Benjamin Todd

Especially efforts within health, such as fighting malaria and parasitic worms.

And as we'll come to later, we now think there are even more pressing issues than global poverty.

In particular, catastrophic risks that could affect the whole world in future.

Why do we say the most urgent problems aren't local?

Well, remember the distribution of world income that we came across in Chapter 2.

Even someone living on the US poverty line of $14,580 per year, as of 2023, is richer than about 85% of the world's population, and about 20 times wealthier than the world's poorest 700 million who mostly live in Central America, Africa and South Asia on under $800 per year.

These figures are already adjusted for the fact that money goes further in poor countries, purchasing power parity.

As we also saw earlier, the poorer you are, the bigger difference extra money makes to your welfare.

Based on this research, because poorer people in Africa are 20 times poorer, we'd expect resources to go about 20 times further in helping them.

There are also only about 40 million people living in relative poverty in the US, about 6% as many as the 650 million in extreme global poverty.

There are also far more resources dedicated to helping this smaller number of people.

Overseas development aid from the world's developed countries is in total only about $200 billion per year, compared to $1.7 trillion spent on welfare in the US alone.

Finally, as we saw earlier, a significant fraction of US social interventions probably don't work.

This is because problems facing the poor in rich countries are complex and hard to solve.

Moreover, even the most evidence-based interventions are expensive and have modest effects.

The same comparison holds for other rich countries, such as the UK, Australia, Canada, and the EU.

Though if you live in a low-income country, then it may well be best to focus on issues there.

All this isn't to deny that the poor in rich countries have very tough lives, perhaps even worse in some respects than those in the developing world.

Rather, the issue is that there are far fewer of them, and they're harder to help.

So if you're not focusing on issues in your home country, what should you focus on?