That's just one of those rhetorical philosophical statements. $25K isn't going to stop children from being sick or from starving.
$25K goes a long way in Africa. Singer talks about the world's poorest people living on less than the spending equivalent of
one U.S. dollar a day. Donate that $25,000 to one baby, and you've doubled their standard of living for the next 68 years. I can't quote the cost of vaccinations and medicine, but they seem to be pretty affordable. Poor children who don't die of starvation often die of diseases that are easily treatable or preventable in industrialized countries. So yes, even a few dollars could potentially save a life. Or, back to the starfish, even if a single vaccination cost $25,000, so your car contribution saved only one life, wouldn't that one life still be worth it?
In order for that to happen, entire governments need to change, people's values need to change and populations need to be educated
Yes. That is exactly what Peter Singer is attempting to do.
He's not trying to get you, one person, to sell your car. He's trying to get all Americans to think about the cost of the luxuries they enjoy, whether it's a $25,000 car, a $25,000 truffle, or all the other things we buy for ourselves.
Here's a recent Singer essay on the topic, which I just read in
Best American Essays 2007, and ran in the
New York Times Magazine last year. It's really though-provoking; I would encourage anyone interested in this subject to read it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=printHere's how he calculates things could change if people started thinking in those terms:
Philosophers like Liam Murphy of New York University and my colleague Kwame Anthony Appiah at Princeton ... calculate how much would be required to ensure that the world’s poorest people have a chance at a decent life, and then divide this sum among the affluent.
... What might that fair amount be? One way of calculating it would be to take as our target, at least for the next nine years, the Millennium Development Goals, set by the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000. On that occasion, the largest gathering of world leaders in history jointly pledged to meet, by 2015, a list of goals that include:
Reducing by half the proportion of the world’s people in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than the purchasing-power equivalent of one U.S. dollar per day).
Reducing by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
Ensuring that children everywhere are able to take a full course of primary schooling.
Ending sex disparity in education.
Reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5.
Reducing by three-quarters the rate of maternal mortality.
Halting and beginning to reverse the spread of H.I.V./AIDS and halting and beginning to reduce the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
Reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
Last year a United Nations task force, led by the Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, estimated the annual cost of meeting these goals to be $121 billion in 2006, rising to $189 billion by 2015. When we take account of existing official development aid promises, the additional amount needed each year to meet the goals is only $48 billion for 2006 and $74 billion for 2015.
Now let’s look at the incomes of America’s rich and superrich, and ask how much they could reasonably give. The task is made easier by statistics recently provided by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, economists at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris-Jourdan, and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively, based on U.S. tax data for 2004. Their figures are for pretax income, excluding income from capital gains, which for the very rich are nearly always substantial. For simplicity I have rounded the figures, generally downward. Note too that the numbers refer to “tax units,” that is, in many cases, families rather than individuals.
Piketty and Saez’s top bracket comprises 0.01 percent of U.S. taxpayers. There are 14,400 of them, earning an average of $12,775,000, with total earnings of $184 billion. The minimum annual income in this group is more than $5 million, so it seems reasonable to suppose that they could, without much hardship, give away a third of their annual income, an average of $4.3 million each, for a total of around $61 billion. That would still leave each of them with an annual income of at least $3.3 million.
Next comes the rest of the top 0.1 percent (excluding the category just described, as I shall do henceforth). There are 129,600 in this group, with an average income of just over $2 million and a minimum income of $1.1 million. If they were each to give a quarter of their income, that would yield about $65 billion, and leave each of them with at least $846,000 annually.
The top 0.5 percent consists of 575,900 taxpayers, with an average income of $623,000 and a minimum of $407,000. If they were to give one-fifth of their income, they would still have at least $325,000 each, and they would be giving a total of $72 billion.
Coming down to the level of those in the top 1 percent, we find 719,900 taxpayers with an average income of $327,000 and a minimum of $276,000. They could comfortably afford to give 15 percent of their income. That would yield $35 billion and leave them with at least $234,000.
Finally, the remainder of the nation’s top 10 percent earn at least $92,000 annually, with an average of $132,000. There are nearly 13 million in this group. If they gave the traditional tithe — 10 percent of their income, or an average of $13,200 each — this would yield about $171 billion and leave them a minimum of $83,000.
You could spend a long time debating whether the fractions of income I have suggested for donation constitute the fairest possible scheme. Perhaps the sliding scale should be steeper, so that the superrich give more and the merely comfortable give less. And it could be extended beyond the Top 10 percent of American families, so that everyone able to afford more than the basic necessities of life gives something, even if it is as little as 1 percent. Be that as it may, the remarkable thing about these calculations is that a scale of donations that is unlikely to impose significant hardship on anyone yields a total of $404 billion — from just 10 percent of American families.
Obviously, the rich in other nations should share the burden of relieving global poverty. The U.S. is responsible for 36 percent of the gross domestic product of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations. Arguably, because the U.S. is richer than all other major nations, and its wealth is more unevenly distributed than wealth in almost any other industrialized country, the rich in the U.S. should contribute more than 36 percent of total global donations. So somewhat more than 36 percent of all aid to relieve global poverty should come from the U.S. For simplicity, let’s take half as a fair share for the U.S. On that basis, extending the scheme I have suggested worldwide would provide $808 billion annually for development aid. That’s more than six times what the task force chaired by Sachs estimated would be required for 2006 in order to be on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals, and more than 16 times the shortfall between that sum and existing official development aid commitments.
BTW, this esssay doesn't include the child-on-the-RR-tracks scenario, which I read in a different Singer essay, but it offers a similar example:
In an article I wrote more than three decades ago, at the time of a humanitarian emergency in what is now Bangladesh, I used the example of walking by a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning. Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that if we can save the child at minimal inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so. Anything else would be callous, indecent and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown. Similarly if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so.
But books and movies and the internet, and little things like an attractive and comfortable sofa, etc., ...these things do sustain my spirit. I do believe that I would be miserable if I lived in a shanty, slept on a mat on the bare ground, and ate nothing but beans. I might get some satisfaction knowing I was able to give a few hundred dollars a month to charity, but still I'd be pretty depressed, and I'd likely soon lose my humanity and desire to help anyone.
Gary, I don't think even Singer would expect you to give until you're living in a shanty, sleeping on a floor mat and eating only beans. In this particular article, in fact, he is talking about millionaires and billionaires, though I've also seen similar things he's written directed at more common folk. But in any case, I don't think he's saying that, in order to be moral human beings, we all must give away our money until we live under impoverished circumstances. He's saying that, in America, there's a big, big gap between floor mats and beans, and the way most of us actually do live. And he's suggesting that we all think hard about the cost of that gap.
Here's one more excerpt from that essay, about an extreme example of what we're talking about:
Few people have set a personal example that would allow them to tell [Bill] Gates [who Singer considers an example of generous giving] that he has not given enough, but one who could is Zell Kravinsky. A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger.
But even Kravinsky stopped short of reducing his lifestyle to floor mats and beans.
