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This graph is extremely misleading.
First of all it states in the caption that it only includes
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
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.
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.
Its not even philanthropy. This chart includes loans
I wouldn't go as far as to say extremely misleading. The graph there does show foreign aid per capita after all with a selection of western countries.
The title of this post is wrong and should either focus more on Luxembourg/Norway or say that US is behind some other country in foreign aid per capita.
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.
I'm with you that the title and ranking of US as #10 is wrong. The graph is still just a graph of a select few countries with a large population as an illustration.
The way OP presented it is misleading as if those are the top ranking countries and that this is the entirety of their development aid. The article is specifically for aid provided by the state for DAC/OECD members which excludes private aid where it doesn't contain ranking and only contains a short list of countries.
The post is misleading, the Wikipedia isn't.
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?
Thanks for the passionate criticism, it's needed.
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.
And it's terribly important to share this type of stuff. Most people doomscrolling want the short adrenaline hit which corresponds with preexisting beliefs.
And that's cool.
But for me it's important that people don't take things at face value and actually look at sources.
So I figured I'd not only important to upvote, but also personally thank people for doing that stuff, as I saw what happened to Reddit and people got flushed away with underbelly driven doom peddlers.
So thanks again!
"I didn't read past the title, therefore misinformation"
The irony 🫠
Some of the non-DAC members you mention are in the article, but agreed the graph is misleading
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.
It looks like the graph was added less than a month ago. Image page says the following:
If you want to update it I'd say go for it
Edit: apparently the image was also added to the pages 'Aid' and 'United States foreign aid' by the same user so.. yeah
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.
So, which part of "per capita" did you not understand?
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?