12 Rules for the Good of the Planet | Bjørn Lomborg | EP 345
Should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up! Get your act together! Adopt some responsibility! Put your life together! Develop a vision! Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within! Be a force for good in the world, and that'll be the adventure of your life.
[Music]
Especially for young people, they have a Miss Ionic urge that emerges, you know, in late adolescence and runs into early adulthood when they're trying to sort out their lives. They want a project, and they want a vision that they can be involved in that does have some larger scale social significance. And this seems to me to be, this could be recognition. It's like, well, how about we don't have any direly poor people, and then we see how that goes? If you can improve the seed stalk so that crops are more pesticide-resistant, which you can’t, or more pest resistant, which you can do, then you can use less pesticide. You can increase the yield per acre so that uses less farmland. It's like, why wouldn't the greens be absolutely 100% on board with this as well if they could drop the zero-sum presupposition and, you know, the anti-extrapolism defeat idea?
It's like, well, we serve women when they're the most vulnerable, and now we serve children when they're the most vulnerable, and there's no downside to that—there's just upside! So that sounds like a perfectly good adventure. And one of the things that we find doing these projects is that it's amazing, as you also pointed out, that we spend so much time focusing on some of these other things, like, you know, plastic in the oceans and climate change and many other things—these are all worthy things, mind you. And a lot of people will argue that we should do them because they will help the world's poor. The problem is they'll help them very ineffectively, so for every dollar spent, they will only help them in an infinitesimal part.
Whereas if we spend that dollar on some of these projects that we're going to be talking about, you can have an enormous impact right here, right now. So again, it's not to say that we shouldn't do all the other wonderful things; I'm simply making the argument we should probably do this first.
Oh, hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms and, well, on the Daily Wire Plus too. I'm here today—I'm pleased to be here today—live, so that's also good—with Bjorn Lomborg, who runs a think tank called Copenhagen Consensus in Denmark. And Bjorn has done the most detailed and reliable analysis of spending prioritization.
I would say that there are a number of enterprises that are underway on the international front, but it's a chaotic mess of jumbled priorities, and that's a big problem because it makes everything super expensive and inefficient, which might be a feature rather than a bug. And Bjorn and his team have spent, well, it's more than a decade now, damn near 20 years determining how to prioritize our approaches on the national and international front in relationship to the multitude of problems that beset us. And it's important to stress multitude because we have a proclivity in the woke West to reduce the entire panoply of problems that confront us, or opportunities, depending on how you look at it, to a single climate emergency and then to reduce that to a single cause, carbon, and then to assume that if we oppose carbon, we're now acting as the appropriate representatives of the Messiah on the planet.
And none of that constitutes acceptable theology, let's say, let alone policy. So I'm going to talk to Bjorn today about what he's been up to recently, but then we're going to walk through 12 projects that Bjorn and his team of economists—a team of, it's a meta-team of economists because there's many teams—are working on what they believe where we can do the most good for the least amount of money in the shortest period of time with the highest return. All of that multi-dimensional calculation.
So good to see you, Bjorn. Likewise. Thank you for being at Stanford for a couple of weeks. What have you been doing there? So I'm a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and so I gave the first presentation of the project that you just described, which is basically a project that tries to say, look, we'd love to do everything in the world, and everybody sort of promises everything in the world.
And we actually have it documented because the world has made 169 different targets—its priorities; they're called the sustainable development goals—where we promised we're going to fix, as you mentioned, climate, but we're also going to, you know, fix world peace, and we're gonna get rid of corruption. We're gonna make sure that everybody are well-educated and don't starve and get out of poverty and we get more parks for handicapped people in urban areas. And we recycle more, and the list just goes on and on.
And there's something almost comical about the total effect of that because we're promising everything to everyone all the time, but of course, we're actually not delivering on this. We promised this from 2016 to '30, so this year we're at halftime— we're at halftime of all the global promises. So remember this is promises that every single nation in the world has signed up to—the U.S., Canada, pretty much everyone. I think Syria is the only one that hasn't done this yet.
So we promised all this stuff; we're not delivering at all. Yeah, and so what we're trying to say is look, if we can't do it all, what should we do first, right? What are the smartest ones? One of the things I worked on, one of the relatively early documents in this sustainable development goal world, that was the secretary's general report on sustainable economic development—that was about 15 years ago. And one of the things I found very peculiar about it is actually what tilted me over towards your work eventually was that there were 200 goals, and I thought that's a lot of goals.
It's like at some point you have so many goals that really what you're saying is we're going to do everything at once, and that's a stupid plan, because any number, any one of the goals is quite difficult to attain. You have to build a structure and systems that will move towards the goal, and you have to put the spending in place, and you have to evaluate the outcomes. It's actually very difficult—you have to build the local apparatuses. And so I ask the powers that be, why the hell there were 200 goals? And their answer was, well, each of the priorities has a constituency somewhere, spread across countries or in a given country, and we don't want to offend anyone by rank ordering our priorities.
And I thought, well, that's all well and good. Plus, the upside of that from a political perspective is that you get all the moral cachet of being concerned about everything that you would be concerned about if you were good without any of the responsibility for actually doing any of the difficult work. And so you can go to COP26 or whatever the hell it is and posture on the world stage about your commitment to these wonderful goals and appeal to 200 different constituents and walk away while having agreed to spend a tremendous amount of money stupidly but shining at least in your own eyes and in the eyes of the press.
So then I was looking around, I thought, well, there must be someone somewhere sensible enough to understand that 200 goals is absurd. And the only group that I could really find that had a method for rank-ordering priorities was your team. And so do you want to explain exactly how you do that? And then we can progress with our discussion about what you think things should be done.
Yeah, so you're absolutely right. Look, it's much easier for politicians to just promise everything to everyone because then they just seem like good guys, and they don't actually make any decisions, of course, they do in reality, because every year you have a budget, and you don't have infinite resources on your budget. So in your budget, you actually show what it is that you really care for. And so it ends up being a few things that you focus on, but often without much concern about efficiency.
So what we're trying to bring to the table is, in a sense, and that's what economists can do. We're basically helping—and I should just say I'm a pretend economist. I'm actually a political scientist, but I work with a lot of really, really smart economists. And they look at how much will it cost and how much good will it do? Remember, some things are very desirable but really, really hard to do. So, you know, for instance, getting rid of corruption in general—I’ll actually tell you we do have one good solution—but in general, corruption is a huge problem. It costs about a trillion dollars a year or more for the world, but we don't know how to get rid of it.
It's really hard to do because the systems that are needed to get rid of corruption are exactly the ones that are corrupt, right? So it's really hard to do. This has been a real problem, as the former Soviet Union countries have tried to retool because even if you import Western structures, nobody trusts them because the corruption is so unbelievably widespread. And the problem with corruption, of course, is that once it's instantiated, it manifests itself at every level of society. And so that's a good example of a low-resolution concept.
