Good post by Matthew Yglesias:

Ultimately, obviously, the ideal solution would be for Africans to get richer. But the per capita GDP of Africa isn’t going to magically reach American (or even Mexican or even Chinese) levels overnight even if Africa does start seeing strong growth. Meanwhile, people with HIV will die really soon unless someone gives them medicine. And even better, the marginal cost of producing extra HIV medication is really low. There’s just no getting around the fact that giving poor people medicine is a useful and important way of making the world a better place.

Foreign aid is not a panacea for everything that troubles the developing world, but one thing that was impressed upon me by Peter Singer’s recent book is that there’s still a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit that aid can effectively address (e.g., easily curable diseases or other medical conditions) and which will make dramatic improvements to people’s lives.