Of course it was Friday's map of US government assistance to other countries. Man, people like maps. I used to wonder, "why is every news organization investing so much in data visualization?" And the answer seems to be "a crazy number of clicks".
And, of the 164,000 people who viewed the post yesterday, less than 1% clicked through to any of the paper links. Oh well.
That did not stop me from getting a zillion angry tweets asking me why "economic aid" included military assistance, seemingly from people who really like military aid. My reaction: Yes, it would be interesting to separate development assistance from other flows, and I was imprecise about "foreign aid", but the fact that military flows to middle income or rich countries are so large as to distort any assessment of money to support poor people is actually more depressing to me.