Well, there's corruption. It's like, yeah, but now you've said very little by saying that because the devil in that situation is definitely in the details. And so you might want to fight corruption, but that's not a plan. And so, yeah, and so we should also—so you set up teams of economists that would rank order the goals, and then you averaged across the teams, which I also thought was a brilliant methodologically because you could argue that any given economist's analysis of both costs and benefits has a margin of error of some substantive amount, right? And because it's hard to assess and to forecast.
But technically speaking, from the perspective of a social scientist, I would say that that's an unbeatable methodology, even though it's still going to produce a somewhat problematic end, because you zoom in on where there's multi-dimensional measure—to measure multi-dimensionally measured consensus. And at least in principle, you'd be ironing out the errors of any given team of economists. Hopefully, yes. Again, what we're not trying to do is make the truth of the world, but we're just trying to make a much better resolution of what it is that we can do.
So we try to identify what are things that we can actually do right so that the problem works. Yeah, and that we have good evidence for works at low cost with high benefits. And so what we're essentially doing is we provide, if you will, a menu for the world. So a menu typically comes with, you know, it has to tell you what you're going to get, how much you're going to get, you know, a tiny pizza or a big pizza, and how much will it cost. And then, of course, you can make those decisions. So economists, they're not going to tell you you should do this, right?
But basically, we're telling you here is something that at very low cost can give you a lot of good food. How about that? So in the same way, in the world order, we'll make a list of all the things—all the things you'd like to do—where are really smart or that are really effective policies that we know work that would help a lot of people at low cost. Why don't we do that before we do the stuff that'll cost a lot but help very few people? Right?
Right? Well, we should talk a little bit about that as a fundamental presupposition too because there's a kind of utilitarianism there, which is that all things considered, in the absence of other compelling reasons, you should do what you can in the most efficient way—well, why? Well, because what efficiency means—because people might say, well, you know, some things are so important that it’s worth spending the money on. It's like, yeah, but there's many things that are important, and unfortunately, when you spend, given that resources are not precisely infinite, when you spend money in one place, that means you're not spending it in another place.
And so, if you believe that you have 12 things to do that are good—or 169 things—you have to value efficiency from the moral perspective because, in principle, efficiency is precisely that which allows you to address more than you would have otherwise been able to manage. And otherwise, what are you going to make an argument for inefficiency, which is so weird?
Yeah, so this is, well, I like this because it’s zeroed us in your methodology. It also reduced a landscape of problems that was so diverse and disparate that there was no way anyone sensible could have possibly undertaken the enterprise, and then it's extraordinarily practical. And it also—this, the other thing that I found very striking was that in comparison to the amount of money we're already spending on all sorts of things, the amounts that your teams have been recommending are really rounding errors in the total, let's say, international or in the total world of international or national governance.
And but then, it's also demoralizing in some sense because you understand that we could do the 12 most important and efficient things and do a lot of good for a lot of people, especially the absolutely poor, and we could do that without really even noticing it. Yeah, on the spending side. So that's incredibly optimistic. But the problem is you've got to ask yourself, given that that's the case, what the hell have we been doing?
And well, that's something we'll delve in today. So we're going to go through Bjorn's 12 suggested projects and talk about their cost but also about what they could do for people. And tell me if you think this is true. So imagine that there's a rule of thumb ethic that underlies the selection of these projects. We talked a little bit about efficiency, but I think the ethic is something like, well, if we could alleviate material poverty—absolute poverty, not relative poverty—but to start with at least absolute poverty, enough for people to eat, make sure they have access to hygienic facilities, make sure they're not inhaling indoor pollution to the point that they're dying, they're not starving, their kids have some opportunity, there's some option for them to expand their temporal horizon across decades instead of being focused on the necessity for the next meal because that makes them, um, impulsive, you might say, with regards to what they're willing to do on the environmental front.
And so, at minimum, you're trying to raise the standard of living at the very bottom end. And you won't do that in a way that allows you to do that—multiple ways, and that's kind of the overall ethical schema, I would say. I think it's what comes out of what we try to do. So we're basically saying, look, there's a lot of different things you can do in the world. As we know, there's 169 things, and you know, there's literally thousands of different projects out there. We've tried to look at a lot of them and say what do we have evidence for and what are the costs.
And so we've tried to estimate—and this is an impossible task—so we reasonably assume that we've covered the whole area of saying where can you get an enormous amount of good for every dollar or shilling or rupee spent. And what we find is so we're looking at where can you spend a dollar and at least do $15 of good. This is a threshold that we've set, which basically means all the things we're talking about are incredibly good things. Imagine if you could give a dollar to this one project and you could do at least $15.
Well, we should also point out that's not an expense, then. No, no investment. Well, it is an expense, in a sense because if you've spent the dollar, you don't get $59 right back, right? You get $15 of social benefits. Typically, in the poor world, you also mentioned that this is mostly for the world's poor people. So we're looking at low and low-middle-income countries—that's, you know, World Bank estimate. So it basically means that you live with less than, say, $13 per day, which is not very much.
So this is almost, this is a little more than half the world's population. So 4.1 billion people live in low and low-middle-income countries—from Malawi, a very, very poor country, to India, to Bangladesh—that's actually a fairly rich lower-middle-income country. So what that tells you is this is where the best investments are because that's where you can help the most people at very low cost. It'll cost them most in need. Absolutely, it will cost a lot to make you a little better off, but it costs actually very, very little to make the world's poorest much better off.
And so it also has this moral sense that is how we should be prioritizing. Yeah, and so that's the proper payment for privilege, you know, I would say. Once you have the economic wherewithal to be contemplating projects of the sort that we're describing, you also have the moral requirement to do that in a manner that's intelligent. And also, you might say that would address the problems of the people in the most want first. Yes.
And one of the things that we find doing these projects is that it's amazing, as you also pointed out, that we spend so much time focusing on some of these other things like, you know, plastic in the oceans and climate change and many other things. These are all worthy things, mind you. And a lot of people will argue that we should do them because they will help the world's poor. The problem is they'll help them very ineffectively.
So for every dollar spent, they will only help them in infinitesimal part, whereas if we spend that dollar on some of these projects that we're going to be talking about, you can have an enormous impact right here, right now. So again, it's not to say that we shouldn't do all the other wonderful things; I'm simply making the argument we should probably do this first.
Yeah, well, and so just to give you a sense of proportion, you have to get a scale of this. Of the 12 solutions that we come up with, they will in total cost about— I'm giving you a rough estimate here because there's different ways to measure. It'll need about $35 billion a year in funding. And that funding could come from, you know, rich people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. It could come from our development agencies, USAID or GIZ or whatever; you know, we're spending $175 billion in development aid every year, so surely we could afford $35 billion.
