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Figures Don’t Lie… |
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In a recent post called “The MasterCard Commercial I’d Like To See,” I shared a number of statistics comparing the amount that Americans spend on certain luxury items to what it would cost to provide access to basic necessities for the world’s citizens. Many readers were convinced that I had intentionally distorted the numbers or had even made them up completely. Adding to the suspicion was the fact that my citation for these figures was incomplete - it led to the home page for www.globalissues.org, not to the page with the actual stats.
So here is the actual page URL that I found after painstakingly scouring over months of research notes. (you need to scroll down a little bit to see the numbers I used - they’re all there)
I did make two mistake in this article. First, these are amounts to provide access for these things to developing nations, not to the entire world. Second, to be more clear, I should not have said that $700 billion would equal 25 years worth of food, water, and health care. This implied direct handouts, not development programs. This is simply a matter of poor wording. I apologize for any confusion these errors may have caused.
In the end, I neither lied nor distorted the numbers. If you still think they are incorrect, please take it up with the folks at globalissues.org. Now please leave me alone, all ye naysayers, for I have more plundering to do. Arrggghh!
