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THE MATH. The fact of inflation is one of those thing I "know" about, but not one of those things that I automatically correct for in my head. So the Marshall Plan's $15 billion grant to Europe, though clearly generous and obviously worth something more than $15 billion, never struck me as a particularly staggering amount. That's because I never did the math:
To gauge the true importance of the Marshall Plan, it is crucial to get a sense of the amounts involved. Behrman writes, “From June 1947 to its termination at the end of 1951, the Marshall Plan provided approximately $13 billion to finance the recovery . . . of Western Europe.” This was less than half the Europeans’ initial request and four billion dollars less than President Truman’s initial proposal to Congress, but it was still serious money. Behrman computes that, in today’s dollars, “that sum equals roughly $100 billion, and as a comparable share of U.S. Gross National Product it would be in excess of $500 billion.” That’s actually an understatement. In fact, the total amount disbursed under the Marshall Plan was equivalent to roughly 5.4 per cent of U.S. gross national product in the year of Marshall’s speech, or 1.1 per cent spread over the whole period of the program, which, technically, dated from April, 1948, when the Foreign Assistance Act was passed, to June, 1952, when the last payment was made. A Marshall Plan announced today would therefore be worth closer to seven hundred and forty billion dollars. If there had been a Marshall Plan between 2003 and 2007, it would have cost five hundred and fifty billion. By comparison, actual foreign economic aid under the Bush Administration between 2001 and 2006 totalled less than one hundred and fifty billion, an average of less than 0.2 per cent of G.D.P.That's rather a lot of money. I was trying to think of recent acts of extraordinary generosity on the part of America, but the closest I could come was our $40 billion loan -- which was, mind you, fully repaid -- to bail out Mexico in the 90s. If you're a neocon and believe that Iraq is some sort of large philanthropic gesture, than the hundreds of billions we're spending to destabilize that society are pretty impressive, but I'm not a neocon. Indeed, the greatest acts of recent American generosity haven't come from america at all, but from the Gates family and Warren Buffett, who have plowed gigantic fortunes into humanitarian missions across the globe. Sort of a shame, given how low our standing has fallen, then America can't point to anything dramatic that should make people like us. On a related note, this, from The New Yorker's profile of Nicolas Sarkozy, was striking:
When Sarkozy met Condoleezza Rice, she said, ‘What can I do for you?’ And he said, bluntly, ‘Improve your image in the world. It’s difficult when the country that is the most powerful, the most successful—that is, of necessity, the leader of our side—is one of the most unpopular countries in the world. It presents overwhelming problems for you and overwhelming problems for your allies. So do everything you can to improve the way you’re perceived—that’s what you can do for me.’If four years ago you told the neocons that a new, pro-American French president would return this administration's offer of help by scolding us about our cratered reputation, they would have suggested nukes. Now, this sort of thing passes without notice. --Ezra Klein
