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My Princeton colleague Angus Deaton has done us all a service by pointing to the existence of extreme poverty in the United States, and especially the failure of this affluent society to provide adequate shelter for homeless people. There is no doubt that governments at all levels should be doing more to meet this need.
Yet it is disturbing that Mr. Deaton has started to doubt that, in our personal giving, we should prioritize the poor in developing countries over those at home. Mr. Deaton omits the relative cost of making a major difference to the well-being of people in poverty in the United States versus in developing countries.
