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  • Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish author and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a project based US think tank

  • where prominent economists are seeking to establish priorities for advancing global welfare.

  • He's the former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen.

  • Bjorn became known internationally for his book 'The Skeptical Environmentalist'

  • in 2001 and 'How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place,'

  • 'Cool It' in 2007, which is also a movie and lately, published in 2018

  • 'Prioritizing Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of The UN's Sustainable Development Goals,'

  • among many other works and books. And so, I'm hoping we'll have a very productive conversation today

  • and welcome to this

  • discussion.

  • Bjorn: Thanks a lot Jordan.

  • Jordan: All right, so why don't you just start by letting people know what you've been up to?

  • Over the last, let's say, two decades

  • I know that's a very broad question. I've been interested in talking to you because I

  • read a number of your books a few years ago, and I was interested in their economic

  • analysis as a way of determining which which

  • crises, let's say, or which potential crises are real and, also, how they might be managed most intelligently.

  • Bjorn: Thanks a lot Jordan and so

  • fundamentally, what I try to do is to say and this really is very very obvious

  • 'We only have a limited amount of resources,

  • so let's make sure we focus those resources on the places where we can help the most. Where we can do the most good.'

  • Remember, what is it that we mostly focus on in the world?

  • It's very often the things that get the headlines, the things that people talk about and very often that ends up being

  • the things that have the cutest animals or the most crying babies or the groups with the best PR and

  • surely that's not the right way to prioritize. The right way should be to look at : If I spend a Dollar or a Peso or

  • Rupee here

  • Will I do more good than if I spent that same Dollar or Rupee or Peso over here?

  • So basically asking across all the different areas you can spend

  • resources, where do I help the most. Now, obviously, that's a huge

  • conversation in-and-of itself because it's not easy to just determine that but the basic idea is simply to say

  • Let's focus on the places where you can do the most good

  • Rather than the places where it makes us feel the best about ourselves. So that's really what I've been trying to do for

  • for two decades and you know

  • Prioritizing the world and trying to say 'Where should you spend money?' of course makes the the projects that we say

  • 'These are the really really great interventions!'

  • They all love us and think we're like the best things since sliced bread

  • but of course the projects of the policies that are not so effective, they think we're terrible so it creates a lot of

  • antagonism and makes a lot of people annoyed and interested, but I think it's crucial to ask these questions.

  • Jordan: Well, one question would be 'What's the alternative?'

  • You know like when I was looking at the UN Development Goals, for example, if I remember correctly

  • there was something approximating 200 of them and this was a few years ago

  • I worked on a UN panel and I thought 'Well, the problem with 200 goals is that you can't have 200'

  • They're not goals if there's 200 of them because you absolutely have to prioritize in order to move forward assuming some limitation on resources

  • Which is exactly what you just described and so then then the question would become

  • 'Well, how do you calculate benefit?' And that's a really difficult problem,

  • which is, I think, why it wasn't addressed with the mishmash of 200 goals.

  • Apart from the fact that you're going to offend people by rank ordering their priorities.

  • So why don't you tell people a little bit about the methods that you used because I think there are definitely interesting.

  • Bjorn: So, you're absolutely right. The sustainable development goals:

  • We actually worked with the UN back in 2015 when they were doing this. It was about

  • 60 to 90 (it was very unclear) UN ambassadors.

  • I actually met with a quarter of them

  • in New York and talked to each one of them and said 'Shouldn't we try to, you know,

  • focus on the targets that would do the very most good?' Now, of course, each one of them said 'Yes' individually,

  • but the the the combined effort of all the UN ambassadors was, of course, not to actually do the best goals

  • It was to get everybody's goals in there.

  • So, you know, the Norwegians had three ideas and the Brazilians at four and everybody else had you know

  • three or four that they want in there. That's why we ended up with a hundred and sixty nine targets

  • which of course simply means she promised everything to everyone everywhere and that means a lot of people are going to be very disappointed when

  • 2030 rolls around and we haven't actually dealt with all the things that we promised.

  • Jordan: Right, so what happens there

  • is that the people who are doing that, including everyone on the list,

  • maximize short-term emotional well-being of the people who had been doing the consultation at the cost of medium to long term progress.

  • But then, again,

  • they're not going to be around in 2030, in all possibility, to suffer the consequences of that.

  • Bjorn: Or, at least, yeah

  • or at least they're not nobody's gonna see that we fail to do as much good as we possibly

  • could because we will have done a little bit of good everywhere. But, doing a little good everywhere

  • It is not nearly as good as doing an enormous amount of good in the places where you can view the very most good with

  • extra resources.

  • Remember we're estimating

  • the total cost of the SDGs is somewhere in the range of two and a half trillion dollars and

  • the actual amounts available is about a hundred and forty billion dollars.

  • So we literally have five percent of what we're promising

  • So we're promising the world and then we say:

  • 'Hey, here's a small amount of money and let's spread it thinly so everybody gets a little bit of it'

  • Jordan: Okay,

  • so that's partly where you derive your premise that we're dealing with limited resources is that you're actually using a real number and

  • that the number you're using is what's actually available and when you wrote 'How to Spend $75 billion'

  • you basically took half of what was available.

  • Bjorn: That yes, I was about much much earlier on and that was mostly sort of a oh, it's a fun idea to say:

  • 'How would you spend a specific amount?' Yes, and that was half

  • So we weren't saying we should spend all of it in the exact way that we were talking about.

  • Jordan: Okay, so to agree with you

  • So to agree with you, people have to agree that

  • Everything can't be done for everyone all at once at infinite expense and that it's useful

  • practically and and also

  • Even in a utopian sense in the desirable sense to rank order so that the obvious

  • Money that's available the money that's genuine available can targeted best.

  • And so then the next question would be: 'How do you go about that in the least

  • controversial and most empirically sound manner? (To do the rank ordering)

  • Bjorn: So, we use

  • cost-benefit analysis

  • which is a very well-established economic tool that tries to say: 'All right, for each of the proposals that you come up with -

  • How much will that proposal cost?' Now, remember, this is not just economics. Most of the cost will be money

  • but for instance if you want to immunize

  • small children

  • You also have to ask the mothers to spend perhaps a day to go to the place where their kids will be immunized.

  • That'll, both, cost them labor (they can't do labor that day), maybe they will have transportation costs, they'll have food costs

  • There'll be extra other cost

  • So we try to add all of those costs up and say: 'So, what's the total cost of this project?'