As you mentioned, a drop in the bucket, it really is a rounding error. If we spent that amount of money over this decade, we would every year save 4.2 million lives—that's 8% of everyone who dies in the world. We could avoid 8% of all death in this world. Of course, we won't do that indefinitely because people have to die, but we would postpone that. That would be an incredible boon for a lot of people and a lot of societies.
And at the same time, we would generate economic benefits worth $1.1 trillion. Just to give you a sense of proportion of what that means—that means that we could almost make sure that every person in the poor part of the world, so the 4.1 billion people we talked about before, could get about one dollar every day—almost one dollar every day, each person. So these projects that cost virtually nothing could save 8% of everyone who dies and get almost all people in the lower poor half of the world one dollar.
Okay, so I want to investigate something a little bit darker before we start our discussion about the projects per se. So one of the things that I see emerging on the chaotic and confused 169 goals front is an ethos that is also not precisely explicit but sort of lurks beneath the surface. And there are claims that go along with it. It might be that people are listening and think, well, this is all obvious. Obviously, we should spend money in the most efficient way; we should spend the least amount of money we have to spend; we should do it so that it does the most good.
But we should also understand that there are real resistances to this approach. And so one of the resistances that's implicit and sometimes explicit is the notion that, well, first of all, we're playing a zero-sum game in the world. So if some people are rich, other people have to be poor—there's not enough for everybody—and then, which I don't believe to be true at all, and economists generally don't buy as an argument. And then the next argument would be, well, let's say we could make poor people richer, but that's not sustainable because to support everybody in the world at the Western standard of living would take five Earths.
I've heard that figure bandied about, and there are probably way too many people on the planet in any case—there should only be 500 million or a billion or maybe two billion if they lived, you know, in poverty. And so there's this notion that the planet is truly finite in some fundamental sense; there's definitely not enough for everyone, and there's no way that we can elevate their living standards of the poor because all that would mean is that we're going to use up all the available resources faster.
And so what do you think about—so first of all, on the serum some game—remember, 200 years ago—we have good data for the last 200 years, 200 years ago almost every one of us were poor. We're extremely poor. So we lived at less than what used to be called one dollar a day. So we were—it was 95% of people; it was 90-95% of all people. This is a terrible world. There's a few people who were, you know, kings and dukes and those kinds of people, and then the rest of us were living in absolute poverty. We've pretty much eradicated most of that now; it's only 10% that live less than a dollar a day, I would really keyword 215 now.
But you know, fundamentally, we can absolutely have a world that's much better that's much richer and one that is obviously much better for these people. Now, people worry about, well, sustainably live on this planet. But what you have to remember is this is not a question of whether we have the resources to—it absolutely—we have the resources. When you hear this five Earths, uh, that is a very, very bad comparison. I get why they made it, but it basically assumes that because of climate changes almost entirely about climate change, which is a real problem—because we emit CO2, you have to plant forests to soak up that extra amount of CO2. And if we all lived like Americans or Americans, then you would need five Earths.
What they're really saying is you would need five Earths of forest to plant—but that's the most inefficient way to get rid of CO2. Much smarter way would be to put up, I don't know, wind turbines and solar panels. You could also put up nuclear power plants. We could have very, very little footprint. So actually, when you do the math, it turns out that this is just hokum. Yes, there is a problem. So we—we will do well within one Earth, even if we were much richer, all of us, and even if there were more people. So, you know, about 10 billion people—yes, there are problems with having 10 billion people, but having 10 billion rich people also means we can deal with most of these problems if you're poor—that's the real pollution problem. Right?
Right! Or you pollute a lot. You both, you know, you cut down your forest to keep, you know, to slash burn so you can grow some food for your kids. You'll have terrible indoor air pollution; you'll typically have very inefficient production; you will have all kinds of bad things. So what we really need, not just morally, to get people out of poverty and to get them to a good life, but also actually that's the only way we can get people to be so involved that they will want and they can afford to care about them.
Right.
Well, we should also… we also have to watch very carefully the terminology we use because, when we start talking about making people rich, we need to really explain what that means.
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When we go back 200 years and everybody's scrabbling around in the dirt, what that really means is that people's next meal is uncertain, and so is the sustainability of their shelter, and the opportunities for them and their kids are extraordinarily limited. So, when we're talking about wealth, we're not talking about, you know, cocaine and hookers in Vegas wealth. We're talking...
I was not talking about Alicia!
Yeah, well, people, the thing is, it brings up this specter of the 1920s spouts where capitalism is like a complete liberty, known as time off, and you know, it's hyper consumption wealth. But that's not what we're talking about at the low end of the world. We're talking about providing people with enough material security so that they can adopt a longer-term view, so that they can start to pay attention to what sort of planet their children and grandchildren might inhabit.
And so, there's both reliable provision of food and shelter, basic healthcare, hygienic availability, and opportunity for their children. And so it's not exactly wealth we're after here; it's getting people away from zero. Absolutely.
So, but also, you know, the people who are watching this, but also everyone who's really worried about we're going to become these libertines from the 1920s—do they live like that? No, they don't. They live nice lives where they actually have heating in the winter, and they have cooling in the summer, they have enough food, they don't have to worry about stuff, their kids go to school, they have a nice life, and they can go places and experience the world. Everyone obviously would like to have that same kind of life.
And so this is not about, you know, absurd consumption or anything; this is about actually being able to have a good life. Right. Well, it's also, as you pointed out, it's also one of the things that struck me when I was doing my original research on this front 15 years ago was the overwhelming evidence, and Marion Tupi's group has done a nice job of delineating that there's actually a positive relationship between population growth above a certain level of standard of living, let's say, and more abundance.
And what I've come to understand in the intervening time—and this is something that's very much worth taking apart too—is that we have this notion of natural resources, and that's always struck me as species say because natural means it's sort of there at hand. The only real natural resource I can think of is air because all you have to do is breathe, and it's there, but you still have to breathe, right?
So there's still some effort involved, okay? But when you start talking about even the next stage, which would be water—it's like, well, is water a natural resource? Well, fresh water—yeah, fresh water is a technological miracle fundamentally. It takes a lot of industrial infrastructure and innovation to get fresh water to people. And of course, oil—petroleum is barely a natural resource at all. I mean, we had petroleum forever; no one figured out what the hell to do with it until, what, about 1860 something like that?
And so now it's a natural resource, but that's only because smart people figured out how to use it. And so there's always this dynamic interplay between human ingenuity and governance structures and plenty. And one of the things I've really come to understand is that abundance depends on the integrity of the individual, the moral integrity of the individual, and the validity of the governance structures far more than it does on natural resources.
There's a zero-sum presumption in the natural resource discourse that's just absolutely wrong. I mean, back in the early 1900s, for instance, iron is a big thing. We used to have just iron if it fell down as a meteorite, right? Now, pretty much everything we know is built with iron and steel, and back in 1900, Carnegie, the rich guy worried immensely about the fact—because it’s also important for military use.
