Thanks. At first, I just happened to notice that the graph didn’t match up with the table below. And then when I pulled up the source I realized there were many more errors.

The irony 🫠

Austria, Ireland, Denmark, and Finland are all DAC members and aren’t included in the graph. The graph is unequivocally misleading, which is my original point.

The article itself does have a more comprehensive table, but it uses outdated figures from several years ago. The title of the article is “List of development aid sovereign state donors” and yet it excludes major ODA donors such as Saudi Arabia, not only from the DAC list but also from the second list.

I don’t understand why people keep defending this when I outlined like 10 separate errors already. Are you even reading my comments or am I responding to bots?

It isn’t titled “foreign aid per capita among western countries” though. The fact that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are also in the top 20 paints a very different picture of what placing highly on the list actually means.

Furthermore, it doesn’t say “among western countries with greater than 8.5m population except for Norway which is much smaller”. The caption says “among countries with large populations”, where a large population is defined as greater than 8.5 million. That’s extremely misleading and arbitrary. And then Austria and Saudi Arabia are omitted anyway, despite fitting all the above criteria.

So yeah, I would definitely go so far, and in fact I considered going further and calling it outright misinformation.

Still doesn’t explain the omission of Austria (9m) or Saudi Arabia (32m).

I don’t really know how to navigate Wikipedia but the user account seems pretty normal, it was probably just an honest mistake. It seems like they use scripts to make a lot of graphs and maybe some wires got crossed.

I understood perfectly fine. You are the one who seems to be misunderstanding something.

Saudi Arabia has a higher per capita ODP than three countries that are shown on this graph. Why was it excluded?

But Denmark, Finland, Ireland and Austria are DAC members and they were still omitted. It’s just a bad job by whoever made that graph.

This graph is extremely misleading.

First of all it states in the caption that it only includes

highest donation rates among countries with large populations

Even of this disclaimer were true, it’s completely arbitrary and makes no sense. Norway (5.5 million) has about 8 times the population of Luxembourg (670,000). Whereas the US (340 million) has about 60 times the population of Norway. If such a size discrepancy is so meaningful that Luxembourg should be excluded, then how can it be relevant to compare Norway with the US despite the vastly larger population discrepancy? Luxembourg should be #3 btw along with Liechtenstein (2) and Monaco (4).

More damningly, they don’t even live up to their disclaimer. Taking the numbers straight from the quoted source. They randomly excluded Denmark (7) and Ireland (8), which are just as populous as Norway and almost equivalent to Sweden in per capita ODA. They also excluded Iceland (11) and Finland (12), which come in above UK/Canada/Belgium/France. And then as the cherry on top they conveniently excluded Qatar (17) and Saudi Arabia (18). The US is #19. And then it’s also missing Austria (20), UAE (21), and New Zealand (23), before you get to Australia, which is actually 24th, not 12th.

Furthermore, ODA is just a small part of the economic picture. As it states in the wikipedia article

by definition, ODA does not include private donations

The US is giving approximately $64.5 billion annually in ODA. In comparison, private charitable donations from American individuals, foundations, and corporations totalled $557 billion in 2023, with 67% of that money coming from individual donations.

Granted, many of those donations are directed towards domestic causes, but even if a relatively small percentage is directed towards foreign causes, it alters the narrative that is told by this graph. For instance, this organization is largely funded by the Gates foundation, which is a private charitable organization, and thus not included as ODA.

The foundation has donated more than $6.6 billion for global health programs, including over $1.3 billion donated as of 2012 on malaria alone, greatly increasing the dollars spent per year on malaria research. Before the Gates efforts on malaria, malaria drugmakers had largely given up on producing drugs to fight the disease, and the foundation is the world’s largest donor to research on diseases of the poor. With the help of Gates-funded vaccination drives, deaths from measles in Africa have dropped by 90 percent since 2000.

In conclusion, I feel like that graph helps paint a certain political narrative that isn’t even remotely accurate, partially because it randomly omits about half of the countries in the top 25, and partially because it’s measuring a very limited subset of philanthropic activity.

That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about micro plastics to dispute it

Nice. It’s amazing that I’m still slowly piecing together my reddit subscriptions on Lemmy almost 2 years later. There’s another classic one that I hadn’t yet found, thanks.

And remember, memes can be more salubrious than therapy 🫠

I appreciate the openness but it’s almost certainly a matter of time.

Keep your finger on the lock button. It’s somewhat underutilized on Lemmy imo, simply locking a post that has devolved into a shitshow without removing said post is frequently the best course of action.

Freaking commie tumbleweeds rolling from town to town looking for handouts

You gotta be kidneying me