  • Then we look at all the benefits and remember the benefits of both economic

  • Yes

  • But they're also social, for instance kids not dying or kids not being sick and they're often also environmental.

  • So we tried to take all of those benefits of both the economic the environmental and social benefits.

  • Add them all up into one number that is

  • denominated in Dollars or Rupees or whatever your currency is and then you can say: 'Well, for this many Dollars

  • you can do this much good' and that means you can also say: 'For every dollar spent you can do this much good."

  • Obviously I'm simplifying this but in a sense what it means is if you do it

  • Right and a lot of economists spend a lot of time trying to make this right if you have all the same

  • parameters across all these different areas

  • It actually means you can start comparing

  • Different interventions across all the different areas and say: 'Where do you get the biggest bang for your buck?'

  • And of course that is what it matters if you're actually going to do good so we did and this is not good

  • please don't buy this book because this is this is a very long and

  • Academic book but we did this long and academic book with with more than 50 of the world's top economists

  • Looking across all these different areas

  • but the beauty is you can actually

  • Put it in just one chart and I'm going to show you that and then we'll also put it up there on your website

  • So this is the ones

  • One-page chart that has all the targets here and for each of the targets

  • There's an analysis that says: 'How much will this cost? How much good will it do?' and then it shows 'For every dollar spent..How much good will it do?'

  • If it's a long line, it'll do a lot of dollars of good if it's a short line not so much.

  • So it really becomes this very simple menu for the world to say: 'Where can you spend your resources?'

  • And of course this doesn't mean you know, just like when you go into a restaurant you get a menu

  • It doesn't mean you buy the cheapest thing or the most nutritious and maybe you're in the mood for you know

  • an unhealthy cake

  • But it's incredibly important to know what is the cost and what's the benefit and knowing this

  • Makes it a lot more

  • likely that the world is going to focus itself on some of the really long bars where it can do a lot of good for

  • Every dollar or your Peso spent.

  • Jordan: Ok. So now

  • if I was thinking about critiquing this, lets say, from a social science and/or

  • Political perspective the first thing that I would object is

  • Well, how do you... how is it that you know that your calculation of the costs and the benefits are

  • accurate and how do you know that they're

  • essentially as free as possible of any undue political bias

  • So because your critics, no doubt, will object, as perhaps they should, that there will be

  • Let's call them implicit biases even though I'm not a fan of that idea in some sense

  • There's going to be underlying presuppositions that weight the manner in which the economic

  • Calculations are made and then of course, you also have to buy the idea that the cost-benefit analysis approach is actually valid

  • So, can you tell me what you guys did to forestall such or to take such criticisms into account?

  • Bjorn: Sure, and so first of all, we don't just ask one team of economists

  • We also have other teams

  • critiquing those

  • economists and we exactly try to make sure that there's sort of critiques from both sides if you will so we know that this is

  • not just an ideologically driven number, but it's actually an empirically pretty clear number that says for instance if you focus on on

  • Vaccinations you're actually going to do and what we find is you're going to do $60 a social good for every dollar you spend

  • Now you could argue: 'Well, what would be sort of the

  • Ideological spin you could put on that?' Well one thing is to say: 'Well, did you measure all humans as equal?'

  • Yes

  • we actually did. And of course, you could argue from an economic point the same point that they're not. I think very few people would

  • want to do that but what we do is across all these areas, all people are ranked as

  • equally important. That is: equally valuable, and that's obviously political gonna consideration

  • But I think one if we're looking across the world, that is the right one

  • If anything that probably means that most rich country people are evaluated way too little compared to what they're actually willing to do themselves

  • But this means that we actually get the weighting right in the sense of saying: 'Where are you gonna spend extra money if your goal

  • is to help the most in the world?'

  • Jordan: Right. Okay, so you're used an approach

  • that was basically I would say a solid measurement approach

  • from the theoretical perspective because the idea would be to have

  • multiple measures of the same phenomenon or set of phenomena and to see where they

  • dovetail

  • So that would be an issue of reliability

  • so if you have multiple teams of economists and

  • They all converge on something that approximates an agreement and you look at a diverse range of opinions

  • Then you can be reasonably certain that you've converged on something that's real. And then you also have an element of peer review in there

  • Bjorn: Yes

  • Jordan: another way of altering.. Go ahead

  • Bjorn: and exactly both of these are obviously important to make sure as you say you get the

  • Reliability and you actually get something that resembles somewhat of a truth

  • But the real point here is of course in some way. We just take a step back

  • This is not a question about getting the absolute numbers. Exactly. Right. I mean that would be wonderful if we could do that

  • but when I just told you that

  • You know, vaccination - every dollar you spend will give you sixty dollars back in value

  • It'd be very very unlikely that that's the right number but it's much much more about getting the order-of-magnitude right.

  • Is it 60 or is it six or is it six hundred dollars you get back? Because really, the point here is to

  • compare across all these other things that you could also spent that money on and there we have a much greater

  • Sort of reliability because we're pretty sure that even if you change the assumptions very much

  • You will still get much of the same kind of picture

  • You won't get exactly the same picture

  • But you'll very much get the same sort of picture which indicates that there's a few targets that will do an amazing amount of good

  • And there's a lot of targets they'll just do a little good and so, again, we try to say: 'Do the amazing

  • targets first'

  • Jordan: So the more critical thing for you guys to get right is the rank ordering and not the absolute magnitude

  • so as long as your method is

  • Stable across all the different domains. Then the rank ordering should be relatively stable. Now, did you get a Pareto distribution with regards to

  • positive impact of investment? Like, is there a handful of

  • Interventions that that are clearly head and shoulders above the rest in terms of generating positive economic outcome?

  • And what proportion of the total number of say 170 goals like if you did if you accomplished 10 percent of the

  • 170 goals how much of the economic bang for your buck would you would you accrue?

