It is entirely true that less of my tax money is now flowing to Bangladesh in order to aid development.
The British Government has decided to cut Official Development Aid (ODA) from 0.7% of GNI to 0.5%.
One of the programs losing funding as a result is Brac which has been gaining some £29 million a year to promote varied good things in Bangladesh.
No, it is OK, I am not rubbing my hands in glee at being alleviated of that cost.
However, it is also true that this is not as important as Brac and the other NGOs who get to spend those funds would have you think.
Yes, clearly, people do benefit and it is not just those being paid the money in their wage packets that do.
Good things are done, we like good things and so on.
But there is still this however.
We need to make the distinction between the horrors that need immediate alleviation – starvation, say, just as one example – and those undesirable things that are going to get solved anyway.
Our task with these second things is to work out what is the best way of getting there.
Or even, perhaps we should stop wasting resources on those things that are better solved by other means and concentrate on those immediacies that really do require that instant action.
Which brings us to an interesting distinction we might want to make between the Sustainable Development Goals, the current UN and NGO mantras, and the last set, the Millennium Development Goals.
Those MDGs concentrated upon economic matters – making the poor richer was the main one.
One specific target was to reduce the number of absolutely poor – under that $1.90 a day – by a certain amount, this being a target that was overachieved and early with it too.
How? More trade, more globalization, rich people, people in rich countries, bought more of the production of poor people in poor countries.
Neo-liberalism, it appears, does in fact work.
Which is rather why the SDGs concentrate upon rather different matters, reducing inequality, gender equity, empowering women and the like.
It is possible, as I do, to regard these as rather weak, even wishy washy, goals. Desirable, yes, but perhaps things we might think about after everyone's got enough to eat?
Rather more importantly though they're all also things which happen entirely naturally as a result of economic development, which explains why the SDGs have been differently defined.
What room is there for all those NGO workers and international conferences on meeting the UN targets if the actual solution is more businessmen concluding contracts with each other?
Take gender equity in employment for example.
When child death rates are high then women will spend much of their adult life either pregnant or nursing – because if kids die in droves then many children must be had in order to ensure grandchildren.
If a society is animal or human muscle powered then men will always have the advantage in paid employment.
But not having epidemics that carry away the babies, society being automated so that machines do the heavy lifting, these are definitions of a place being richer in the first place.
That is, have economic development and those other, softer, goals naturally follow.
I admit to being an economic fundamentalist.
No, not that economics is the only thing that matters, but that sorting out the economic situation of a place and most of what we also find desirable follows, naturally, as a consequence.
I recently, and not entirely as a joke, suggested in London (I am at a think tank which does, at times, get policies adopted) that we should entirely abolish our development aid.
Keep the emergency aid part, and instead of funds for economic development simply allow duty, tariff and quota free imports from poor countries.
Which does more for gender equity and female empowerment in Bangladesh - a few NGO folk having seminars on the subjects, or 4 million women with well paid jobs in the garment factories?
Even to ask the question is to provide the answer.
This was also something that the Bangladeshi Government was keen to ensure when Brexit happened – would the country retain those trade benefits that used to exist when the UK was part of the EU, that tariff free access to the market?
It is in fact true that most of those Sustainable Development Goals are things which will naturally arrive alongside – perhaps very slightly behind – economic growth.
So, given that we find those things desirable, we should be concentrating upon the economic growth part.
The cutting of development aid might not be Britain's finest hour but it is relatively unimportant compared to the continued growth in Bangladeshi GDP of that 6 to 8% that has been happening each year for decades.
For it is that growth which is going to make all those dreams come true, not well meaning people talking to us about them.
The author is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London
