For many of us, it doesn’t cost much to improve someone’s life, and we can do much more of it

Foreign aid is always an easy target for people arguing that the state is wasting money on the wrong people. This analysis shows that the world isn’t spending all that much on foreign aid, even though it’s usually a highly effective investment in making lives better. It comes with this fascinating (and frankly: depressing) finding from a survey in the US: On average, respondents estimated that the government spends 31% of its budget on foreign aid. They think it should be far less, more like 10%. Which…is still ten times of what the US actually spends on foreign aid (before Trump and Musk, that was).