Why we obsess over giving “the perfect gift” — and how to stop

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This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Lynne Randall doesn’t buy all the toys that show up at her house. They just kind of happen. There’s the play kitchen her 3-year-old son inherited from his cousins. There’s the “random stuff” her mother-in-law buys online, all of it plastic and made up of countless tiny pieces. There’s the kid-sized workbench — Randall got that from her local Buy Nothing group, where neighbors can offload used items (and pick up more). The sheer volume of stuff her son has to play with is overwhelming, Randall told Vox. The day we talked, she and her family were having guests at their Pacific Northwest home, so she was attempting to declutter, “finding all the parts and putting food in the toy kitchen and putting the tools in the workbench.” But it was always a losing battle. Shelves overflowing with cars and blocks and action figures can be just as stressful for kids as they are for parents. It’s a familiar refrain among parents: One reader told Vox recently that her family was “absolutely drowning in toys.” And while adults have been complaining about kids’ junk for generations (please see my father’s fruitless search for my brother’s one-inch-long toy wrench in Los Angeles International Airport circa 1992), many millennial and Gen X parents have the sense that something is different now — that kids have more toys than in past decades, and that they seem to arrive in ways Randall describes as “unintentional.”  Historical data on the average number of toys per kid is surprisingly hard to come by, but there is evidence that Americans’ toy glut is increasing — and it’s not just a problem for affluent households.  US toy sales jumped from $22.3 billion in 2019 to $26 billion in 2020, and then to $30.1 billion in 2021, as parents struggled to entertain their kids at home during the pandemic. Sales dipped slightly in 2023, perhaps because of inflation, but remain solidly above 2019 levels.  “I don’t think we’ll ever go back,” Juli Lennett, a vice president and industry adviser for toys at the market research firm Circana, told me. Shelves overflowing with cars and blocks and action figures can be just as stressful for kids as they are for parents. Sometimes “kids don’t play with anything, because there’s just too many options,” said Sarah Davis, a parenting coach and co-author of the book Modern Manners for Moms and Dads. Meanwhile, an overemphasis on acquiring new toys can foster materialism, which is linked with anxiety and depression.  Stemming the tide of clutter is easier said than done, since toys often come from grandparents or other loved ones, or even from parties at school. But experts say there are certain characteristics that kids’ favorite toys share. And by focusing on those, grown-ups may be able not only to save money and space, but also to help kids have more fun. Still, I get the struggle. Recently, I was taking a shower when I noticed a pink plastic rat in the drain. Why kids have so many toys In the early 2000s, a team led by archaeologist Jeanne E. Arnold counted up the possessions of 32 self-identified middle-class families. The average family in their sample had 139 toys visibly on display, with “untold numbers” out of sight in closets or under beds, the authors wrote in a 2012 book about the research. One girl’s room contained 165 Beanie Babies, 22 Barbie dolls, 36 “human/animal figurines,” and one miniature castle. “Spilling out of children’s bedrooms and into living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, and parents’ bedrooms, the playthings of America’s kids are ubiquitous in middle-class homes,” the authors wrote. That problem has only worsened, with several factors contributing to the overflow. Unlike most other categories of products, childrens’ playthings have actually gotten cheaper over the last 30 years, Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos reported. A toy that cost $20 in 1993 would retail for just $4.68 today, in part because of lower production costs as manufacturing moved overseas. Those rock-bottom prices make it easier for grown-ups to buy kids that extra doll or car or guinea pig in a shark suit.  But Americans aren’t just buying more toys than they used to, they’re also buying them differently. Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and has all but disappeared from the shopping landscape, and other brick-and-mortar toy stores, from small to large, have shuttered in recent years. Meanwhile, shopping has also become more seamless, thanks to Amazon and other e-commerce platforms. In the 1990s, my parents had to drive to Toys R Us to get my brother a squishy, blood-shot rubber eyeball; I can purchase a similar eyeball and get it delivered by the end of the week.  Online shopping also offers a convenient way for far-flung extended family members to send kids more toys. “We ask for clothes and college fund money, and despite that, sometimes toys still come in,” Randall told me. Even secondhand shopping has leveled up, from yard sales and flea markets to Facebook groups and sites like Mercari that let parents snag some lightly used Legos without leaving the couch. In the 1990s, my parents had to drive to Toys R Us to get my brother a squishy, blood-shot rubber eyeball; I can purchase a similar eyeball and get it delivered by the end of the week. The rise of YouTube over the last 20 years has also changed toy purchasing, with influencers advertising toys and releasing their own lines. Unboxing videos, in which kids or adults film themselves taking toys out of packages, have become a cultural staple, even inspiring the popular Netflix kids’ show Gabby’s Dollhouse (which now has its own branded toys). There are simply more avenues for toy advertising and quasi-advertising today than in decades past, and — thanks to features like TikTok Shop — more and easier ways to buy them. Changing childhood cultural norms may also be having an effect. More schools are asking parents to distribute small toys instead of cupcakes at children’s birthday parties, in an effort to cut down on sugar, parents tell me. The result is what Davis, the parenting coach, calls “the plastic graveyard — all these plastic toys that are just showing up from birthday parties and classroom parties in lieu of candy.” How many is too many toys? After an initial burst of excitement, a lot of those new toys aren’t seeing much playtime, experts say. “Kids often really only play with a subset of toys, and the other ones are not really that relevant,” sociologist Allison Pugh told Vox in an email.  In a 2017 study, University of Toledo researchers found that toddlers played longer and more creatively when presented with just four toys than when they had 16 options to choose from (though that’s still a far cry from the 100-plus toys many kids actually own).  The benefit of having fewer choices is something a lot of early educators understand. “If you go into a preschool classroom, they’ll have like, three tables set up, and each table will have a specific group of toys,” Davis said. “It’s not too much. It’s not overwhelming.” Kids’ favorite toys, meanwhile, tend to be those imbued with “social meaning,” Pugh said. “Kids use toys to connect to other kids — sometimes just by owning the same exact thing, sometimes by playing with it together, sometimes by accruing and sharing specialized knowledge about that toy.” Playing with others can give meaning even to objects that aren’t intended as toys at all: “My kids once developed an elaborate series of stories about a bunch of rocks that they found,” Pugh said. The social aspect of toys isn’t always so cute — kids can be bullied or feel inferior if they don’t have the same toys other kids have, and social comparisons can be painful for children whose parents can’t afford new purchases. And while wealthier families may be able to afford pricier toys, lower-income parents sometimes feel so much pressure to buy popular items that they’ll go without basic necessities to do so, Pugh has found.  