  • Bjorn: I should actually just say I didn't plant that question. That's wonderful because that's exactly what we tried to do

  • so if you do across all these areas every dollar spent will do about

  • $7 good if you just did it across all of them equally

  • Which is probably unreasonable to assume but it's not unreasonable and sort of first order approximation

  • If you spend it on the best

  • 19 targets you would do

  • $32 of good

  • So more than four times more good

  • so you can simply spend you're the same dollar and do more than four times more good than you would do if you just

  • scattershot it across all areas

  • and again

  • what you also have to remember is a lot of the things that we're looking at which are really really

  • effective are also things that are much easier to do so two of the best things that we point out is actually

  • contraception, so family planning for women

  • Why? Because if you do that (there's about 13% of women that still don't have access to contraception)

  • And if they got that

  • access they would be able to better space their kids so we know that that means that you can actually have your kids when you're

  • Ready to have them that means you put more effort and investment into your kids. So they'll grow up better. They'll be fed better

  • They'll have a greater chance of surviving but they'll also become more productive in the long run

  • It also means a fewer of those kids are going to die. Fewer moms are going to die

  • so we actually estimate you see about

  • 600,000 fewer kids die and

  • You would get a demographic dividend. That is basically because you have slightly fewer kids. You can invest more in them.

  • You get better return on every kid. You have slightly higher growth rates.

  • And so we estimate for every dollar you spend on family planning

  • You will do a hundred and twenty dollars of social good. The other great thing is

  • Invest in free trade. Free trade is something that we've sort of forgotten

  • We actually have the last big free trade discussion from DOHA back in 1999

  • That's basically, you know, stop being a concern obviously with Trump

  • But also with many other people who've sort of given up on free trade yet

  • we have to remember that one of the basic things that have made us wealthy is

  • the fact that we trade with each other. You do what you're good at and I do what I'm good at and that means when

  • we exchange we actually all get better off. There's some issues there...

  • Jordan: So, maybe you could tell people in some detail what that would mean practically like, what are the sorts of barriers that you guys

  • determined were

  • particularly troublesome that need to be addressed

  • Bjorn: So we actually estimated what would it take to get a reasonably successful DOHA round, which would not be free trade

  • But it would be freer trade

  • So it would simply be reduced tariffs, make it easier for everyone to trade across the world

  • Especially from the developing world to the developed world and one of the outcomes we found was not only that on average

  • every person in the world would be about... sorry in the developing world would be about

  • $1,000 richer per person per year in 2030

  • So by the end of these sustainable development goals, we would lift a hundred and forty five million people out of poverty

  • but we would simply make everyone better off because if

  • You're in a poor country you would be able to sell the things that you do best a little easier a little cheaper

  • and hence be able to market more of it and you'd be able to buy back more from other developed countries and that would make

  • Everyone better off. So again, this is not this is not rocket science. I mean, if you look at China for instance

  • China over the last 30 years lifted what.. 680 million people out of poverty

  • Very largely driven by the fact that they could trade with the rest of the world. Imagine if we could make that happen for

  • Sub-saharan Africa if we could make that happen more for Latin America

  • So again, it's more about realizing that for very little money

  • Some of these things can do an amazing amount of good and we tend to forget because there's no focus on these issues

  • We don't think about

  • family planning or

  • free trade or indeed

  • vaccinations we think about all kinds of other things like

  • plastic waste or global warming or many other things that have a lot of sort of

  • Attention from celebrities and get in the newspaper and that's not because there are no problems

  • but it's about getting a sense of what's the magnitude of how much good we can do with little money and

  • Jordan: So, let's talk about global warming because okay, so I've talked to lots of people about your work and you know

  • you obviously have a lot of admirers and you have a lot of detractors and I've been listening to the detractors because I

  • Believed after I had reviewed the UN Development Goals

  • I had come to the same

  • conclusion that you had come to before I knew what you had done which was: 'These things need to be ranked ordered because otherwise it's

  • It's not a plan. It's not a strategy'

  • and

  • so then there has to be some mechanism for rank ordering them and I ran across your work and I thought: 'Well, that seems to

  • be exactly right to me' from an agnostic perspective lets say.

  • It's an interesting idea because what you have to start with is the willingness to be agnostic about what the worst

  • Problems are and and well the worst and most solvable problems

  • Let's say at the same time you have to be agnostic about that and I actually think that that's part of the reason

  • Why what you do bothers so many people because they have an a priori commitment to what constitutes the most salient

  • catastrophe and that's clearly, at the moment, the idea that

  • climate change

  • Or global warming depending on how you want to phrase it, constitutes such an immediate and pressing threat of

  • overwhelming economic magnitude that a sacrifice of any amount is worth some probability of forestalling that and

  • so

  • One of the things that's striking about your list and

  • maybe what I should do is have you tell us what the top seven or eight are just so that we have some sense of

  • What the priorities are because one of the things I noticed was that

  • They don't tend to include measures that are designed to forestall global warming

  • Bjorn: Yeah, so we actually

  • We had two Nobel laureates

  • Look over all of this evidence and set priorities and come out with

  • 19 targets that they focused on and actually one of them was

  • 'Stop fossil fuel subsidies' which is obviously a stupid idea in so many different ways

  • Remember, this is most in developing countries where it's very often done to

  • you know basically pacify the population a little bit like you make

  • subsidies for bread or other things

  • But of course the idea of subsidizing fossil fuels like Venezuela has done and Indonesia has done

  • Is basically a way of subsidizing fairly wealthy people to drive their car that you have to have a car in order to enjoy this

  • And drive it more and actually create more congestion more air pollution and with very few benefits

  • So clearly what you should be doing is scrap those subsidies for fossil fuels not only because they lead to more

  • Air pollution and co2 emissions but also because they're just terribly bad use of public resources that could have been spent on

  • education or health or other places

  • They could have done a lot more good

  • But just to give you a sense of some of the other ones that we were talking about

  • Expanded immunization as we talked about that's an incredibly good way. We know that we're right now cut child mortality

  • That is undefined mortality from our 12 million kids dying every year in 1990 to about 6 million

  • That's a fantastic achievement. Of course six million is still a mind-boggling number

  • That's way way too large and we actually know that by investing about a billion dollars

  • We could save a million kids every year but you you've got to almost say that again for a billion dollars

  • You could save a million kids lives every year. Why the hell is that not one of our top priorities?

  • That's also why we show for every dollar spent. You actually do $60 worth of good. Another incredible

  • investment is in nutrition.