He worried that we were using up all the good iron and that there would be nothing left over for future generations, and how they were going to do and how they were going to defend themselves—all that kind of stuff. But what he failed to remember is that when, sure, we use up the easily accessible and high-quality iron ore, so we have to dig deeper and we have to use worse iron ore. But we also have a lot more technology that makes it a lot easier to dig and utilize poor iron ore and get it out cheaper.
That's what innovation means. So actually what's happened is that while we have used up the easily accessible iron ore, we have access to much cheaper, much more effective iron for all of humankind. And this is true for pretty much all resources.
Well, there was the famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb" for everyone who's listening. He's still beating the same damn drum. Ehrlich and the Club of Rome types back in the 60s prognosticated that by the year 2000, there'd be Mass starvation. And not only that, but the price of commodities would spike dramatically as scarcity inevitable scarcity kicked in. So Ehrlich and the biological types who think his way think in Malthusian terms.
And Malthus was an English thinker. He was a pastor, if I remember correctly, who posited that, all things being equal, natural populations would expand to the point where they started to overconsume the available local resources and then collapse. So that's like the yeast in a Petri dish model of humanity.
And there's a couple of problems with that. It rarely works that way in the natural world because of checks and balances that emerge in ecosystems. But even more importantly, the idea that we are best modeled as yeast in a zero-sum Petri dish is, let's call it a bit presumptuous. Alfred North Whitehead, a great thinker, pointed out that the reason human beings think is so that we can let our ideas die instead of us.
And so what that means is that what human beings have done is replace biological death—you die when you do the same old stupid thing too many times—so you have to either die, and then new organisms emerge that do something different, or you have to shift the way you do things, which is kind of a virtual death. And that's what thought and discourse allow—so we can stop doing stupid things and we can start doing more efficient things.
And there doesn't seem to be any real upper limit to that. And I think the evidence for that is—well, first of all, Ehrlich had that famous bet with Julian Simon. Simon, who is an economist who said, "All right, you can pick the basket of commodities and I’ll bet you"—this was in the 60s—"that by the year 2000 you can pick an arbitrary date that those commodities will be less expensive, not more. And that there won't be instances of mass starvation, unless they're politically produced."
And of course, Simon famously collected in the year 2000 because what happened? Even though Ehrlich picked the basket of commodities was that the average price of the commodities had gone down substantially. Ehrlich had to admit that he lost the bet, and that hasn't stopped happening. I mean, I'm old enough now so that I can remember when everyone was concerned about overpopulation. And you know, at that point in the 60s, we were still— human beings were still trying to get a grip on the fact that we were sort of now operating at a planetary level, and it wasn't obvious how much damage we might do.
You know, there was reason for debate at least. But now we have eight billion people rather than the four we had in the year 2000, and the doubt is quite clear that as population has increased and governance structures improved, especially since the Soviet Union collapsed, that all that's happened fundamentally is we have more brain power and everyone's far better off than they were, like, in all. We certainly have more technology.
And that's basically what makes it possible for us to be more people and be better off and possibly actually leave with less environmentally. Well, right, so one of the things we have to realize is there is a real environmental issue, but fundamentally—yes, but you're only going to fix them if you stop people from worrying about where's my next meal gonna come from? Are my kids actually going to be well educated?
So on, so it's about making sure that we actually pull people out of poverty, give it, put them on a path to prosperity, and then we will also fix a lot of the environmental problems. Well, that bromide—think globally, act locally—and that's a bromide that in some ways manifests itself on the motivational front for environmentalists.
It's like, well, there's some truth in that. What we're doing with this conceptual scheme is thinking globally. The global scheme is, well, how do we ameliorate absolute poverty? Well, the—what's so wonderful about that—and this is what struck me when I first reviewed the literature—was that if we concentrated on ameliorating absolute poverty instead of making the planet worse, we would make the planet better by the standards of the radical environmentalists themselves.
And I thought, oh, that's so cool! We could have our cake and eat it too and so could everybody else. And you think, well, that's too good to be true, and so then you do the microanalysis, which is what you've done, and you find out, well, not only could we do that, we should do it, and we could do it so cheaply that no one would even notice that we were doing it.
It would just mean we'd stop spending money on some of the—well, possibly not even that. We can keep spending it; we're spending stupidity. Yeah, yeah. So let's delve into the details.
So what we've done is basically look over all of the sustainable development goals and look at where here are the really good buys where can you actually do a lot of good for little money. And so we've come up with these 12 things. So these are 12 different teams of economists who've looked at each one of these—they're the specialists—the best people in their area to look at how much would this cost, how much good would it do?
And what would it mean that they’re the best people? How did you identify them? And how would you justify your claim that you have the right people working on this? So I think—the short answer is if you ask people in the area, are these some of the best people, they'd not be obviously a yes. Yes, they would all say, yeah, these are some of the best people! They're not the only people who could have done this, but they're some of the best people.
Okay, we're doing this; we're published widely in the period literature. They're all, you know, at the famous universities, and they are the ones who set the debate on how to do this. Okay, so there'd be a consensus on their expertise, even if they'd be replaceable to some degree. Oh, sure! And look, again, our point is not so I'm gonna, you know, tell you about these things and tell you for every dollar we spend you'll do $48 of good.
In this particular case, you’ll do this much good. Of course, it’s not likely to be 48 in real life. Yeah, it might be 50. Right, even! Yeah, we don't care all that much—it’s going to be a lot of good, but obviously, we try to make the best estimates that we can.
And so, for instance, let me just get started on one of these things. Let me take maternal and newborn health—so huge issue area. So every year about 300,000 moms die in childbirth; about 2.4 million kids die in their first 28 days on this planet. That's it! Now, it's come down dramatically; it used to be much, much worse. So, you know, maternal death used to be about one in 100 women who gave birth would die in childbirth.
This was even true in rich countries, you know, some 200 years ago. And actually, rich women had higher risks because they would go to a hospital, and there they would be treated by this filthy surgeon—by this doctor who just chopped off a leg somewhere else and then came in and helped with so—and there's—and this was one of the reasons why we caught on to—oh wait, this might actually be, you know, something about they need to wash their hands.
That kind of thing—that was Semmelweis, wasn't it? Yes! Who objected to his germ theory? Yes! Yes! And likewise, it used to be that almost a fifth of every child that was born died within the first 28 days. So now it's—now it’s yes 20, now it's—it's only 2%. So, a lot of human misery, incredible amount of human misery if you look back, which of course is why the world is much better place. But we can make it even better!
So every two minutes, so you know, just this little conversation we've had here—one mom has died, and nine children have died in the first 28 days of their lives. Yeah. Why don't we do something about it? It turns out that it's incredibly cheap to do something about how would you go about doing that?