But thinking about toys as social objects is also a reminder that playing is what makes a toy a toy — if nobody plays with it, it’s just part of the plastic graveyard. Kids might gravitate at first to the toys with the most bells and whistles — like, for example, these cursed electronic stuffies that emit bloodcurdling screams when thrown. Playing is what makes a toy a toy — if nobody plays with it, it’s just part of the plastic graveyard. But toys that do too much often lack “stickiness,” or the ability to hold kids’ attention for a long period of time, said Sudha Swaminathan, director of the Center for Early Childhood Education at Eastern Connecticut State University. The stickiest toys are usually simple and open-ended, she said, like blocks or basic animal figures. The toys that kids return to again and again are the ones that “require attention, imagination, and creativity,” Davis said.  For her kids, that’s magnetic blocks. For Randall’s son, it’s a set of wooden train tracks left over from her own childhood. “I guess I just didn’t need to get any modern toys,” she said. Realistically, kids are going to ask for toys they saw on YouTube, on the playground, or at a friend’s house. They’re going to come home with vials of mysterious green goo that end up in the freezer (maybe this is just my kid). Parents do not control what their kids want, or even always what they get, and it can seem like that control is ebbing further every day. The adults in kids’ lives can, however, decide when to say yes and when we have to say no. And when all else fails and the clutter gets overwhelming, we can “sneak out in the dead of night,” while they’re sleeping, as Randall puts it, and get rid of that junk.

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Antsokia Woreda, a boy in Mekoy, Ethiopia, carries bednet packaging. Insecticidal bednets are one of the most cost-effective ways to save a human life. | Louise Gubb/Corbis via Getty Images It will soon be Giving Tuesday, and it’s time for me to do what I do on Vox every Giving Tuesday: encourage people to give more money to effective charities. Over years of doing this, I’ve gotten a long and familiar list of objections. I decided this year to try my best to answer them. What are you asking me to do? I am asking you to give 10 percent of your pretax income to a charity that saves lives. I give my 10 percent to GiveWell’s top charities fund, which redistributes it to highly effective global health charities like the Malaria Consortium and Helen Keller International. GiveWell estimates that for every $5,000 gift, these charities will save one human life. I think of GiveWell as like the charity version of an index fund: It’s a rigorous, impartial recommender that you can donate to without having to pick and choose individual causes. It has also been, disclosure, an advertiser on Vox Media podcasts, though I’ve been using it since long before that was true. 10 percent seems like a lot. It’s significant. For the average American household, which has an income of roughly $75,000, it’s a $7,500 commitment. That’s a real bite, but it’s also more than enough to save a life. I don’t know if I can afford 10 percent …  That’s fair! Can you do 5 percent? Maybe …  I would go as low as 1 percent! But then that’s only $750 a year, and that can’t save a life. Well, every five years you would. And if you want to do more good, we can always go back to 10 percent! The Vox guide to giving The holiday season is giving season. This year, Vox is exploring every element of charitable giving — from making the case for donating 10 percent of your income, to recommending specific charities for specific causes, to explaining what you can do to make a difference beyond donations. You can find all of our giving guide stories here. Okay, okay, 10 percent. Isn’t that kind of religious? For sure: The practice of tithing in many world religions is a key inspiration here. The twist is I’m suggesting tithing not to religious institutions but to highly effective charities (which could be religious or not — it’s not their beliefs that matter, but their effectiveness). So why these particular charities? Because there’s a huge, huge difference between what the most and least effective charities can accomplish with donations. You might think that charities are like brands of dish soap… I’ve never once thought that. It’s an analogy, give me a second. The absolute best dish soap is probably, at most, a tiny bit better than the average brand, right? I mean it’s just soap. Even Wirecutter says “you probably can’t go wrong with most name-brand dish detergents.” Fair enough, soap is soap. But really, charities are more like chef’s knives. The difference between the best and worst knife is enormous and affects the entire process of cooking, or so it has been explained to me by superior cooks. It’s the difference between an enjoyable time in the kitchen versus pure drudgery (and a heightened chance you inadvertently chop off your fingertip). So what does this have to do with charity? What it has to do with charity is that the vast majority of nonprofits have no evidence of positive impact at all, and even charities brave enough to agree to rigorous tests of their impact see widely variable effectiveness. In global development, something like 60 to 70 percent of interventions tested show no results at all, which effectively means the money donated could have just been thrown down a hole. And among those that do show results, the size of the impact varies drastically. The researcher Benjamin Todd has looked into these questions a lot, examining nine different databases of program impact, and found that in every context, from US social policy to global health to the UK’s National Health Service to estimates of climate policies, the results are “fat-tailed.” That’s statistics talk for the conclusion that the best interventions are much, much better than the average interventions.  How much better are these super-interventions? It depends, but here are a couple of examples: The most cost-effective treatments examined by Britain’s National Health Service were 120 times more effective than the median treatment. A World Bank study found the most effective interventions in global health were 38 times more effective than the median ones. And why should I care about giving my money to the 38-times-more-effective place? Because it lets you do a lot more good. Suppose you’re giving $7,500 a year. If you gave that to an average global health program, you’d be providing 30 more total years of healthy life to a few people, per the World Bank data. 30 years of life! That’s pretty good, right? It’s great. But If you put that money toward one of the 2.5 percent most cost-effective interventions, you’d save about 1,275 years of life. Wow, I can actually provide a millennium of extra life? Quite possibly! These are necessarily rough numbers and you shouldn’t take them too literally. You might merely save hundreds of years of life. But the magnitudes here strongly suggest that you should be careful about choosing where to donate, because the difference between the best and the merely okay is huge. There’s a reason the philosopher Toby Ord, who originated the “10 percent of income to effective charities” pledge idea, has argued that cost-effectiveness is a moral imperative, on par with the moral imperative to give money at all. So I looked at the GiveWell list of top charities … why aren’t there any working in the US? Good question. The short answer is the US is a rich country, which means everything tends to cost more than it does abroad — including the cost of helping people in need. The US still has extreme poverty, in