This week the OECD published its 2004 figures for Official Development Assistance (ODA). One way to interpret the numbers is to divide the amount of development aid by the gross national income (GNI) of the country, the latter figure giving a rough indication of the country's wealth.

ODA as a percentage of GNI for OECD countries is shown in the table below. The United Nations has set a goal for ODA of 0.7 percent of GNI. From the table we see that only five out of 22 OECD countries meet or exceed that target.

With enough guns and spies, the War on Terror can be won. Those may not be the exact words of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but they seem to summarize the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism. On Saturday, Rumsfeld told European defense officials:

It will take the cooperation of many nations to stop the proliferation of dangerous weapons... and it surely takes a community of nations to gather intelligence about extremist networks, to break up financial support lines, or to apprehend suspected terrorists.

These steps, though necessary, are only part of the solution. They ignore the causes, such as extreme poverty and a lack of basic human rights, that create a fertile breeding ground for terrorism. If addressing the causes is not an integral part of the War on Terror, then every time a terrorist is jailed or killed, another eager recruit will step forward to take his place.

To keep people from wanting to become terrorists, give them food and clean water. Give the children the chance to go to school. Give the adults the possibility to work to earn a decent living. Then they'll find more constructive ways to change their lives than by strapping on a vest loaded with explosives.

In False Prophets, Bad Economics, Bjorn Lomborg pooh-poohs headlines predicting extreme environmental changes caused by global warming. Megadroughts? Famine? The shutting down of the Gulf Stream? He believes such headlines are "fiction, the stuff of Hollywood imaginations." In fact, he simply does not know what lies ahead. Neither he nor anyone else really knows how the planet will react to mankind's continued abuse. But based on a growing body of data, such possibilities cannot be ruled out.

He then cites a U.N. projection for the year 2100 as justification for essentially ignoring the Kyoto Protocol and doing nothing to fight global warming in this century, and instead concentrating on poverty reduction: According to the U.N., developing countries will be two to four times richer in 2100 than they are today. By Lomborg's logic, that means that a country like Bangladesh -- one that is vulnerable to rising sea levels -- will be a "rich Netherlands" by 2100 if we fund development projects today. Therefore it will be able to take care of its own global warming problems. This raises two questions: