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> American citizens were asked to guess how much US federal spending goes to foreign aid. ... The average guess was a whopping 31%. What? I'm very curious how

> American citizens were asked to guess how much US federal spending goes to foreign aid. ... The average guess was a whopping 31%. What? I'm very curious how people arrived at such a number. I wouldn't be very surprised if people thought it was, say, 5%. But 31% is a wildly implausible number. 15% of people thought it was over half the budget, which is too far from the Lizardman's Constant to just be trolls, but at the same time it's such a wildly high guess that I can't imagine a normal person sincerely making such a guess.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
watersb 2y ago
Maybe some people have only a handful of numbers: none, one, two, and "many". Maybe there are cognitive reciprocals of these numbers: "all", "some", "half", and "none". So when you ask for a fraction, they say 50%.
- sethammons 2y ago
  I have a friend whose fractions stop at fourths. "I'm at half a quarter of a tank of fuel."
copypasterepeat 2y ago
Ceaseless, decades-long propaganda that US is being taken advantage of and that America should come first certainly played a part in inflating that number in minds of a lot of people. When it comes to stuff like this I think that most people just go off the vibes and don't really have any reasonable idea how the budget is divided up.
- asah 2y ago
  well... in fact... - military is 2.7% GDP for US: https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941/ https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941... vs 1.9% for Europe: https://www.google.com/search?q=europe+spending+on+defense+as+percentage+of+gdp https://www.google.com/search?q=europe+spending+on+defense+a... - US spent $62B on foreign aid, vs 0% from China and Russia, whose GDPs are far larger...
  - bombcar 2y ago
    I don’t know about Russia but China spends on stuff that’s similar to foreign aid but they categorize it differently, and explicitly expect a return.
    - mcny 2y ago
      My understanding is that China mainland (CCP) very much prefers loans and not grants for big ticket items.
  - sam_bristow 2y ago
    I can't parse what you mean by "China and Russia whose GDPs are far larger". Larger than what? China's GDP is about 3/4 that of the USA and Russia is about 1/10th.
  - _djo_ 2y ago
    China doesn’t spend ‘0%’ on foreign aid. It’s less than rhe US, but averaged around $7 billion a year. If you include foreign development assistance, which you are in your ‘$62B’ number, then China has provided hundreds of billions through the BRI and other initiatives. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-china-fill-the-void-in-foreign-aid/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-china-fill-the-void-i... Russia’s foreign aid is also primarily development assistance, though much less than the US, UK, EU, and China. Moreover, the US’s larger defence budget also reflects its self-assumed role as the global stability guarantor of the post-war order it built for its own benefit. It’s that order that made the dollar the world’s reserve currency, requiring most of the world to invest in American financial instruments, and which gave it and its companies an outsized advantage for decades. That was not an international order built for benevolence or which harmed the US. Americans are going to deeply regret how their place in the world and personal wealth shrinks after this administration is done.
maxerickson 2y ago
Ironically, you are espousing a questionable world view based on vibes.
ks2048 2y ago
People are way off in their estimates of all sorts of things. I think many use "20-30%" as a generic "kind of small amount". See this graphic that made the rounds recently (e.g. 1% are transgender, people thought 21%. 6% are military veterans, people thought 40%, etc). https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/tky94p/americans_overestimate_and_underestimate_the/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/tky94p/ame...
- tailspin2019 2y ago
  1% was higher than I’d have guessed for transgender people. It turns out the figures are rounded in that graphic because the source article [0] (posted by another commenter) has it at 0.6% (which is likely rounded too). Interesting when you consider how much certain topics seem to dominate current political discourse. [0] https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    A quote I’ve seen going around but not verified conveys that outsized attention quite well: “There are more people with measles right now than there are transgender college athletes”.
    - plastic3169 2y ago
      Is this quote an example of making the issue seem larger than it is? Measles ”feels” very common although at any one point I guess not that many people have it, but many see it in their family or remember experiencing it. So it feels like a large number. Saying that there are less people in some group does not make it sound that small. Why not say there are under 100 poeple or whatever the number approximately is?
      - watwut 2y ago
        Measles are not common nor were common for decades. There are simply not many people who have seen it. There were also no deaths from measles for 10 years, because, well, not enough people had measles.
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
Americans also estimate that 30% of the population lives in New York City (https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...). I think most people just don't have a numerical intuition for percentages, and don't necessarily intend for a guess of 31% to mean "I think the foreign aid budget is equal to the federal budget times 0.31."
calebio 2y ago
I kind of wonder if some of those folks equate things like the gulf war or the war on terror as "foreign aid".
Jtsummers 2y ago
People were surprised that the cost of federal civil service employees was only around 5% in the early DOGE discussions here. They were expecting 20+%. SSA which pays about 70 million people is just over 21% of the spending so far this year, and there are only 2.3 million civil service employees. For civil servants to cost as much in salaries as social security pays out would require them to be paid nearly $800k/year on average. People are just bad at estimating, and apparently none of the ones making the absurd claims know (or their listeners/readers don't know) that all this data is publicly available.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
When we spend $1 trillion a year on our military, just which states was that protecting from invasion? Did the Air Force repel a Dutch beachhead on the Alaskan coast last year that I didn't hear about? All of that is to protect foreigners. Europe, east Asia, etc. When you hear about the US navy going after pirates off the coast of Somalia, that money wasn't spent protecting US citizens in most cases. When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland? And that's just the military. There are so many slush funds going on, I don't think anyone can truly know just how much cash gets sent to or spent on foreigners. I don't think it's quite to 31%, but that guess isn't an order of magnitude high or anything like that.
- solatic 2y ago
  > When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland? Yes it was. The primary threat is the illegal drug trade, you know, the one that results in more than 100,000 overdose deaths per year in the US. The drug trade is a huge part of how groups like ISIS get financed. When you take out the group, you take out the people playing the drug trade to finance them, and you weaken the drug trade. consider e.g. https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2017/07/isis-is-so-desperate-its-turning-to-the-drug-trade.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2017/07/isis-is-so-desp... At the end of the day, there's the rules-based international order, and then there's everybody outside it. The law and the outlaws. Outlaws will collaborate to fuel their self-interest. When you weaken some outlaws, you weaken the rest; when you weaken some areas of the law, you weaken the rest as well.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Of course the only reason ISIS existed as any sort of threat was because the village idiots and war criminals Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded Iraq and overthrew their regime.
- ljf 2y ago
  The fight against Somalian pirates for example, isn't to protect the local people, but to protect American interests.
brulard 2y ago
I believe most people don't truly understand percentages. Or are not good at thinking in percentages and probabilities
- sethammons 2y ago
  five fourths of people have trouble with fractions and percentages
  - kbelder 2y ago
    Five fourths out of ten?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

watersb 2y ago

Maybe some people have only a handful of numbers: none, one, two, and "many". Maybe there are cognitive reciprocals of these numbers: "all", "some", "half", and "none". So when you ask for a fraction, they say 50%.

sethammons 2y ago
I have a friend whose fractions stop at fourths. "I'm at half a quarter of a tank of fuel."

copypasterepeat 2y ago

Ceaseless, decades-long propaganda that US is being taken advantage of and that America should come first certainly played a part in inflating that number in minds of a lot of people. When it comes to stuff like this I think that most people just go off the vibes and don't really have any reasonable idea how the budget is divided up.

asah 2y ago
well... in fact... - military is 2.7% GDP for US: https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941/ https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941... vs 1.9% for Europe: https://www.google.com/search?q=europe+spending+on+defense+as+percentage+of+gdp https://www.google.com/search?q=europe+spending+on+defense+a... - US spent $62B on foreign aid, vs 0% from China and Russia, whose GDPs are far larger...
- bombcar 2y ago
  I don’t know about Russia but China spends on stuff that’s similar to foreign aid but they categorize it differently, and explicitly expect a return.
  - mcny 2y ago
    My understanding is that China mainland (CCP) very much prefers loans and not grants for big ticket items.
- sam_bristow 2y ago
  I can't parse what you mean by "China and Russia whose GDPs are far larger". Larger than what? China's GDP is about 3/4 that of the USA and Russia is about 1/10th.
- _djo_ 2y ago
  China doesn’t spend ‘0%’ on foreign aid. It’s less than rhe US, but averaged around $7 billion a year. If you include foreign development assistance, which you are in your ‘$62B’ number, then China has provided hundreds of billions through the BRI and other initiatives. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-china-fill-the-void-in-foreign-aid/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-china-fill-the-void-i... Russia’s foreign aid is also primarily development assistance, though much less than the US, UK, EU, and China. Moreover, the US’s larger defence budget also reflects its self-assumed role as the global stability guarantor of the post-war order it built for its own benefit. It’s that order that made the dollar the world’s reserve currency, requiring most of the world to invest in American financial instruments, and which gave it and its companies an outsized advantage for decades. That was not an international order built for benevolence or which harmed the US. Americans are going to deeply regret how their place in the world and personal wealth shrinks after this administration is done.

