Michael Bloomberg has dedicated $220 million to the fight against tobacco, making a total of $600 million in his lifetime; to the BBC’s “World At One” he made the following point:

About half of the world’s smokers are in Russia, China, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia. (39m mark)

I heard that and thought: Let’s add that up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

• Russia – 143,030,106
• China – 1,347,350,000
• India – 1,210,193,422
• Bangladesh – 142,319,000
• Indonesia – 237,641,326

Total Population Above: 3,080,533,854

World Population: 7,002,000,000

Percentage: 44% (approx)

…so we’d expect that perhaps 44% of the world’s smokers would be in those five countries – assuming smoking is evenly distributed – and if it’s closer to 50% then there’s a slight uptick in the rates of smoking in those countries; an extra 13% or so.

I don’t know if that 13% is statistically significant, I can’t be arsed to do the math. In any case, 44% probably qualifies as “about half”.

But it would not sound quite so philanthropic to say I am injecting money into five huge and famously corrupt countries in the expectation of getting (say) 13% of their smokers to quit… or something like that.