the global, living-on-$2-a-day standard, but it’s comparatively rare and hard to target effectively. The poorest Americans also have access to health care and education systems that, while obviously inferior compared to those enjoyed by rich Americans, are still superior to those of very poor countries. To be blunt: People in the US simply are not dying for want of a $1.50 anti-malaria pill. (For one thing, the US managed to essentially eradicate malaria transmission from within its borders.) That means it is much, much more cost-effective to help people abroad. How much more cost-effective? Here’s one example. Years ago, GiveWell looked into a number of US charities, like the Nurse-Family Partnership program for infants, the KIPP chain of charter schools, and the HOPE job-training program. It found that all were highly effective but were also far more cost-intensive than the best foreign charities. KIPP and the Nurse-Family Partnership cost more than $9,000 per child served, while a program like the Malaria Consortium’s prevention efforts costs around $4,500 per life saved. There’s been less work on evaluating US charities in recent years than would be ideal, and I’d love to hear about charities that can save lives here very cost-effectively. But right now, the evidence suggests to me that it’s much more expensive to save lives in the US than abroad.  But … I still want to help people closer to me. That’s a commendable impulse! I get it, really, and if the most I can convince you to do here is give 10 percent of your income to fight poverty in the US, then you should do that and I’ll take the win. But I would also ask you to consider the idea that people in other, much poorer countries have equal moral weight to those who live in your country. Their lives matter just as much. And if you can help, say, 100 of them for the cost of helping one American, and you choose to do the latter, you’re making an implicit choice to value Americans much more than non-Americans. I think there might be valid reasons to make that choice — but it’s not one I want to make, so that’s not how I donate. What about animals? This all sounds very human-centric. Animals count, too! Indeed they do. I think the best critique of GiveWell’s list — well, less a critique than an argument not to use it exclusively — is that you can do even more good, even more efficiently if you try to help animals, especially farm animals bred and raised in extreme suffering just so they can be slaughtered. There are billions of them, and very little is spent trying to help them. If you want to help them, Animal Charity Evaluators has some good suggestions of where to give. I’m partial to the Humane League, which pressures corporations to improve their treatment of farmed animals. This all … sounds like effective altruism. It does because it is. Todd and Ord were among the founders of effective altruism, and generally the community and people in it have developed a lot of the ideas you see above, from the focus on cost-effectiveness to the “give 10 percent” idea to taking animals seriously. Didn’t effective altruists do a bunch of crimes a few years ago? A bunch of EAs definitely did a bunch of crimes a few years ago. Sam Bankman-Fried and several of his colleagues at FTX and Alameda Research identified as EAs and stated that they were only becoming billionaires to donate the proceeds to effective charities. Of course, they turned out to be stealing lots of money in the process and Bankman-Fried has since been convicted in federal court and sentenced to 25 years in prison. (Disclosure: In 2022, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause.) So he did crimes because of these ideas? I don’t think we know for sure why he did what he did, but there are some theories. One theory is that Bankman-Fried took the idea that you should make as much money as possible and donate it as efficiently as possible, and ran way too far with it — to the point where committing outright fraud to make money to donate made sense to him, on the apparent grounds that the potential good that could be done with it was worth the risk to himself and many others. Other theories hold that he was just lying the whole time, never cared about doing the right thing, and used EA as a cover for his own greed. Either way, it reflects very badly on EA. So why are you asking me to take these effective altruist ideas seriously? Because they’re good ideas and they’re in danger of being totally discredited because of some effective altruists who didn’t even take the “donate a lot of your income to normal charities that save lives” part of the philosophy seriously. Look at SBF: He distributed a bunch of money to causes he valued, but they were explicitly not causes involving giving people lifesaving medication right now. They were more speculative “longtermist” causes — things like AI safety and preventing global catastrophic risks. Whatever you think of that behavior, it’s precisely not what I’m asking you to do right now. If they didn’t take these ideas seriously, why should I? Because you have the opportunity to save lives, right now, and you should take it. This whole thing where you think I’m, like, obligated to give this much is weird. I don’t think you’re “obligated.” I just think it’s a good thing to do and that you should consider it. If everyone did it, we could end global poverty and then some. And I don’t even think it’s purely an altruistic good thing. I think it’ll be good for you as a person, too. Oh, really? I should selfishly give away 10 percent of my income? That’s honestly a big part of why I do it. Really? For yourself? Sure. Look, I think it’s important to do good for other people, in and of itself. That’s a major motivator, definitely. But … you ever wonder if your life has meaning? If it makes any kind of difference to the world? Personally, I want to live a life that means something, that leaves things ever so slightly better than I found them. I want to be pursuing goals that aren’t just material. I don’t want to mark the progression of my life solely through raises and promotions, or fall victim to the subtle pressures that push me to spend more and more of my money on gadgets and furniture that make me progressively less happy. What on earth are you even talking about? I’m talking about a problem that, for me, giving 10 percent of my income away helps solve. One, it helps establish a baseline meaning or impact from my work — if nothing else, I know that the money I make through my job contributes to saving people’s lives. That has to count for something. That’s a source of real meaning and pride. Two, it provides a powerful counterforce to the treadmill that comes as you age and make more money, a treadmill that pushes you to spend lots of it to keep up with your peers or feel like you’re living better. There are definitely times when I feel like I’m not taking as nice a vacation as my friends are, or where I feel kinda cheap for having mostly Wayfair furniture while my friends have a nice, solid wood dining table. Sometimes I blame the donations for these feelings. But mostly I am thankful for them. The idea that, after you reach a certain level of baseline comfort, additional consumer spending is going to make you dramatically happier is a seductive lie. And one of the few weapons I have against it is the knowledge that I face a very real choice between, say, getting one of those amazing lie-flat business-class airplane seats for my next vacation and saving a human being’s life. That lets me resist the former, and live a life that feels just a tiny bit more meaningful. Okay, fine, I’m in. Where do I sign up? The group Giving What We Can runs a pledge, which I and thousands of others have signed, for people who commit to donating 10 percent of their income to highly effective charities. You can sign if you want. But the main thing to do is just give.

