Kristof is right: The leaders of the most developed nations in the world are not doing enough to help the poor. A few points:
-The world’s richest 500 people have the same income as the world’s poorest 416 million.
-If the U.S. and other wealthy nations spent $7 billion every year for the next decade to provide 2.6 billion people with clean drinking water, 4,000 lives a day would be saved. Americans spend more than that on cosmetic surgery.
-Annual world spending to fight AIDS, which kills three million people a year, equals military expenditures for three days.
-In India, girls between the ages of 1 and 5 are 50 percent more likely to die than boys — that’s 130,000 girls a year who, as Kristof says, “are discriminated to death.”
-“the gap between the current trendline on child mortality and the one the [U.N.] leaders committed themselves to amounts to 41 million children dying before their fifth birthday over the next decade.”
University of Ottawa professor Amir Attan has more.