Well, fundamentally, it's about a very simple thing, namely make sure that more women come into giving institutional birth. Now the doctors actually wash their hands, so that's a good idea! And that means especially when there are problems they will have an opportunity to get that problem fixed. That means that if you have preeclampsia or eclampsia, that basically means that you get very high blood pressure if you're a woman just around your birth.
You may very well go into seizure; you may actually die. And the doctors or the nurses there will be able to help you. So there's a whole range of things that the World Health Organization recommends. It's called basic emergency obstetric and newborn care; by friends, it's called BEMONC. And so we're saying we should have BEMONC and we should have family planning. It turns out that those two things by themselves could save an enormous amount both of kids and moms.
So what does that mean? Does that mean the provision of more hospitals, or does it mean the provision of special units that specialize in maternal care? So, it would cost—because you need to have more institutional facilities. These, these are not the hospitals that you're imagining—they're very, very cheap institutions, right?
They’re really basically buildings with some power and you need some nurses, not so many doctors. This is very, very low, low, fairly simple stuff. And then you need some very basic things—and I'll just give you one example that, you know, the World Health Organization has a whole list of these—but one thing, so when newborns come out in rich countries, about 90—sorry, about 85% of them will breathe right away, which of course is what they should be doing.
10 won't, so that's why you need to dunk them in the back and, you know, get them going, and then they will actually do something. Sorry, I should just—oh, that's very bad. No problem, no problem. So then, you need to dunk them, but the last 5%, they don't start breathing themselves—you actually need to have a mask over them and give them—a hand pump.
Well, in the poor world, in the rich world you have a more expensive right that does this, right? But the fundamental point is you actually need to have some intervention. If you have that hand pump, so only about 50% of all hospitals in the poor world have that. It costs $65 and it will save about 25 lives, you know, along with the cost of the nurse—this will possibly cost about $5 to save a human life.
But how many of those kids that don’t breathe well are suffering from anoxia and then are permanently crippled as well? There is a little risk, but it's actually a very small risk because you go from being fine to being crippled to die, right? And typically if you don't get—it's very—so you might want to fight corruption, but that's not a plan.
And so as that, yeah, and so we should also—so you set up teams of economists that would rank order the goals, and then you averaged across the teams. Which I also thought was a brilliant methodologically because you could argue that any given economist's analysis of both costs and benefits has a margin of error of some substantive amount.
Right, and because it's hard to assess and to forecast, but technically speaking, from us, the perspective of a social scientist, I would say that that's an unbeatable methodology even though it's still going to produce a somewhat problematic end because you zoom in on where there's multi-dimensional measure—multi-dimensionally measured consensus.
And at least in principle, you'd be ironing out the errors of any given team of economists, hopefully..Yes, again what we're not trying to do is make the truth of the world, but we're just trying to make a much better resolution of what it is that we can do, so we try to identify what are things that we can actually do, right? So the problem works and that we have good evidence for works at low costs with high benefits.
And so what we're essentially doing is we provide, if you will, a menu for the world. So, a menu typically comes with, you know, it has tells you what you're going to get, how much you're going to get—you know, a tiny pizza or a big pizza and how much will it cost? And then, of course, you can make those decisions.
So, economists, they're not going to tell you you should do this, right? But basically, we're telling you here is something that at very low cost can give you a lot of good food, how about that? So on the same way in the world order, we'll make a list of all the things of all the things you'd like to do where are really smart or that is really very effective policies that we know works that would help a lot of people at low costs. Why don't we do that before we do the stuff that'll cost a lot but help very few people?
Right? Well, we should talk a little bit about that as a fundamental presupposition too, because there's a kind of utilitarianism there, which is that all things considered, in the absence of other compelling reasons, you should do what you can in the most efficient way—well why? Well, because what efficiency means, because people might say, well, you know, some things are so important that it’s worth spending the money on. It's like, yeah, but there's many things that are important and unfortunately when you spend, given that resources are not precisely infinite, when you spend money in one place, that means you're not spending it in another place.
And so though if you believe that you have 12 things to do that are good or 169 things, you have to Value efficiency from the moral perspective because, in principle, efficiency is precisely that which allows you to address more than you would have otherwise been able to manage. And otherwise, what are you going to make an argument for inefficiency?
Which is so weird. So this is well—I like this because it plugins you zeroed us in your methodology. It also reduced a landscape of problems that was so diverse and disparate that there was no way anyone sensible could have possibly undertaken the enterprise.
And, then again, it's extraordinarily practical. And it also this, the other thing that I found very striking was that in comparison to the amount of money we're already spending on all sorts of things, the amounts that your teams have been recommending are really rounding errors in the total, let's say international or in the total world of international or national governance.
And so but then, it's also demoralizing in some sense because you understand that we could do the 12 most important and efficient things and do a lot of good for a lot of people, especially the absolutely poor, and we could do that without really even noticing it on the spending side. So that's incredibly optimistic, but the problem is you've got to ask yourself, given that that's the case, what the hell have we been doing?
And well, that's something we'll delve in today. So we're going to go through Bjorn's 12 suggested projects and talk about their cost but also about what they could do for people. And tell me if you think this is true. So imagine that there's a rule of thumb ethic that underlies the selection of these projects. We talked a little bit about efficiency, but I think the ethic is something like, well, if we could alleviate material poverty—absolute poverty—not relative poverty—but to start with at least absolute poverty, enough for people to eat, make sure they have access to hygienic facilities, make sure they're not inhaling indoor pollution to the point that they're dying, they're not starving, their kids have some opportunity, there's some option for them to expand their temporal horizon across decades instead of being focused on the necessity for the next meal because that makes them, um, impulsive, you might say, with regards to what they're willing to do on the environmental front.
And so, at minimum, you're trying to raise the standard of living at the very bottom end, and—and you won't do that in a way that allows you to do that—multiple ways, and that's kind of the overall ethical schema, I would say. I think it's what's come out of what we try to do, so we're basically saying, look, there's a lot of different things you can do in the world. As we know, there's 169 things, and you know there's literally thousands of different projects out there, we've tried to look at a lot of them and say what do we have evidence for and what are the costs?
And so we've tried to estimate—and this is an impossible task—so we reasonably assume that we've covered the whole area of saying where can you get an enormous amount of good for every dollar or shilling or rupee spent. And what we find is so we're looking at where can you spend a dollar and at least do $15 of good. This is a threshold that we've set, which basically means all the things we're talking about are incredibly good things. Imagine if you could give a dollar to this one project and you could do at least $15.
Well, we should also point out that's not an expense, then. No, no investment. Well, it is an expense in the sensor because if you've spent the dollar, you don’t get 59 right back, right? You get 15 of social benefits. Typically in the poor world, you also mentioned that this is mostly for the world’s poor people. So we’re looking at low and low-middle income countries— that’s, you know, World Bank estimate. So it basically means that you live with less than, say, $13 per day, which is not very much.
