What Should a Billionaire Give, and What Should You?

Yesterday's NY Times Magazine had an excellent article about the relationship between the abundance in powerful countries and the poverty of countries like Haiti: What Should a Billionaire Give, and What Should You? . It discusses how the relationship in two directions: first, how our comfort is, to a large extent the result of unfair extraction of wealth from poor countries; but more important, that wealthy countries could eliminate the worst forms of world poverty without making any real sacrifices.

Here's the final paragraph, but the full article is very much worth reading:

For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing and teaching about the ethical issue posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of great abundance and life-threatening poverty. Yet it was not until, in preparing this article, I calculated how much America’s Top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty. (It has actually become much easier over the last 30 years, as the rich have grown significantly richer.) I found the result astonishing. I double-checked the figures and asked a research assistant to check them as well. But they were right. Measured against our capacity, the Millennium Development Goals are indecently, shockingly modest. If we fail to achieve them — as on present indications we well might — we have no excuses. The target we should be setting for ourselves is not halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat, but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one, needs to live in such degrading conditions. That is a worthy goal, and it is well within our reach.