  • So, you know everybody kind of knows that it's

  • It's not right that people are starving and we know that we could actually feed everyone. The main reason why people are still starving

  • Is because they don't have enough money. It's not because we can't produce it

  • so it's because they're poor and they don't actually have the demand capacity but the real tragedy of

  • Malnutrition is that if you get it when you're really small so from zero to two years of age

  • Your brain develops less and that means when you get into school

  • You're actually less able to learn and that stays with you for your entire life

  • You stay less long in school. You learn less and you come out and you actually are not very productive

  • We know this now

  • We've had this as a theoretical argument for a long time

  • But researchers and some of the researchers that we work with have now actually proven this because they went back to an old study

  • done in Guatemala in the late 1960s

  • Where researchers went to two small villages in rural Guatemala and gave the kids there

  • So the really small zero to two-year-olds good food

  • And then they took two other rural villages nearby and gave the kids essentially sugar water

  • Of course you couldn't do this today, but the brilliant thing about this is our researchers

  • then re-found these kids they're now in their late 30s/early 40s and

  • You could see what had happened and it was exactly what the theory predicted if you had gotten good food

  • You stayed longer in school. You'll learn more every year in school

  • And so when you came out you were much more productive and one of the ways we measure that is you had higher incomes.

  • If you avoid it being stunted you had 60% higher income. That's a phenomenal outcome

  • so again spend money for instance on

  • malnutrition by getting good food and also research and development into better yielding varieties and you

  • Can do an incredible amount of good for every dollar we estimate 35 dollars or there abouts.

  • Jordan: Right and so what you're doing is for stalling cognitive deterioration

  • In in the first two years and because cognitive ability is a great predictor of long-term success

  • Then you're producing people who are much more likely to be

  • economically

  • Productive for themselves and for other people, right?

  • Bjorn: And the crucial bit is it's also for other people, right? If you're good. You're likely to make other people better too.

  • Jordan: Right oh yes, that's an absolutely crucial issue. So so yeah, so so it's quite striking

  • It was quite striking to me when I came across your work to find out to what degree it was focused on targeting

  • Children's health in some fundamental sense in the developing world that seems to be I mean if you had to put it in a nutshell

  • correct me if I'm wrong that seemed to be where are you guys focused or where your focus took you and

  • Bjorn: With and I just say because there's also some other very low-hanging fruit for instance what you're seeing increasingly across the world

  • is that more more people dying not of infectious diseases because we've actually

  • Tackled many of those but they died from old age diseases like cancer and heart disease. Those are by far the biggest

  • issues

  • Cancer it turns out to be fairly costly to deal with but heart disease

  • We've actually now figured out pretty much how to deal with not to the extent that we will live forever

  • but that we can make people live much longer and that's basically by giving very cheap and

  • off-patent heart

  • medication so we give this a lot of middle aged people in the developed world and it's very very cheap to also do in the

  • Developing world so we can save about three years of life for these

  • Elderly people both men and women and it costs peanuts and you can basically make all lives longer

  • And so that's one of the places where we're also show there's a huge benefit

  • We also emphasize and this is again, one of the depressing things that we should be focusing a lot more on

  • tuberculosis tuberculosis now the world's leading infectious disease killer

  • It's no longer HIV AIDS that's still a good idea to invest in but it's actually an even better idea to invest in tuberculosis

  • But again because it's an old disease

  • It's it's been with us for hundreds of years and we kind of learned how to fix it a hundred years ago

  • It's not an issue in the developed world

  • So most people don't want to hear about it. Don't care about it

  • but it's a crucial killer that kills 1.4 million people every year in the developing world and we have the means to

  • Eradicate pretty much all of those deaths very very cheaply

  • So again, that's one of the places where we say: 'Spend money here because you can do an amazing amount of good'

  • So I think we're just simply looking for where are the really good deals

  • Okay, if you want to do something about global warming as you then

  • You should ask yourself. Well, how are we going to fix it? So there's two things to global warming one is as you mentioned

  • there's a sense in which

  • people believe it's the

  • overwhelming danger that's gonna undermine the entirety of human civilization and

  • Just like pretty much all other problems. That's just not true. This is a problem

  • It's not the end of the world if you look at the economics that's been done

  • The Nobel Prize was just awarded in climate economics to William Nordhaus

  • This year and he's been a guy working almost three decades on

  • What are the cost and the benefits of climate action and he finds the cost of climate

  • so climate change is about.. and he's backed up by a lot of other economists is

  • somewhere between two and four percent of GDP by the end of the century, so

  • Remember by then will be say four or five times richer

  • So we'll be four hundred five percent as rich as we are now

  • But we will see a drop in our incomes worth

  • About two to four percent less than we would otherwise have had.

  • That's a problem

  • But it's by no means the end of the world and that's the first thing you sort of need to recognize

  • This is a problem

  • It's not the end of the world because if you think you're it's the end of the world as you rightly pointed out

  • Then you're willing to throw everything and the kitchen sink at it

  • But if it's a problem you will act exactly like what I think we should do with all problems say all right

  • There's a lot of problems. Let's ask. Where can we spend a dollar and fix most of that problem?

  • And unfortunately, that's not climate change

  • It's actually really really hard to just change a tiny bit of climate change with a lot of money and that's why we find that

  • Most of the interventions that you do for climate change turns out to be fairly poor. They're not necessarily bad investments

  • Some of them are but even you know for instance adaptation or or get more energy for poor countries

  • Give you sort of you know, two five dollars back in the dollar

  • Which is nice but in the big scheme of things, they're much much better places

  • You can spend your resources on.

  • Jordan: So lets look at this

  • Well, because I'm really curious about this, eh, because I can't see any a priori problems with your method

  • It seems to me to make a lot of sense

  • And if your goal is to do the most amount of good in the shortest period of time with the least amount of resources

  • Which seems like a pretty damn good goal

  • Then and to be realistic about what's attainable then I can't see that anyone's done a better job from a methodological perspective

  • Than you guys have okay

  • but now but you still face a

  • Tremendous amount of opposition and most of that does come from the climate side of things as far as I can tell

  • and so it's I've been trying to think through why that might be and so

  • When I reviewed the climate literature, which was a few years ago. Um, I had some real concerns about measurement accuracy

  • and so forth because it's a very complicated issue and it's not the

  • Constants that should be associated with increase in carbon

  • Dioxide aren't obvious and there's quite wide error bars around them and then carbon dioxide has all sorts of weirdly

  • Complicated effects like increasing green global greening, which is quite an interesting one

  • And so anyways, and it also struck me that

  • the if you project out

  • The climate change estimates across about a 50 to 100 year period the error bars grow very large as you move outward

  • Obviously because the errors multiply and then it struck me that

  • we're in a situation where the error bars out 50 years are so wide that even if we did what people

  • Recommended now, we could never be sure that it actually worked

  • because you can't the the

  • Propagation of error across all those decades makes the picture so blurry

  • two or three four decades down the road that there's no way of garnering evidence about the effectiveness of your

  • Intervention, and if it's a high cost intervention, that seems to be a really bad idea

  • so, okay, so and I'm gonna step one more step backwards, which is

  • so I

  • Also found it difficult to trust the climate science and the reason for that was that it struck me as motivated by

  • Issues in large... at least in some part that were outside of the science

  • It seems to me that a tremendous amount of what motivates people's psychological

  • commitment to the idea of climate change is something like an underlying anti-western or anti capitalist ethos and that

  • the idea is that we should restrict growth and we should restructure the economic system and that would address climate change and that would be

  • a positive thing and forestall the apocalypse

  • But the real goal seems to be more to find an ethical justification

  • for the political position that requires the retooling of these economic systems and

  • so

  • so

  • well, I guess the first thing I'd like to know is

  • What you... does that strike you as a reasonable argument because I can't see, otherwise, why people would be

  • Objecting to what it is that you're doing

  • Bjorn: Yeah, so there's there's a lot of questions in there

  • so let me just unpack some of this

  • We I think if you look out yes, there's a lot of uncertainty going forward

  • Some of that actually cancels out when you're saying well we're uncertain about how much the temperature rise will be

  • But we do know that if the causal mechanism is co2

  • Leads to higher warming if you take some of the co2 out you will get less of it. Now we don't exactly know how much

  • where you get it less whether it was a lot.. down here a little bit or whether it was here and down a

  • little bit but you actually get a little bit the same thing so you can take some of the error bars out because you're only

  • Looking at the difference and you're not actually looking at the actual input

  • the other thing I I'm in no doubt that there's a lot of you know other reasons why people latch on to social

  • Phenomena, so, you know when when some climate scientists say we should cut carbon emissions because this is leading to a really dangerous issue

  • there's a lot of other people who will see oh that actually fits with my ideological

  • presupposition

  • So I'll actually join in in this conversation. I think that happens in a lot of different areas

  • Jordan: Yeah it does.

  • Bjorn: What we're trying to do is to sort of step back and say look I'm not going to get into all of that

  • I'm simply taking as the starting point. We're economists. I'm actually not I'm a political scientist

  • But all the people I work with are economists

  • We just take as given what the climate scientists are telling us and I think it's a it's a it's an interesting

  • conversation and say

  • Did they actually get it somewhat wrong? And I think certainly, you know, somebody should be looking into it

  • But you know, I've met a lot of these climate scientists

  • My sense is that they're good hard-working

  • You know scientists are actually trying to find out what what's up and down in this area

  • So we simply take our starting point with you and climate panel

  • what we do is ask

  • How much will it cost to cut carbon emissions so much that we will see a significant change in

  • Temperature and of course remember we emit co2 not because we want to bother Al Gore

  • or anyone else it's a byproduct of having a life that is

  • Incredibly much nicer than one we would have if we didn't have access to a lot of energy

  • I mean we can sit and talk here across the continent. But also, you know you have heating and you're cooling and you

  • fertilizer that subsidized

  • artificial fertilizer that basically feeds half the world's population and a lot of other benefits that come from mostly using fossil fuels

  • So if you want to get rid of some of those fossil fuels and possibly all of them

  • You will have to replace it with more expensive

  • Energy, and that's why it costs to cut carbon emissions now that may be worth the cost

  • But that's exactly the question that we try to ask and that's what William Nordhaus the Nobel laureate and climate economics and many

  • others have asked

  • Jordan: So it's really important

  • It's really important to note that you're not questioning the science as it stands now

  • The concensus, so that this is purely a consequence of the economic calculation

  • Bjorn: This is this is only about saying good co2 impacts

  • Warming and it does so in the way of the UN climate panel tells us now

  • that's not entirely true because there's a lot of things that they tell us

  • And there's a whole variability and we try to take that into account, but honestly

  • It turns out that if you do it on the central estimates you get pretty much what I'm about to tell you, okay?

  • So what you find is if you cut carbon emissions now, you can have a little bit of impact in a hundred years

  • But it will have a significant cost now

  • it's not going to put us to the poorhouse, nobody's talking about that just like

  • We're not talking about the end of the world

  • If we don't do something about climate change, we're not talking about the end of the world if we do something about climate change

  • Right, so I want to sort of dial back on the rhetoric both from the alarmist that say oh my god

  • The world is coming to an end or the people who are saying

  • Oh, we can't afford this and we're all going to the poorhouse if you want to, you know have solar panels

  • No, these are both

  • Manageable cost these are sort of in the order, you know, two to four percent

  • but the problem is that if we do sort of things that cost one to two percent of

  • GDP right now and for the rest of the century

  • We basically solve almost no

  • No part of the global warming problem. We probably solve about 1% of it

  • so basically by incurring the cost of 1 to 2 percent of GDP now and

  • Every year throughout the rest of the century, you'll have solved almost none of the problem come

  • 2100 so you still have to pay all the same problems that global warming is

  • in current

  • minus a slight amount and then you paid one to two percent every year

  • That's the basic idea of why most cost-benefit analyses show

  • that unless you do it very carefully and

  • Only do a little bit of cutting and do it really smartly it you're actually incurring higher cost than the problem

  • You're trying to solve so ok

  • We can't thread the needle and do it really carefully, but that requires a lot of smartness from a lot of politicians

  • But if we do it really bluntly we're just going to incur lots of costs and actually not get very many benefits

  • Jordan: Ok, so when the people who are not happy with you for not prioritizing climate change to the degree that it should be hypothetically

  • Like how do they criticize your statements like on what basis do they decide that your conclusions are inappropriate?