So this is almost, this is a little more than half the world’s population. So 4.1 billion people live in low and low-middle income countries—from Malawi, a very, very poor country to India to Bangladesh—that's actually a fairly rich lower-middle-income country. So what that tells you is this is where the best investments are because that’s where you can help the most people at very low cost—it will cost them the most in need.
Absolutely, it will cost a lot to make you a little better off, but it cost actually very, very little to make the world's poorest much better off. And so it also has this moral sense of that is how we should be prioritizing. Yeah.
And so that’s the proper payment for privilege, you know, I would say is once you have the economic wherewithal to be contemplating projects of the sort that we’re describing, you also have the moral requirement to do that in a manner that’s intelligent and also, you might say that would address the problems of the people in the most want first.
Yes, and one of the things that we find doing these projects is that it’s amazing, as you also pointed out that we spend so much time focusing on some of these other things like, you know, plastic in the oceans and climate change and many other things these are all worthy things, mind you and a lot of people will argue that we should do them because they will help the world’s poor. The problem is they’ll help them very ineffectively so for every dollar spent they will only help them in infinitesimal part whereas if we spend that dollar on some of these projects that we’re going to be talking about, you can have an enormous impact right here, right now.
So again, it’s not to say that we shouldn’t do all the other wonderful things, I’m simply making the argument we should probably do this first.
Yeah, well and so just to give you a sense of proportion well you have to get to scale this of the 12 solutions that we come up with they will in total cost— I’m giving you a rough estimate here because there’s different ways to measure it—will need about $35 billion a year in funding. And that funding could come from, you know, rich people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates. It could come from our development agencies USAID or GIZ or whatever; you know we’re spending $175 billion in development aid every year so surely we could afford $35 billion.
As you mentioned— a drop in the bucket, it really is a rounding error if we spent that amount of money over this decade we would every year save 4.2 million lives— this is 8% of everyone who dies in the world. We could avoid 8% of all death in this world of course; we won’t do that indefinitely because people have to die but we would postpone that.
That would be an incredible boon for a lot of people and a lot of societies and at the same time we would generate economic benefits worth $1.1 trillion just to give you a sense of proportion of what that means— that means we could almost make sure that every person in the poor part of the world, so the 4.1 billion people we talked about before could get about one dollar every day—almost one dollar every day each person.
So these projects that cost virtually nothing could save 8% of everyone who dies and get almost all people in the lower part of the world one dollar.
Okay, so I want to investigate something a little bit darker before we start our discussion about the projects per se. So one of the things that I see emerging on the chaotic and confused 169 goals front is an ethos that is also not precisely explicit but sort of lurks beneath the surface. And there are claims that go along with it—it might be that people are listening and think well this is all obvious, obviously we should spend money in the most efficient way, we should spend the least amount of money we have to spend, we should do it so that it does the most good.
But we should also understand that there are real resistances to this approach. And so one of the resistances that’s implicit and sometimes explicit is the notion that, well, first of all we’re playing a zero-sum game in the world. So if some people are rich other people have to be poor—there’s not enough for everybody—and then, which I don’t believe to be true at all, and economists generally don’t buy as an argument and then the next argument would be well, let’s say we could make poor people richer but that’s not sustainable because to support everybody in the world at the Western standard of living would take five Earths.
I’ve heard that figure bandied about and there are probably way too many people on the planet in any case—there should only be 500 million or a billion or maybe 2 billion if they lived you know in poverty—and so there’s this notion that the planet is truly finite in some fundamental sense, there’s definitely not enough for everyone and there’s no way that we can elevate their living standards of the poor because all that would mean is that we’re going to use up all the available resources faster.
And so what do you think about—so first of all on the serum some game—remember 200 years ago—we have good data for the last 200 years. 200 years ago almost every one of us were poor. We’re extremely poor. So we lived at less than what used to be called one dollar a day.
So we were—it was 95% of people; it was 90-95% of all people. This is a terrible world. There’s a few people who were you know kings and dukes and those kinds of people and then the rest of us were living in absolute poverty. We’ve pretty much eradicated most of that now; it’s only 10% that live less than a dollar a day.
I would really to 215 now, but you know, fundamentally we can absolutely have a world that’s much better that’s much richer and one that’s obviously much better for these people. Now people worry about—well sustainably live on this planet—but what you have to remember is this is not a question of whether we have the resources to—it absolutely—we have the resources. When you hear this five Earths, uh, that is a very, very bad comparison.
I get why they made it, but it basically assumes that because of climate change, almost entirely about climate change—as a real problem—because we emit CO2, you have to plant forests to soak up that extra amount of CO2. And if we all lived like Americans or Americans, then you would need five Earths.
What they're really saying is you would need five Earths of forest to plant—but that’s the most inefficient way to get rid of CO2. Much smarter way would be to put up, I don’t know, wind turbines and solar panels. You could also put up nuclear power plants. We could have very, very little footprint.
So actually when you do the math, it turns out that this is just hokum. Yes, there's a problem, so we will do well within one Earth even if we were much richer—all of us—even if there were more people. So, you know, about 10 billion people—yes, there are problems with having 10 billion people, but having 10 billion rich people also means we can deal with most of these problems if you're poor—that's the real pollution problem.
Right? Right! Or you pollute a lot. You both, you know, you cut down your forest to keep, you know, to slash burn so you can grow some food for your kids. You’ll have terrible indoor air pollution; you’ll typically have very inefficient production; you will have all kinds of bad things.
So what we really need—not just morally—to get people out of poverty and to get them to a good life but also actually that’s the only way we can get people to be so involved that they will want to—and they can afford to care about them. Right!
Well, we should also— we also have to watch very carefully the terminology we use because when we start talking about making people rich, we need to really explain what that means.
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When we go back 200 years and everybody's scrabbling around in the dirt, what that really means is that people's next meal is uncertain, and so is the sustainability of their shelter, and the opportunities for them and their kids are extraordinarily limited. So when we're talking about wealth, we're not talking about, you know, cocaine and hookers in Vegas wealth. We're talking...
I was not talking about Alicia!
Yeah, well, people the thing is it brings up this Specter of the 1920s spouts where capitalist who's like a complete Liberty known as time off and you know, it’s con.
It’s hyper consumption wealth but that's not what we're talking about at the low end of the world; we're talking about providing people with enough material security so that they can adopt a longer-term view so that they can start to pay attention to what sort of Planet their children and grandchildren might inhabit, and so that there are—there's both reliable provision of food and and and and uh shelter basic health care hygienic availability and opportunity for their children and so it's not exactly wealth we're after here, it's getting people away from zero.
Absolutely!