Donald Trump poses with Kenya’s then-President Uhuru Kenyatta, Guinea’s then-President Alpha Conde, African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina, then-Vice President of Nigeria Yemi Osinbajo and then-Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn. Trump’s foreign aid policies would profoundly affect countries like Kenya, Guinea, Nigeria, and Ethiopia, and institutions like the ADB. | Jonathan Ernst/AFP via Getty Images On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance did not sound like guys likely to support foreign aid spending. Vance would rail against Kamala Harris, who he alleged “taxed money from the American taxpayer, sent it off to China and to foreign regimes all over the world.” (It’s not clear what exactly he meant by this.) Trump blasted US aid to Ukraine, joking that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is “maybe the greatest salesman of any politician that’s ever lived. Every time he comes to our country, he walks away with $60 billion.” Sure enough, this skepticism applies to more traditional foreign aid spending as well, through vehicles like the US Agency for International Development (USAID). All four budget proposals during Trump’s first term included major cuts to foreign aid; the last one proposed a 34 percent cut to global health programs, including an over 50 percent cut to the Global Fund, the main international body coordinating donor funds to fight malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS. Project 2025, the notorious Heritage Foundation project outlining policy for a second Trump term, commissioned Max Primorac, who served in USAID during Trump’s first term, to outline a plan for aid. His focus was on fighting DEI and reproductive health initiatives, combating Chinese influence, returning support to fossil fuels in developing countries, and enacting “deep cuts” to the aid budget. All of that reads like a case that foreign aid advocates should be freaking out right now, the same way abortion rights and immigrant advocates are. But the truth is more nuanced. The president does not control the foreign aid budget directly, and during Trump’s first term, a bipartisan coalition in Congress ensured that none of the cuts were adopted. While his budgets proposed cuts to institutions like the Global Fund, the US also made large pledges of increased support during his term, albeit largely at Congress’s instigation. Mark Green, the former Congress member who Trump tapped to head USAID last time, is widely respected in the aid world and pursued reform policies that honestly don’t look very different from those of Biden’s administrator, Samantha Power, or Obama’s Raj Shah and Gayle Smith. Experts and advocates I spoke with emphasized that no one really knows what Trump II will bring, or how similar/different it will be from his first term. Some of his Cabinet picks, like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, seem like people any Republican could’ve chosen. Others, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Matt Gaetz, seem wildly unqualified and bizarre. But while little is certain, aid experts emphasized that we should not assume big cuts or other major damage to the US foreign aid system. “I have every expectation that we will see an attempt to cut funds for these areas, and those proposed cuts are profoundly dangerous,” Colin Puzo Smith, director of global policy at the antipoverty group RESULTS, told me. “But it’s so, so, so important for the global health advocacy community to remember, for the public to remember, and for other country leaders to remember, that those decisions don’t sit with the White House. They fall to Congress.” The case for optimism on foreign aid under Trump The best case that foreign aid will survive the Trump years without major damage is the record of Trump I. If you look at total foreign assistance spending for fiscal years 2018 and 2019 (the two years after Trump took over but before Covid-19), foreign aid funding was basically the same in dollar terms, only declining slightly due to inflation. When you account for military aid declining as the fight against ISIS in countries like Iraq and Jordan wound down, the picture looks even better. The basic reason that funding remained high despite budget requests from Trump proposing deep cuts is that members of Congress, in particular Republicans who were chairing relevant subcommittees in the Senate and House for Trump’s first two years, were adamant that funding stay high. They were not shy about denouncing his proposed cuts, even very early in his term. The most important institutions on aid funding in Congress are the State and Foreign Operations subcommittees of the appropriations committees for each chamber. Appropriations is in charge of all funding that has to be regularly authorized; that excludes things like Social Security or Medicare but includes the entire foreign aid budget.  The Republicans chairing the subcommittees during Trump’s first term were furious at the prospect of foreign aid reductions. “The proposed cuts to U.S. diplomacy and assistance are sweeping and potentially counterproductive to our national security goals,” Hal Rogers, the Kentucky Republican in charge of the House subcommittee, said in a 2017 statement.  The Senate chair was Lindsey Graham, a former Trump critic who had by this point become a major booster. All the same, Graham pronounced the foreign aid cuts “dead on arrival,” and argued Trump’s cuts to the State Department could lead to “a lot of Benghazis.” The health research group KFF has a useful tool allowing you to compare global health funding each year in the President’s budget, both in House- and Senate-proposed spending bills and in actuality. In almost every case, you see Congress pushing for more spending than Trump did, and winning.  Trump wanted to provide $1.125 billion to the Global Fund, the anti-malaria/TB/HIV group. The final bill provided $225 million more than that. Trump wanted $424 million for USAID efforts against malaria. The House upped that to $505 million, the Senate to $655 million, and the final passed version was $755 million, plus another $202 million for the National Institutes of Health to research malaria. That reflects a deep bipartisan commitment to global health funding, one that persists to this day. Graham is currently the ranking member on the funding subcommittee, and likely will be chair again come January. Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who has succeeded Rogers as chair of the House subcommittee, is also known as an enthusiastic supporter of global health funding.  