maxerickson 2y ago

Ironically, you are espousing a questionable world view based on vibes.

ks2048 2y ago

People are way off in their estimates of all sorts of things. I think many use "20-30%" as a generic "kind of small amount". See this graphic that made the rounds recently (e.g. 1% are transgender, people thought 21%. 6% are military veterans, people thought 40%, etc). https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/tky94p/americans_overestimate_and_underestimate_the/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/tky94p/ame...

tailspin2019 2y ago
1% was higher than I’d have guessed for transgender people. It turns out the figures are rounded in that graphic because the source article [0] (posted by another commenter) has it at 0.6% (which is likely rounded too). Interesting when you consider how much certain topics seem to dominate current political discourse. [0] https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  A quote I’ve seen going around but not verified conveys that outsized attention quite well: “There are more people with measles right now than there are transgender college athletes”.
  - plastic3169 2y ago
    Is this quote an example of making the issue seem larger than it is? Measles ”feels” very common although at any one point I guess not that many people have it, but many see it in their family or remember experiencing it. So it feels like a large number. Saying that there are less people in some group does not make it sound that small. Why not say there are under 100 poeple or whatever the number approximately is?
    - watwut 2y ago
      Measles are not common nor were common for decades. There are simply not many people who have seen it. There were also no deaths from measles for 10 years, because, well, not enough people had measles.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

Americans also estimate that 30% of the population lives in New York City (https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m...). I think most people just don't have a numerical intuition for percentages, and don't necessarily intend for a guess of 31% to mean "I think the foreign aid budget is equal to the federal budget times 0.31."

calebio 2y ago

I kind of wonder if some of those folks equate things like the gulf war or the war on terror as "foreign aid".

Jtsummers 2y ago

People were surprised that the cost of federal civil service employees was only around 5% in the early DOGE discussions here. They were expecting 20+%. SSA which pays about 70 million people is just over 21% of the spending so far this year, and there are only 2.3 million civil service employees. For civil servants to cost as much in salaries as social security pays out would require them to be paid nearly $800k/year on average. People are just bad at estimating, and apparently none of the ones making the absurd claims know (or their listeners/readers don't know) that all this data is publicly available.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

When we spend $1 trillion a year on our military, just which states was that protecting from invasion? Did the Air Force repel a Dutch beachhead on the Alaskan coast last year that I didn't hear about? All of that is to protect foreigners. Europe, east Asia, etc. When you hear about the US navy going after pirates off the coast of Somalia, that money wasn't spent protecting US citizens in most cases. When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland? And that's just the military. There are so many slush funds going on, I don't think anyone can truly know just how much cash gets sent to or spent on foreigners. I don't think it's quite to 31%, but that guess isn't an order of magnitude high or anything like that.

solatic 2y ago
> When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland? Yes it was. The primary threat is the illegal drug trade, you know, the one that results in more than 100,000 overdose deaths per year in the US. The drug trade is a huge part of how groups like ISIS get financed. When you take out the group, you take out the people playing the drug trade to finance them, and you weaken the drug trade. consider e.g. https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2017/07/isis-is-so-desperate-its-turning-to-the-drug-trade.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2017/07/isis-is-so-desp... At the end of the day, there's the rules-based international order, and then there's everybody outside it. The law and the outlaws. Outlaws will collaborate to fuel their self-interest. When you weaken some outlaws, you weaken the rest; when you weaken some areas of the law, you weaken the rest as well.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Of course the only reason ISIS existed as any sort of threat was because the village idiots and war criminals Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded Iraq and overthrew their regime.
ljf 2y ago
The fight against Somalian pirates for example, isn't to protect the local people, but to protect American interests.

brulard 2y ago

I believe most people don't truly understand percentages. Or are not good at thinking in percentages and probabilities

sethammons 2y ago
five fourths of people have trouble with fractions and percentages
- kbelder 2y ago
  Five fourths out of ten?