So but, but also I you know, the people who are watching this, but also everyone who's really worried about we're going to become these Libertines from the 1920s, do they live like that? No they don’t! They live nice lives where they actually have Heating in the winter and they have Cooling in the summer, they have enough food, they don’t have to worry about stuff, their kids go to school, they have a nice life, and they can go places and experience the world, everyone obviously would like to have that same kind of life.
And so this is not about you know absurd consumption or anything but this is about actually being able to have a good.
Right! Well it’s also as you pointed out it’s also one of the things that struck me when I was doing my original research on this front 15 years ago was the the overwhelming evidence and Marion Tupi’s group has done a nice job of delineating that that there’s actually a positive relationship between population growth above a certain level of standard of living, let’s say, and more abundance.
And what I’ve come to understand in the intervening time and this is something that’s very much worth taking apart too is that we we have this notion of natural resource and that’s always struck me as species say because natural means it’s sort of there at hand the only real natural resource I can think of is is air because all you have to do is breathe and it’s there but you still have to breathe right?
So there’s still some effort involved okay? But when you start talking about even the next stage which would be water it’s like well it’s water a natural resource? Well it’s fresh water? Yeah fresh water is a technological Miracle fundamentally it takes a lot of industrial infrastructure and Innovation to get fresh water to people and of course oil petroleum is barely a natural resource at all I mean we had petroleum forever no one figured out what the hell to do with it until what about 1860 something like that?
And so now it’s a natural resource but that’s only because smart people figured out how to use it and so there’s always this Dynamic interplay between human Ingenuity and governance structures and plenty and one of the things I’ve really come to understand is that abundance depends on the Integrity of the individual the moral Integrity of the individual and the validity of the governance structures far more than it does on natural resources.
There’s a zero-sum presumption in the natural resource discourse that’s just absolutely wrong. I mean back in the you know 19 uh early 1900s for instance iron is a big thing you know we used to have just iron if it fell down as a meteorite right now pretty much everything we know is built with Iron and Steel uh and and back in 1900 uh Carnegie the rich guy uh worried immensely about the fact because it’s also important for military use he worried that we were you know using up all the good iron and that there would be nothing left over for future generations and what were they going to do how are they going to defend themselves all that kind of stuff but what he failed to remember is that when uh sure we use up the easily accessible and high quality Iron Ore so we have to dig deeper and we have to use worse iron ore but we also have a lot more technology that makes it a lot easier to dig and utilize poor iron ore and get it out cheaper that’s what Innovation means so actually what’s happened is that while we have used up the easily accessible iron ore we have access to much much more much cheaper much more effectively and for all of humankind and this is true for pretty much all resources.
Well there was the famous bet but between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon Ehrlich wrote the population bomb for everyone who’s listening he’s still beating the same damn drum Ehrlich and his and the club of Rome types back in the 60s prognosticated that by the year 2000 there'd be Mass starvation and not only that that the price of Commodities would spike dramatically as scarcity inevitable scarcity kick in so Ehrlich and and the biological types who think his way think in malthusian terms and Malthus was a uh an English thinker he was a pastor if I remember correctly who posited that all things being equal natural populations would expand to the point where they started to over consume the available local resources and then collapse so that’s like the yeast in a Petri dish model of humanity and there’s a couple of problems with that is that it rarely works that way in the natural world because of checks and balances that emerge in ecosystems but even more importantly the idea that we are best modeled as yeast in a zero-sum Petri dish is let’s call it a bit presumptuous if that Alfred North Whitehead great thinker pointed out that the reason that human beings think is so that we can let our ideas die instead of us and so what that means is that what human beings have done is replace um biological death you die when you do the same old stupid thing too many times so you have to either die and then new organisms emerge that do something different or you have to shift the way you do things which is kind of a virtual death and that’s what thought and discourse allows is we can stop doing stupid things and we can start doing more efficient things and there doesn’t seem to be any real upper limit to that and I think the evidence for that is well first of all Ehrlich had that famous bet with Julian Simon Simons who is an economist who said alright you can pick the basket of commodities and all bet you this was in the 60s that by the year 2000 you can pick the arbitrary date that those Commodities will be less expensive not more and and that there won't be you know there won't be instances of mass starvation except unless they're politically produced and of course Simon famously collected in the year 2000 because what happened even though Ehrlich picked the basket of Commodities was that the average price of the Commodities had gone down like so substantially the Derek had to admit that he lost the bet and that hasn't stopped happening you know I mean I'm old enough now so that I can remember when everyone was concerned about overpopulation and you know at that point in the 60s we were still human beings were still trying to get a grip on the fact that we were sort of now operating at a planetary level and it wasn't obvious how much damage we might do you know there was reason for debate at least but now we have eight billion people rather than the four we had in the year 2000 and the doubt is quite clear that as population has increased and governance structures improved especially since the the Soviet Union collapsed that all that’s happened fundamentally is we have more brain power and everyone’s far better off than they were like in all we certainly have more technology and that’s that’s basically what makes it possible for us to be more people and be better off and possibly actually leave with less environmentally well right so one of the things we have to realize is there there is a real environmental issue but fundamentally yes but you’re only going to fix them if you stop people from worrying about where where's my next meal gonna come from are my kids actually going to be well educated?