In late 2022, under President Joe Biden, a bipartisan deal was cut involving these players enacting major increases in a number of global health funding streams. Those same actors could do that again. “There remain a lot of people in key positions in Congress who are very supportive of global health,” Chris Collins, head of Friends of the Global Fight, which pushes for increased global health support from Congress, told me. “Global health has always been bipartisan.” The foreign aid team that Trump put in place last time also gets high marks from observers in the field. His USAID pick Mark Green sought to reorient the agency toward emphasizing evidence-based interventions and programs run by locally rooted organizations, as opposed to US-based contractors. His program in that vein, the New Partnership Initiative, was quite similar to the Local Solutions program under Obama and the pledge by Power to increase the share of aid running through local groups to 25 percent. “Thanks to the able leadership of Administrator Mark Green, USAID has avoided much of the harm many feared could befall it under an administration that has so often positioned itself at odds with a development agenda,” the Center for Global Development’s Sarah Rose and Erin Collinson wrote when he stepped down in 2020. “When Green steps down from the job today, he will leave behind an agency that has largely continued to champion development.” The basic bull case for Trump II is that his second USAID administrator will be a broadly liked technocrat like Green, focused on improving efficiency rather than pursuing a partisan agenda focused on gender or reproductive health issues. That, plus a Congress willing to fund aid programs generously, could result in basically decent outcomes, if not spectacular ones. The case that this time will be different The first Trump term was not an unqualified success from a foreign aid standpoint. While his cuts did not make it through Congress, the fact that he proposed them put aid agencies under pressure and added uncertainty that they’d be able to continue programs. He also engaged in some classic Republican policies that global health experts disdain, like reviving the Mexico City Policy, a Reagan-era measure that bars aid to organizations that provide abortions. This is an example of Trump being a standard Republican president — every Republican since Reagan has adopted that policy, and every Democrat in office has then rescinded it. It’s more or less an American tradition at this point. But the policy is also associated with worse maternal health outcomes in recipient countries. Meanwhile, other Trump appointees pushed for abstinence-only sex education programs to combat HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, an approach that most research suggests is ineffective. More to the point, Trump II is by no means guaranteed to be like Trump I. His appointments so far have indicated he’s willing to depart from normal US policy more drastically; compare, for instance, his first-term choice of respected former Sen. Dan Coats to be director of national intelligence to his choice this time of Tulsi Gabbard, who is incredibly close to the Russian government. When it comes to global health, two big changes stand out. One is that Trump II will be a post-Covid administration, and thus will reflect the deep skepticism of multilateral health institutions that has developed on the right as a result of the pandemic. A few months into the pandemic, Trump announced he was withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization (WHO), citing its failure to contain the virus and arguing it was excessively close to the Chinese government. While the Biden administration reversed course on that decision, GOP anger toward the WHO in particular has lingered. The most recent Republican appropriations bill in the House zeroed out funding for that agency as well as the UN Population Fund, UNESCO, and the UN Environment Fund, among others.  Diaz-Balart, the chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, crafted that bill and is known as a moderate who resisted deeper cuts in Trump’s first term. If he wants to zero out WHO funding, it’s a fair bet it’ll be zeroed out. “The multilateral space is one where you’re going to see a shift,” Elizabeth Hoffman, executive director for North America at the ONE Campaign and a veteran foreign aid staffer in Republican congressional offices, told me. “There’s going to be a shift from trying to do things through multilateral mechanisms and looking at a more bilateral framework.” It’s not clear that this skepticism will extend to multilateral funding mechanisms like the Global Fund or Gavi. But there’s another factor in Trump II of potential concern for Gavi, especially: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Since Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Trump, the latter has repeatedly suggested that RFK will have a role as a kind of public health czar. He made it official by naming Kennedy as his pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is perhaps the most influential anti-vaccine activist not only in the US, but the world. A few months after he visited the nation of Samoa in 2019 and campaigned with anti-vaccine advocates there, a massive measles outbreak, driven by declining vaccination rates, broke out, killing some 83 people, mostly children, in a country of 217,000. The US population equivalent would be over 136,000 deaths. It’s not clear how much power Kennedy will have to repeat his Samoa performance in the US. He told NPR the morning after the election, “We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.” But he used the same appearance to emphasize that he thinks “the science on vaccine safety particularly has huge deficits,” suggesting he maintains his belief that they’re unsafe. How much power Kennedy will have to reduce vaccinations in the US is unclear, and how much power or interest he’ll have in reducing them abroad is even less clear. But whereas the last Trump administration declined to propose funding cuts for the vaccine funding group Gavi, even as it sought to cut almost every other kind of foreign aid, it’s not hard to imagine Kennedy’s presence pushing them to include Gavi and other vaccination programs in their budget slashing agenda. Such cuts, if enacted, would be tragic. Economic research suggests that Gavi’s support for national vaccination programs can save a life for a few thousand dollars, or even less. It’s one of the most cost-effective things the US government does, in any domain. If anti-vaxxers in Trump’s orbit target it, and if Congress goes along with them, the ramifications would be devastating. Perhaps the most disturbing omen for Trump’s foreign aid policy is the report from the Washington Post that he wants to revive “impoundment,” a practice Congress banned after Watergate in which the president simply refuses to spend money that’s been allocated by Congress. Trump publicly flirted with using a related tool, called rescission, to unilaterally cut foreign aid in 2019. This time he seems more serious. If Trump fully usurps the power of the purse from Congress, then any hope for foreign aid premised on the bipartisan congressional coalition behind foreign aid spending becomes hollow. Trump could simply overrule the Lindsey Grahams and Mario Diaz-Balarts of the world. Then we’d be in an incredibly dark reality indeed.