  • Bjorn: I think I mean if you read most of the internet, there's a lot of things they'll just say

  • Oh, you're a denier. You can't yeah. Yeah sort of. We're gonna excommunicate you we don't want to talk to you. That's not right

  • I'm not really going to talk about those people because that's just yeah, that's political posturing but rather than anything else

  • I think there's a reasonable argument to be made to say that's not the only way that you can approach this

  • so there's two ways you can think about

  • cost-benefit analysis actually showing that climate impacts are worth doing one is to say

  • But there might be a tiny risk

  • Even just a tiny risk that the whole world is going to spin out of control and we're all gonna die kind of thing

  • And you know, that's not implausible

  • Especially if you say sort of I'm not gonna put a percentage on it, but it's not it's greater than zero

  • There's a nonzero chance that global warming will spin out of control and we'll basically be you know

  • Relegate a few/couple of hundred humans living on an ice-free Antarctica

  • Jordan: That's a positive feedback loop argument right that we might trigger mechanisms like the melting of the Greenland ice sheet

  • for example that would flood the world or cause some

  • Irreparable catastrophe of unparalleled magnitude. Okay, so I have a question about that

  • Because that's a tricky one to address right? That's kind of an apocalyptic argument

  • And then then the argument would be well if there's a 1% chance of an infinite apocalypse

  • It's worth any donation of resources to stave it off. So, yeah

  • One way of thinking about that is actually to multiply the catastrophes

  • Because my suspicions are that that same argument could be used in

  • relationship to a lot of the other problems that you are trying to address like I

  • Don't know what the probability is that if we keep a substantial number of people in abject poverty over the next 20 years

  • Let's say more than we'd have to, that we would increase the probability of the generation of

  • Epidemic and infectious diseases

  • because poverty

  • Poor people are a risk to everyone in this... this is a horrible way of thinking about it, but

  • poverty is a risk to everyone that's a better way of thinking about it because

  • Decreased global human health is also a breeding ground for all sorts of catastrophes that might emerge and then there's the possibility of political

  • Instability and a nuclear war and all of those things that are also equally apocalyptic

  • So it seems to me to be reasonable to some degree to say look

  • there's the possibility across a wide range of potential crises of

  • Unforeseen positive feedback loops spiraling out of control, but we can't introduce them into the argument unless

  • We can parameterize them because all it's it's an unfair game move in some sense because you can't be not wrong about that

  • Bjorn: Exactly and and and you're you're basically saying if you allow it in in this area just because you like that particular

  • Area and say I want you to focus more money on my thing, which is climate change

  • You could equally well do it in all kinds of other areas, and I actually think you can make your argument even stronger

  • It's not just not it's not just a poverty sort of creates a lot of risk

  • But it's also that they breed terrorism and willingness to you know, do a lot of bad things

  • You know, focused so it's not just something that happens

  • but you know throw in buying terrorists and our

  • Ability to keep all the plutonium in the world under under lock and and you can get catastrophe from anything.

  • Jordan: So abject poverty, for example you could imagine that there might be two socio-economic contributions to that

  • There would be the absolute number of people in abject poverty who are therefore

  • Desperate and then there would also be maybe another contribution of excess

  • Inequality and a sense that the world isn't laying itself out fairly and that that would justify

  • political and revolutionary instability and then

  • Bjorn: and also just you know

  • State failure and many other things that we know make it a lot easier for everyone to to make really bad things like we saw

  • out of Afghanistan

  • With 9/11 a lot of other things, you know, once you once you get Failed States, you get a lot of bad things happening

  • Jordan: Right. Okay, so we try to make people better off we try to make people better off globally so that we decrease the probability of

  • Large-scale political and economic instability and that's another way of staving off an apocalypse. Yes. Okay, and then on you know and

  • Bjorn: Can I just say so Nordhaus actually looked at this the Nobel Laureate because some people argued exactly what you said

  • There's a tiny risk that things go really really bad

  • So we should spend all of our money on this issue

  • But of course that's a failed argument because likewise there's a lot of small risks everywhere else

  • We know one risk

  • which is being hit by an asteroid that could wipe out the

  • The earth yet and Nordhaus that I thought that was very very elegant

  • We know that we can track all of those asteroids out there

  • 99.99%

  • But we chose to only track 90% because tracking the rest was too expensive

  • So you can actually see that we put a price on how much are we willing to do this?

  • And of course that's just one place where we have a very clear example that we say we care somewhat for the future

  • But we don't care about it entirely we have lots of other issues that we want to focus on right now

  • So that's just like every other area you have to argue

  • what is the risks and what are the opportunity to do this and

  • Absolutely given that there are some risks and there probably more downside risks and upside risk for global warming

  • We should probably do a little more than what we would otherwise do that's exactly what the models show us and those of the models

  • That we use in making the estimate of how much should you keep paying for global warming?

  • So yes, we should take that into account, but it's not a good argument. That was that was one argument. Sorry

  • Oh, I'll try to be a little quicker with the other argument

  • the other argument is that people will say

  • One of the reasons why it doesn't pay to do global warming is because you have to pay now

  • But the benefits come far out into the future

  • So basically you do something now that's fairly costly and then you get a tiny benefit in a hundred years

  • So you have to really say the future is incredibly important. In economic speak, that is that the discount is really low

  • That you really care a lot about the future. Now a lot of people would argue

  • We should...

  • We're rich we should be able to care

  • enormously about the future and if you change that parameter enough and you say we care enormously about future generations it

  • actually turns out that global warming becomes a good deal, you know doing something about global warming actually becomes goes from you know,

  • Saying you spend a dollar and you do a couple cents of climate damage to start to avoid climate damage

  • You actually spend a dollar and you might do two dollars of climate benefit. So it actually turns it into a good idea

  • But here's the kicker if you care that much about the future you change

  • Every other one of all of these priorities and make them boom

  • right because obviously happens is you've just said I care so much about the future that the guy that I will save from not having

  • Tuberculosis and dying from it tomorrow will now go on to have a successful life. His kids will not live longer

  • They'll do better. He will have a better his you know nation will do better

  • That means they'll be much much better off in

  • 2100 and so on and that means that this is no longer a

  • Question of saying you spend it all you do forty three dollars worth of good

  • But you spend it all in you a thousand dollars worth of good

  • So what you've achieved is basically just made everything a great idea

  • and that's also intellectually what making the discount rate very very small what it means is you should basically

  • starve you should just eat porridge every day and

  • Spend all of the rest of your money on the future because you care so much about it right now

  • If you do that, I I applaud your sort of your your consistency

  • But most people just don't do this and we certainly don't do this in the way that you know

  • We don't seem to care all that much about our pension systems which are in many rich countries going to fail in the next twenty

  • To forty years. Yeah, all these other issues. So as long as you're saying no, no what you're really saying then is on

  • Climate we want to care a lot about the future, but we don't want to do it in all other areas

  • Okay, you're consistent you need to do the cross all areas. And then you need to be very hungry and only porridge, right?

  • Jordan: Okay, so your claim basically from a methodological perspective is that you're rank ordering remains constant across variable discount rates?

  • Bjorn: Yes

  • Jordan: right and that's a really?