So on, so it's about making sure that we actually pull people out of poverty and put them on a path to prosperity and then we will also fix a lot of the environmental problems well that bromide think globally act locally and that that’s a bromide that in some ways manifests itself on the motivational front for environmentalists it's like well there’s some truth in that is what we’re doing with this conceptual scheme is thinking globally the global scheme is well how do we ameliorate absolute poverty well the what’s so wonderful about that and this is what struck me when I first reviewed the literature was that if we concentrated on ameliorating absolute poverty instead of making the planet worse we would make the planet better by the standards of the radical environmentalists themselves and I thought oh that’s so cool we could have our cake and eat it too and so could everybody else and you think well that’s too good to be true and so then you do the microanalysis which is what you’ve done and you find out well not only could we do that we should do it and we could do it so cheaply that no one would even notice that we were doing it it would just mean we’d stop spending money on some of the well possibly not even that we can keep spending it we’re spending stupidity yeah so let’s delve into the details so so what we’ve done is basically look over all of the sustainable development goals and look at where here are the really good buys where can you actually do a lot of good for little money and so we’ve come up with these 12 things so these are 12 different teams of economists who’ve looked at each one of these they’re the specialists the best people in their area to look at how much would this cost how much good would it do and what would it mean they’re the best people how did you identify them and how would you justify your claim that you have the right people working on this so I think so the short answer is if you ask people in the area are these some of the best people they’re not obviously yes yes they would all say yeah these are some of the best people they’re not the only people who could have done this but they’re some of the best people yeah okay we’re doing this we’re published widely in the period literature they’re all you know at the famous universities and they are the ones who set the debate on how to do this okay so there’d be a consensus on their expertise even if they’d be replaceable to some degree oh sure and and look again our point is not so I’m gonna you know tell you about these things and tell you for every dollar we spend you’ll do 48 dollars of good in in this particular case you’ll do this much good of course it it’s not likely to be 48 in real life yeah it might be 50 right even yeah we don’t care all that much it’s going to be a lot of good but obviously we try to make the best estimates that we can and and so for instance so let me just get started on one of these things uh so let me take maternal and newborn health uh so huge issue area so every year uh about 300,000 moms die in childbirth about 2.4 million kids die in their first 28 days on on this planet and that’s it now it’s come down dramatically it used to be much much worse so uh you know maternal death uh used to be about uh one in uh one of 100 uh women who gave birth would die in childbirth uh this was even true in in rich countries you know some 200 years ago and actually uh uh uh uh rich women had higher risk because they would go to a hospital and there they would be treated by this filthy surgeon by this doctor who just chopped off a leg somewhere else and then came in and helped with so and there’s something almost comical about the total effect of that because we’re promising everything to everyone all the time but of course we’re actually not delivering on this and so when we try to say is look if we can’t do it all what should we do first right what are the smartest so there’s some things I worked on one of the relatively early documents in this sustainable development goal that was the secretary’s General’s report on sustainable economic development that was about 15 years ago and one of the things I found very peculiar about it was actually what tilted me over towards your work eventually was that there were 200 goals and I thought that’s a lot of goals it’s like at some point you have so many goals that really what you’re saying is we’re going to do everything at once and that’s a stupid plan because this any number any one of the goals is actually quite difficult to attain you have to build a structure and systems that will move towards the goal and you have to put the spending in place and you have to evaluate the outcome it’s actually very difficult you have to build the local apparatuses and so I ask the powers that be why the hell there were 200 goals and their answer was well each of the priorities has a constituency somewhere spread across countries or in a given country and we don’t want to offend anyone by rank ordering our priorities.
And I thought well that’s all well and good plus the upside of that from a political perspective is that you get all the moral cachet of being concerned about everything that you would be concerned about if you were good without any of the responsibility for actually doing any of the difficult work and so you can go to Corp 26 or whatever the hell it is and posture on the world stage about your commitment to these wonderful goals and appeal to 200 different constituents and walk away while having agreed to spend a tremendous amount of money stupidly but shining at least in your own eyes and in the eyes of the press so then I was looking around I thought well there must be someone somewhere sensible enough to understand that 200 goals is absurd and the only group that I could really find that had a method for rank ordering priorities was your team so do you want to explain exactly how you do that and then we can progress with our discussion but what you think things should be done?
Yeah so so you’re absolutely right look it’s much easier for politicians to just promise everything to everyone because then they just seem like good guys and they don’t actually make any decisions of course they do in reality because every year you have a budget and you don’t have infinite resources on your budget so in your budget you actually show what it is that you really care for and so it ends up being a few things that you focus on but often without much concern about efficiency so what we’re trying to bring to the table is in a sense and that’s what economists can do we’re basically helping and I should just say I’m a pretend economist I’m actually a political scientist but I work with a lot of really really smart economists and they look at how much will it cost and how much good will it do remember some things are very desirable but really really hard to do so you know for instance getting rid of corruption in general I’ll actually tell you we do have one good solution but in general corruption’s a huge problem it cost about a trillion dollars a year or more for the world but we don’t know how to get rid of it it’s really hard to do because the systems that are needed to get rid of corruption are exactly the ones that are corrupt right so it’s really hard to this has been a real problem as the former Soviet Union countries have tried to retool because even if you import Western structures nobody trusts them because the corruption is so unbelievably widespread and the problem with Corruption of course is that once it’s instantiated it manifests itself at every level of society and so that’s a good example of a low resolution concept well there’s Corruptions like yeah but now you’ve said very little by saying that because the devil in that situation is definitely in the details and so you might want to fight corruption but that’s not a plan.
And so yeah and so we should also so you set up teams of economists that would rank order the goals and then you averaged across the teams which I also thought was brilliant methodologically because you could argue that any given economist’s analysis of both costs and benefits is has a margin of error of some substantive amount right and because it’s hard to assess and to forecast but technically speaking from us the perspective of a social scientist I would say that’s an unbeatable methodology even though it’s still going to produce a somewhat problematic end because you you you zoom in on where there’s multi-dimensional measure multi-dimensionally measured consensus and at least in principle you’d be ironing out the errors of Any Given team of economists hopefully yes again what we’re not trying to do you make the truth of the world but we’re just trying to make a much better resolution of what it is that we can do so we try to identify what are things that we can actually do right so their problem works.
Yeah and that we have good evidence for works at low cost with high benefits and so what we’re essentially doing is we provide if you will a menu for the world so we a menu typically comes with you know it has tells you what you’re going to get how much you’re going to get you know a tiny pizza or a big pizza and how much will it cost and then of course you can make those decisions so economists they’re not going to tell you you should do this right but basically we’re telling you here is something that at very low cost can give you a lot of good food how about that so on the same way in the world order we’ll make a list of all the things of all the things you’d like to do where are really smart or that is really very effective policies that we know works that would help a lot of people at low cost why don’t we do that before we do the stuff that’ll cost a lot but help very few people right right?
Well we should we should talk a little bit about that as a fundamental presupposition too because there’s a kind of utilitarianism there which is that all things considered in the absence of other compelling reasons you should do what you can the most efficient way well why well because what efficiency means because people might say well you know some things are so important that it’s worth spending the money on it’s like yeah but there’s many things that are important and unfortunately when you spend given that resources are not precisely infinite when you spend money in one place that means you’re not spending it in another place and so though if you believe that you have 12 things to do that are good or or 169 things you have to Value efficiency from the moral perspective because in principle efficiency is precisely that which allows you to address more than you would have otherwise been able to manage and otherwise what are you going to make an argument for inefficiency which is so it’s weird yeah yeah so so this is well I like this because it it’s zeroed us in your methodology it also reduced a landscape of problems that was so diverse and and disparate that there was no way anyone sensible could have possibly undertaken the Enterprise and then it’s extraordinarily practical and so and it also this the other thing that I found very striking was that in comparison to the amount of money we’re already spending on all sorts of things the amounts that your teams have been recommending are really rounding errors in the in the total let’s say International in in the total world of international or national governance and so but then it’s also demoralizing in some sense because you understand that we could do the 12 most important and efficient things and do a lot of good for a lot of people especially the absolutely poor and we could do that without really even noticing it.
Yeah yeah on the spending side so that’s incredibly optimistic but the problem is is that you gotta ask yourself given that that’s the case what the hell have we been doing and well that’s something we’ll delve in today so we’re going to go through Bjorn’s 12 suggested projects and talk about their cost but also about what they could do for people and I tell me