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Oh no, it’s time to start thinking about gift-giving … There’s always been a saying, an expression of exaggerated exasperation, that’s irked me: “What do you get for the person who has everything?”  The fundamental flaw of that question is that it ignores a very important fact: The person who has everything is probably rich, and you should never feel all that burdened about what to get them. If you told me that you’re agonizing over what to get a rich person, I would ask you to reevaluate your priorities. Rich people have enough money that they can buy whatever they want. But since the rich are people, and people celebrate birthdays, holidays, and milestones with presents, there will sometimes be a rare occasion when someone needs to get them a gift. And the exasperation goes from imaginary frustration to real annoyance.  That’s when people, mostly rich ones, call The Gifterie, a bespoke gifting concierge that helps clients choose the perfect gift for the most affluent, famous, and picky people in the world.  The Gifterie is the creation of Elise Nach and Min Polley. They came to me highly recommended by a few celebrity personal assistants. Whether the recipient is an avid golfer or a newborn nepo baby, Nach and Polley will find just the thing. I spoke with Nach about the difference between good and bad gifts, what they’ve learned from gifting the hardest people to buy for, how we — normies — can translate that to the presents we give this holiday season, and, of course, the most absurd celebrity request they’ve ever taken.  Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Alex Abad-Santos: I asked one of my friends who works as a celebrity’s personal assistant to ask his colleagues and they all recommended The Gifterie. And now I’m here to ask you, the experts, what to get people — like celebrities — who have everything. Elise Nach: As a company we’re used to working with a variety of requests, whether it is very specific, like, “Blake Lively is having another baby. We need to send something she doesn’t have,” to [working with] Amazon, when they’re launching a new series and they want to send something fun to all their press and talent.  When it comes to either the celebrity gifting or higher-end clientele that really have everything, we always say it’s more about making something feel special — [showing] that you put thought into it. Because they have a thousand scarves or they have a thousand different baby toys. Whether it’s etching a baby’s name on a gift or stitching someone’s initials on something, things like that seem to make a bigger impact with the recipient than just another Hermès scarf.  Which again, lovely. Who doesn’t want to get that?  If anyone is reading this, I would not turn down a Hermès scarf.  Of course, I wouldn’t either. But the key to successful gift-giving is really personalizing it. That doesn’t necessarily mean it has to have their name on it, but just knowing the recipient well enough to say, “Okay, this person really loves X.” That could be golf, or travel, or something like, “We know they’re going on a huge press tour,” so we want to get them something to carry their stuff. It’s something you can home in on — think about the conversations you’ve had with this person and what they’re about. It’s just so much more thoughtful.  How much do you need to know about the recipient to feel like you have the confidence that you can give a good gift? You’re getting great gifts for people you might never even meet. There’s a couple of our clients that we work with on a continuous basis, and they just email us and they’ll say, so and so — typically, an actor or a director or somebody that works on one of their shows — is having a birthday or having a baby, and we want to send something. Whether the budget is $150 or $5,000, our team will dig in and do a little deep dive on the internet on these people, and see if we can figure out something that they like or are interested in. We’ll do a little sleuthing and figure out, like, “Okay, this person seems to really love backpacking.” And we would recommend outdoorsy things.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Gifterie (@thegifterie.co) We’re really trying to stay on the pulse of what’s cool, what brands are trendy, quality brands in all different kinds of categories.  It isn’t necessarily that we have to know a certain amount of information about the people that we’re gifting, it’s just the more we know, the better, right? If you receive a thoughtful gift, it’s because somebody really thought of you and took the time to think, “What would this person like?”  I think what you’re getting at — and maybe this is the key to all gift-giving — is that it just comes down to thoughtfulness. Showing someone that you’ve thought about them.  We have this quote on our website: “Happiness doesn’t result from what you get, but from what you give.” That’s basically our motto. Whether they’re going through something rough or they’re celebrating an amazing milestone, giving people something that has thought behind it and brings them joy is always the best direction.  When it comes from someone else, it’s that extra level of excitement that somebody else got it for you. You didn’t buy it for yourself; someone took the time to think of you. It’s just a lovely feeling.  If you receive a thoughtful gift, it’s because somebody really thought of you and took the time to think, “What would this person like?”  I know we’re talking about high-end clientele and very rich people, but do you need a big budget to get people thoughtful presents? It’s not so much how much something costs, but how much you put the thought into it and made it feel special.  Presentation is also a big component. How we gift wrap things — adding dried flowers, the kind of ribbon you use, the paper, etc. — we really think about taking it to another level of not just sticking it in a box. We get a lot of feedback from recipients that the gift was just so beautifully gift-wrapped that they didn’t even want to open it. And then to open it and find something so pretty inside is also a really nice touch.  So for people that are gifting who don’t have a big celebrity budget, you can still wrap it in a really beautiful way and make it feel elevated and special. You can get stuff at Michael’s. It doesn’t have to be from fancy places online. And when you receive a gift like that, it feels like somebody put extra thought into it.  Are there any gift ideas people should avoid?  Ice cream. But that’s a wonderful gift! Have you tried shipping it?  We’ve done it, but it’s a nightmare and very stressful. I would also avoid anything super perishable. That would definitely be number one. If you know you’re not going to overnight it, if it’s something that isn’t going to be locally given, then I would probably avoid food. Are there polarizing foods that are a no-go? Raisins? I hate raisins.  No, we don’t usually include raisins. I mean, how do I say this? Probably avoid cheese that is … you know… more potent. But really, avoid things that are perishable.   With gifts that are very breakable, make sure they’re padded and packaged correctly. One of the worst things is sending someone a gift and something shows up broken. Just save your money. People would prefer a card or gift card, if you’re not going to put thought into it.  Is there such a thing as a bad gift? I just think being generic just shows that you didn’t put any thought into it. You know what I mean?  Just save your money. People would prefer a card or gift card, if you’re not going to put thought into it.  Do you have a go-to gift for someone that’s just notoriously hard to buy for? Sometimes when it’s something celebratory, like someone just won an Emmy — that can be a tough gift. For those kinds of gifts, we’ll do a beautiful bottle of champagne and we will etch on the bottle, “Congratulations on your Emmy win” with their name or the date. It’s something that they could drink, but they could also put it on a shelf and always see it as another trophy. It’s a thoughtful way of enhancing a bottle of champagne or their favorite liquor.  If you know that they love a certain whiskey, or a beautiful bottle of champagne, or a really expensive bottle of wine, and it’s for someone who has everything — those seem to always go over well because you’re getting them something they love, they’ll definitely drink it at some point. What’s the most difficult request you’ve ever gotten? Okay, so not naming names.  I totally want you to name names but I understand.  We got a request from an assistant at a record label: “So and so is coming in. They’re really big. We really need a welcome or a thank you gift basket for them. Can you spend X amount and put all this stuff together?”  We said sure, and that we could do something beautiful — a basket of wine, cheeses,  and all these fresh goods. And the assistant was like, “Can you get it here by 2 pm?” And this was like 10:30 in the morning.  From the valley to Santa Monica is not easy. It’s about a 45-minute drive at 2 pm, and longer with traffic. We went to all of our favorite shops, curated this gorgeous present, but were running out of time to get it to the place.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Gifterie (@thegifterie.co) The assistant kept texting and emailing us, asking when we were going to get there. And he wound up meeting Min on the side of the 405, not like the actual freeway — they exited and drove off the freeway — but they met halfway, and she handed off the gift.  The time constraint made it one of the craziest requests. We were just like chickens with our heads cut off trying to make it happen. We don’t ever want to say no to anything — we do once in a while — but sometimes we’re like,  “Oh, this would be so fun.” Getting something special every time seems incredibly stressful. I only have five friends and I’m already fretting about Christmas. But you’ve turned that stress into a business.  It’s exciting because every single day we’re working on different things. We love answering weird requests and hard calls. We really love anything random and unique. We love figuring it all out.  We’re coming up with unique ideas, whether it’s for one person or for 100 people. Because if it was just the same thing, then we would just have an automated website, and people would pick from it, and that would be that.  A website full of generic nonperishable cheese boards.  Exactly.