  • Important that's a really fundamentally important point

  • Bjorn: it's not entirely

  • I gotta say it does change some of these because obviously

  • you know education for instance is one of those where you pay now and you only get benefits 10 20 50 years out when the

  • Kids grow up and that will become much more productive

  • so there is a change but mostly the rank ordering remains the same and I'm simply just

  • Insisting that people need to be consistent. You can't just say

  • The future is important when you talk about climate. If you want to say the future is important

  • It's important across all areas and then you really have to do everything and forgo having a good life yourself.

  • It's like, okay

  • Jordan: Well, so the other thing that's worth pointing out about the discount rate is that you know

  • You can make a case that the future is more important than the present

  • Especially because it extends out so far

  • But but the other reason that people discount the future is because you can't make the case that you can

  • Predict the outcome of your actions and that means that the error in prediction

  • Magnifies itself as you move out farther in timeframe

  • And so what happens is you get to a point where there isn't a lot of point in

  • Adjusting your behavior in the present

  • If you look like a hundred years out

  • Let's say or a thousand years old because you actually can't calculate with any accuracy the consequence of your actions or inactions

  • and so the the cumulative error makes

  • Discounting the future the appropriate thing to do because you can predict what's going to happen if you act now

  • Now and maybe tomorrow but you get much less accurate as as you move forward

  • So even in the best-case scenario where we had the best wishes for the future that doesn't mean we could justify incredibly radical

  • Sacrifices now because we can't calculate their cumulative impact

  • Bjorn: No

  • There's a good there's a good way of thinking about this, you know

  • If you look at what previous generations has done for us

  • The only thing that they've really managed to do is to give us a lot more knowledge

  • So investment and knowledge is actually a great way to help future generations

  • Because it helped them in all kinds of ways and we can't really predict how but it's probably a good idea to leave them with

  • A lot of books. I'm using as a metaphor

  • But trying to help them in a specific way in matching back a hundred years ago. Yeah our forefathers back in the 1920s

  • know

  • 1910s would have would have done

  • Reasonably to help us now chances are they would have wasted a lot of money on things that never turn into problems

  • There's a wonderful book called 'Today Now'

  • Sorry, oh

  • God I'm forgetting tomorrow

  • Anyway

  • it has a great and clever title, which I've clearly screwed up now, but it was back in 1893 the

  • Fair in Chicago I believe asked 50 of the world's smartest people to predict what would the world look like in a hundred years and

  • So all of them first started said, you know

  • I love the fact that I'm not going to be around when this prediction comes true or not

  • But then they made all their predictions and they were almost entirely off. Yeah, there were some that were pretty close

  • You know, there's not one that predicted sort of email in the sense that you know, those pn, pn, pn

  • No, I can't pronounce that you had

  • Pneumatic tubes. Yep, which is sent away in you would sort of suck it out. And so you could send a letter somewhere

  • They imagined that that would be a worldwide thing. And so you can actually send a letter everywhere

  • You just sort of put in the very very long tube

  • Jordan: Right which is kind of right

  • Bjorn: and you can sort of see yeah

  • yeah, that's not entirely wrong, you know got the whole technology wrong, but the right idea but

  • The fundamental point is we're probably wrong about so many things as you say

  • that claim to help the world in the future by for instance cutting temperature

  • Might be one of the least effective ways of helping.

  • Jordan: Okay, so so there's another thing that's interesting about that

  • I think that speaks to the

  • fundamental intelligence of your approach

  • so one of the things that has struck me as highly likely is that given how complex things are and how

  • Rapidly, they're changing that the best thing we could do to prepare ourselves for the future would be to make better people

  • Smarter people wiser people more responsible people all of that

  • so there's a psychological element to that and so

  • So I would say some of my work has concentrated on that and the public lectures that I've been doing

  • but what's interesting about your approach the economic approach is that you're diverting a lot of resources to the

  • creation of better people for tomorrow by investing especially in childhood nutrition

  • so if you and I suppose this is kind of how economists look at the world, but maybe

  • Biologists could look at it this way, too

  • If you think of people as general problem-solving machines, which is not a bad way of thinking about us

  • Then it might be that given that you don't know which problems are going to be paramount

  • What you want to do is improve the machines that will solve the problems. Whatever

  • Those problems happened to be and so that investment in early childhood

  • Development seems a particularly apropos in that regard. And so

  • Having said that I want to return to the climate issue one more time because here's something peculiar

  • This is something I don't understand. It's a real mystery

  • So let's say that just for the sake of argument that most of the people who are concerned about

  • Climate change and its relationship to economic development or on the left side of the spectrum

  • Okay, but let's also say that those who are on the left side of the spectrum are

  • hypothetically also concerned with the economic well-being of the most dispossessed and

  • That those might be equally important concerns and and they're integrally locked together

  • well

  • The strange thing about so many of your recommendations is that they're directly aimed at addressing the immediate now

  • concerns of the fundamentally dispossessed and so you think that that

  • that's part of the reason that I can't understand why there's so much objection to your methods because it's not like

  • What you came up with looks like support for something that's like a right-wing agenda by any stretch of the imagination

  • I mean first of all, it's predicated on the idea that there's a certain amount of development aid

  • especially directed to children

  • You said not exclusively that would be of great use and it seems to me to be undeniable that the most

  • Dispossessed people in the world are impoverished

  • Infants of impoverished people. So so what if

  • Some of the objections to what you're doing are ideologically motivated. Why doesn't that cancel it out?

