"The word 'no' is the way you keep your commitment to the people you have already said 'yes' to."
- Phil Schroeder
Thursday, March 3, 2005
A minor kerfuffle started yesterday regarding a statistic quoted by Bono and referenced in this post, below:
yet Europeans, who inhabit a more secular world, give more per capita than Americans to what the Bible calls "the least of these" - the world's poor. The United States is in 22nd place, last in the class of donor nations. (Add private philanthropy and it's up to 15th.) Europeans see the discrepancy, and they smell hypocrisy.I've had a hard time letting go of the statistic quoted by Bono, mainly because I don't believe it.
Now - here is what I am not saying: 1. I am not saying that we shouldn't all give sacrificially to "the least of these", and 2. I am not saying that Bono is a bad person. I respect him and his work quite a bit.
However, I hate the misuse of statistics. Notice the statement "per capita". That means "per person". Yet look at this quote from Bono from December 5, 2002:
I have confidence America will turn around the situation where they are 22nd in the list of 22 richest countries in terms of aid given as a percentage of national income. Americans don't like being last in anything. Their personal donations are as generous as Europeans. I'm sure it's the value for money argument. I want bang for the buck too. [Emphasis mine]"As a percentage of national income" (GDP) is quite a bit different than "per capita", and - indeed - with a GDP as massive as ours the amount of money given by America to help the world's poor is potentially (and, I believe, factually) massive.
Why this post? Three reasons:
1. To demonstrate how a meme can develop regarding a statistic. I'm sure Bono was not trying to mislead or misinform in his recent NYT editorial, but I think that after repeating it multiple times he has gotten confused himself as to what the statistic means. However, I saw at least two bloggers run with the meme that "American Christians are stingy", or even "American Christians don't live their faith" based on Bono's faulty statistic. Maybe we are stingy, and maybe we don't live our faith, but the support for those assertions can't be what Bono said.
2. To urge that we value truth, even truths that don't support our arguments, in what we write or say.
And, finally
3. To solicit attributed and well explained statistics (if you read the comments thread to this post you can see the beginnings of this effort) regarding the charitable giving of the United States versus other countries in the world. In addition, if anyone can dig up the source research supporting Bono's "22nd in giving" statistic, that would be fabulous.
Trackbacks:
Trackback URL: http://thinklings.org/bloo.trackback.php/1899.
Comments on ""22nd In Giving"":
2. Daniel
- 03/03/2005 4:15 am CST
Bill, this post is why I like you so much. :-)
Thanks for looking up something that sounded fishy. I, too, hate when people twist stats (much like Bible verses) for their own purposes.
7. Shrode
- 03/05/2005 9:57 am CST
I just googled it. I'd been wondering the same thing. Here's what I got. It's pronounced MEEM.
A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.from answers.com
[Shortening (modeled on GENE) of mimeme, from Greek mimēma, something imitated, from mimeisthai, to imitate.
This link had tons- http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&oi=defmore&q=define:meme
An idea that replicates through a society as it is propagated through person-to-person interaction, both direct and indirect. Memetics is a field of study that focuses on memes' role in the evolution of a culture. [ZY]
nanotech-now.com/nanotechnology-glossary-M-O.htm
As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976): "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." "Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation." In this sense, chain letter components are memes.
www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/glossary.htm
Contagious ideas. Term is used to explain viral marketing. Source: Meme Central
www.access-egov.info/glossary.cfm
An element of a culture or system of behaviour that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation.
212.67.202.199/~msewell/bf/glossary.html
And from Dictionary.com-
/meem/ [By analogy with "gene"] Richard Dawkins's term for an idea considered as a replicator, especially with the connotation that memes parasitise people into propagating them much as viruses do.
Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through, for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to produce a new idea involving elements of each parent idea.
The term is used especially in the phrase "meme complex"
denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an
organised belief system, such as a religion. However, "meme" is often misused to mean "meme complex".
Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans(and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts)cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has becomemore important than biological evolution by selection ofhereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.
Well, I learned something. How about you?
10. Shrode
- 03/05/2005 11:27 pm CST
No prob. I had been pretty curious about it myself. And yes, I'm often guilty of overkill. :)
I'm just an info addict. I can't help it.
As a side note, I think it was sloppy of the NYT editor not to have caught this problem.