The holidays are ostensibly a time to gather with loved ones and celebrate cherished traditions, whether that be over turkey (or a turkey trot!) for Thanksgiving or Chinese food or murderous lullabies on Christmas. Unfortunately for many of us, the season has also become a time of high financial stress. One survey found that 2 out of 3 Americans have concerns about managing their finances over the holidays this year. The money pressures are legion — travel costs, hosting duties, gift buying — not to mention the emotional and logistical labor of making sure everyone is able to make beautiful holiday memories.  It doesn’t have to be this way. Even Better has just the guide to get you through the season with both your credit score and sanity intact. We hope these stories help you navigate the season with a little less stress so you can focus on what’s really important: enjoying time with friends and family (and of course, eating a lot of pie).  Why we obsess over giving “the perfect gift” — and how to stop Are you a bad gift-giver? Here’s how to tell, according to a pro How to host holiday gatherings without losing your mind

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It was last fall, in the midst of preparing to host Thanksgiving for the first time in my Brooklyn apartment, that I became obsessed with a woman on TikTok who was, in all respects, doing it much, much better than me.  For days, my feed filled up with Cecilia Tolone’s adventures in preparing a Friendsgiving for 18 people in her apartment, which involved a detailed spreadsheet, a week-long schedule, the polishing of candlesticks, and like, actually silver silverware. Not only that, but she was making and purchasing all of the food, compared to my rather wimpy request for all 16 guests to bring either a side dish or drinks.  It helped that Tolone is a professional pastry chef and I am merely someone who loves to throw parties. But there’s something about hosting an actual holiday as opposed to a regular dinner party that’s especially intimidating: Suddenly you’re judging your normal-person home next to the holiday movies of your youth, in which Christmases and Thanksgivings and Hanukkahs take place in sprawling suburban colonials where every corner of the space is covered in poinsettias or flickering candles.  Fortunately, none of your guests are expecting that — and if they are, well, they can host next year. What they are likely expecting is a clean space, a good time, and hopefully a serviceable plate of food. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars or follow every famous chef’s advice to throw a successful gathering that your guests will enjoy (Anthony Bourdain famously advised making two turkeys, one for showing off and one for serving, which seems excessive).  To find out how, I called up Tolone herself and other pro hosts to chat about how to hold such a gathering, without going broke, losing your grip, or swearing off the holidays forever.  Consider the Maslow’s hierarchy of hosting Megan Fitzgerald, who has worked in event planning for 15 years, went viral over the spring for her adaptation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but for party hosting. At the bottom, a.k.a. the fundamental requirements for a party, hosts should be thinking about the basic comfort necessities for guests: a clean space, a bathroom stocked with enough toilet paper, and enough water (with enough cups) to go around.  The other tiers — “communication,” “belonging,” “fun,” and “surprise” are the cherries on top, covering things like how to inform your guests of crucial information, making sure each guest has at least two or three people they’ve already met at least once, and creating a theme or an activity to break the ice. (You’ll notice that none of these require a ton of spending!) @aroundeight After the age of 23, you should no longer have to go to a party with no toilet paper. #hostingtips #hosting101 #eventplanner #eventhost #greenscreen ♬ original sound – aroundeight Fitzgerald explains that parties often run on a spectrum, where, say, a frat party might have the top elements (surprise and delight), but not nearly enough of the bottom (like, say, a clean couch to sit on). Similarly, “your family friend Gloria” probably has a lovely serving tray and thoughtfully cooked food, but is missing the elements of a party that make it actually fun.  “The people who can host to that level of detail where their cocktail garnishes are stunning, I think that is so impressive,” Fitzgerald says. “But hosting is also so much more than that. It’s the energy of the party, your mental state, and meeting people where they’re at.” “Hosting is a lifestyle. You will collect things — and thrift, thrift, thrift!” She also advises finding the “why” of your party: Maybe your “why” is that you’re hoping to establish new traditions within your circle, or that you want to reconnect with your religion. Maybe you want your home to feel like a safe haven for folks who don’t have anywhere else to go during the holidays, or you just want to see as many people as you possibly can on your favorite day of the year. “If you know your ‘why,’ a lot of those [hosting decisions] will fall into place,” Fitzgerald says.  Skip the single-use decor “This, I have very strong feelings about,” says Tolone, after I mention what feels to be the standard these days of purchasing cheap Amazon banners, photo backdrops, or themed paper plates and napkins for every event. “There is no, ‘What’s the theme?’ The theme is Thanksgiving, and I’m going to use the same table runners I did throughout my whole 20s.”  Instead, Tolone’s approach is to slowly build a hosting toolkit over time, not on Amazon but at thrift stores. “If you’re hosting Thanksgiving, you don’t have to have everything this year. This year can be for candlesticks, and next year can be for the tablecloth. Hosting is a lifestyle. You will collect things — and thrift, thrift, thrift!” Your space isn’t small — it’s cozy If you decide to have a theme, the best ones work with the physical space they’re in rather than fighting them (much like with weddings). Therefore, your mood board, whether it’s in your head or living on Pinterest, shouldn’t come from holiday romcoms.  “Hosting in an apartment is so much sexier than hosting in suburbia,” Fitzgerald says. “It can look like tapered candles and everybody crowded together around the kitchen and yes, you’re close together, but you should celebrate that you’re in this part of your life where you’re living in a city and celebrating the holidays. That’s magical.” Not enough table and chair settings? Try a makeshift indoor picnic. “Just move the furniture, put down a blanket, and sit on the floor,” Tolone says. “If you think it’s fun and you make it cute and put effort in, people are also gonna think it’s fun and funny and cute. It’s only gonna be awkward if you’re awkward about it.” Daniel Post Senning of the Emily Post Institute also suggests finding small ways to make the party special, like making a toast: “Maybe it’s a signature drink, or a moment where the family gets up and shares what they’ve done in the last year. But think about some things that you could do that would make a holiday gathering where people have made a little extra effort to get there. As a host, you can have fun with that. Reward it, honor it, match it.” Calculate how much to cook  A holiday gathering — particularly Thanksgiving — is one of those times where if you don’t think your pants are about to burst by the end of the night, you feel like you’ve wasted the day. Therefore, making or ordering enough food for everyone to have, at the very least, a heaping first place (and ideally a second) is a must.  Southern Living recommends calculating about a pound of food per person, and half a pound per child. When buying a turkey, make sure you’ve got a pound and a half per person (because the bones and the water cooking off means you’ll be left with about 8 ounces per person). Another way to think about it: Each person should have around 5 bites for an appetizer, 8 ounces of protein, and another 8 ounces of sides total.  If you’re still worried you might not have enough food, it might help knowing that Ina Garten thinks that’s chic, actually. It’s also important to remember that just because you have 15 people eating stuffing, doesn’t mean you need 15 enormous servings of stuffing. “You need a spoonful of stuffing for 15 people,” Tolone says. “When you break down the food, it’s a lot of carbs and frozen vegetables, which are actually pretty affordable.” If you’re still worried you might not have enough food, it might help knowing that Ina Garten thinks that’s chic, actually. “People have more fun if they don’t eat so much they have to be taken home in an ambulance,” she said in her 2004 book on entertaining. “And no hors d’oeuvres; I learned this from the French.” For wine, stock at least one bottle per wine-drinking person. “I know that sounds crazy,” Fitzgerald says, “but if you’re there for four hours, that’s a glass of wine an hour!”  Embrace potlucks and takeout There’s of course nothing wrong with delegating all of that out by asking guests to bring their own dishes if you can’t shoulder the entire expense. This still requires some advance planning and perhaps a shared spreadsheet. Last year, my biggest stressor was whether the person who agreed to bring the mashed potatoes would flake at the last minute. I could only send so many reminders: How, I wondered, can I be a good potluck host without sounding like a drill sergeant?  As Senning says, “This is the art of good etiquette. It’s about being consistent and persistent without being demanding or disappointed.” He advises regulating your emotional tone as you’re dealing with people. “No matter what the responses are, be prepared and hold yourself accountable that you’re the host, and your mood will set the tone for the whole event.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Cecilia Tolone (@cecilia.tolone) Fitzgerald recommends leaning on your VIP guests, which is to say, your most type-A, reliable friends. Send a group text to your VIPs with a list of everything you need, and have them volunteer for their dishes. “Then the people you can’t rely on, just tell them to bring wine,” she says. It’s a good idea for the host to at least supply the main dish, however.  What happens if you’re a terrible cook? “I actually think some forms of takeout are secretly less expensive than cooking,” Fitzgerald says. “If you go to a restaurant that does, like, a vat of pasta, sometimes it can be 70 bucks and you can feed 15 people.” Don’t be afraid to ask for help When Tolone cooks Thanksgiving dinner for her 18 guests, she asks each of them to bring a bottle of wine or other beverage, as well as $10 for the cost of the turkey. “This is definitely a cultural thing. I live in Sweden, and they don’t ever want you to feel burdened by them, so most of the time, people will give me more money because they know how much food I buy,” she says. Though this can be somewhat controversial advice (she says she once got “eviscerated” in her TikTok comments section for it), “you just have to know your audience.” This also goes for the invites. “In Swedish, we would say hosting is ‘hunting after people,’” she says. “I have different lists of people who I know what time to say, ‘Hey, are you coming or not?’ Certain friends, you have to lie to them and say the party is an hour earlier. If you care about these people, you have to meet them where they’re at. It’s a party, it’s not a moral lesson on timeliness.” Encourage fun guests by being a fun host Earlier this year, the New York Times published a piece where they asked dozens of professionally fun and stylish people to give their best party advice. Almost all of them emphasized the same point: Stop stressing out.  “If you operate with the mindset of ‘everything is going to be fine,’ then everything is going to be fine. But if you stress out, then everything is going to stress you out,” one investment executive said. Another said, “When you invite people into your home, you need to let go.” Other old etiquette standbys can still be useful: “There are certain roles a host plays at a gathering, and you can think of them as marks to hit,” Senning says. “Make sure you greet every person as they arrive, make introductions appropriately, check in with them, and thank them for coming and for any contributions that they made.”  In my own case, the most fun part of Thanksgiving was after dinner, when I was sitting with my girlfriends on the floor around the coffee table, playing silly drinking games and singing to the music we listened to in high school. When all is said and done, “People will forget whether the roast was a little overdone, or whether someone brought this salad or that salad,” he adds. “But they will remember how they felt in your company.”

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