  • Bjorn: It's a good question. I I don't quite understand it. My sense is that in some way... So I was in New York in September

  • there was a

  • the first-ever summit at the UN for

  • tuberculosis and I was there because one of the things that we've identified is this is a great investment and of course all the

  • tuberculosis people love us because you know

  • we're pointing out you should spend more money on their problem and

  • and unfortunately almost nobody went I

  • Wrote an op-ed together with the South Africa Health Minister and it was widely published in the developing world

  • But almost no one in the developed world picked it up

  • It was only when I wrote another op-ed of it where I said there were two meetings taking place in New York one

  • Was this TB place where biggest infectious disease killer in the world where almost nobody turned up and then there was the other meeting

  • which Macron and the French president and

  • Bloomberg and others attended to which was the climate summit which everybody attended. So yeah, you sort of pointed out the the

  • Disparity and then it was picked up in all kinds of developed country paper

  • I think fundamentally it goes down to saying while everybody says they care a lot about the world's poor the reality is that you know

  • you care somewhat for it, but

  • most rich well-meaning people

  • Probably care a lot more about the fact that they worried that their kids might be in a position where global warming is really going

  • to undermine

  • Jordan: but even that doesn't make sense because look we already established the fact that there's equal reason to be

  • apocalyptically concerned about unchecked poverty and inequality

  • so this is why I

  • Suggested to begin with that the one of the lovely things about the idea of climate change

  • is that it it really justifies the idea of overthrowing the current system or of undermining the current system and

  • That if you're inclined to do that rather than inclined to truly help the dispossessed

  • Let's say then you'd be more inclined to support a theory that justifies that sort of radical

  • Let's say interventionist policy and I can't see a way out of that logically given that the the work that you're doing on

  • tuberculosis is a great example is

  • directly and evidentially

  • associated with a marked increase in the well-being of the dispossessed and so you'd think that

  • You think that would attract the proper amount of ideological attention, but it doesn't and that's that's a great mystery

  • There's something about the stored memory

  • Bjorn: and it's a good point

  • and and I think you have a consistent argument the the thing that I've

  • Decided a long time ago that I don't want to argue and and I think that's probably the difference between being psychologically focused

  • I don't want to argue on what I think might be people's

  • sort of inner motivations

  • I want to actually take them on face value and many people I meet they say I worry a lot about climate change

  • I worry a lot about the world's poor and then I try to show them

  • Well, if you actually do that, why the hell would you be focusing on spending lots of money

  • That'll almost do no good instead of spending possibly less money

  • and do an incredible amount more good and it creates some cognitive dissonance and I think it

  • Switches people a little bit towards spending smarter, but yes, you're right, but tell

  • Jordan: It also might just be ignorance, you know, it's like what you're doing is pretty new and

  • It takes a long time. I mean it's not new for you, and it's not new

  • considering the span of a single lifetime, but you know what you're doing is very

  • Radical in some sense and there isn't anybody else doing it

  • and so it might only it might be that it will take 20 years or 25 years or something like that for the approach that

  • you're

  • Publicizing and have developed to for people to actually know about it, you know, and so what do they say?

  • You should assume ignorance instead of malevolence when you can

  • I do think that ignorance is a part of this

  • It's not obvious to everyone that there is this method of rank ordering that people have done it and and that there are consequences

  • To that that could be laid out in an intelligent economic plan, you know

  • And I know that it takes a finding in the scientific literature if it's going to make its way into the public something approximating

  • 15 years and and and that's only the ones that actually do manage to make it and so it could be that

  • Just way more people need to know what you're doing and why and how it was done before it gets the steam going

  • I'm interested in the psychological issues in part to try to help figure out what it would take to motivate people to

  • Be more attentive to the sorts of solutions that you and your people have been putting forward and then to eliminate those barriers

  • But but but it could just be as I said

  • It could just be ignorance

  • Bjorn: and and look one of them one of the problems that we're facing

  • constantly and I know why there's no one else doing this than we that we because

  • When you do prioritization and you inevitably end up antagonizing a lot of people

  • I mean climate change is the most obvious one, but for instance

  • Sanitation water and sanitation huge problem, you know

  • There's about two and a half billion people affected by this one of the points that we emphasize

  • Those that doing sanitation while a good thing to do it

  • Probably only pays you about three dollars back on the dollar

  • Why because it's actually fairly costly to do

  • Sanitation and also because the benefits not nearly as great as what many have assumed and this is the new Global Burden of Disease

  • Estimates that the real problem is that what you're doing with sanitation is that you're not removing fecal matter from the environment

  • You're simply reducing the amount

  • So you're not actually having all that much of an impact on disease you're having a little bit but not nearly as much as what

  • We would like to have seen. That obviously pisses off all the people who are doing sanitation and you know

  • we end up pissing off a lot of people and the

  • Truth is I think it's necessary. If you're going to do this that when you rank order, of course the

  • Costs that come out on top love it and the causes that don't don't love it

  • But it's also important to make that argument and so at the end of they certainly my sense is it's necessary to do it

  • But it will always

  • entail a great amount of sort of

  • unease

  • Because it doesn't feel like we're saying, you know

  • Kumbaya, and we should do everything but we're actually saying no you should do these things, but not all of these things

  • Although they seem nice. They're just not in the same league

  • Jordan: Right, right, right, right. Well that that's

  • It would be nice if we could do everything good that we possibly could all at once

  • But it's not

  • It's not realistic because you can't do everything at once and you don't have infinite resources as we've already pointed out

  • So, okay

  • So what would you say would be if you're gonna play devil's advocate against your own position?

  • Which I presume you've done a lot of anyways

  • What... are their criticisms against your let's say your your aims and your methods?

  • that you regard as

  • Unresolved like what is it that you're doing

  • That's still weak and wrong in your own estimation? or where are the limitations in your methods.

  • Bjorn: Well, look there's

  • No method does everything so we have to very obvious problems one is not all issues is about money

  • So we are looking at how do you prioritize money but sometimes money is not the issue

  • For instance on free trade as we talked about before we estimate the benefit is incredible

  • but we actually look at the cost as the cost of subsidizing Western farmers because those are the ones that basically

  • Make a killing from not freeing up global markets. And those are the ones that usually

  • Held it back. But what has happened is it has become much more sort of an emotional thing

  • It's sort of an identity thing and I'm not sure how you would cost that

  • so to the extent that things have not nothing to do with money, but they're just simply about political willingness or interest or

  • What?

  • Then we are not making the argument that is going to convince you

  • So in some sense we are telling you where can you spend money, but we're not talking about the things that don't require money

  • Jordan: Right. So people would object that your that the problem with your method is that

  • You're measuring everything that can be tangibly measured from an economic perspective

  • but that's actually a small fraction of the universe of properly attended to

  • Bjorn: I would tend to say it's probably you know, sort of 70 or 80 percent

  • I'm not quite sure how you'd make that up

  • But you know, yeah biggest the biggest policy decisions in most countries is the national budget

  • It's very clear that that is a very substantial part of what we decide how are we gonna allocate money. That's a big issue

  • It's not the only issue

  • Jordan: Well the problem with an objection is that well...

  • The people who are objecting could be right that your methods are narrow

  • I mean you're making the case that they're not as narrow as a yeah

  • As a pessimist might assume but that puts the onus on them to come up with an alternative way of ranking

  • Right. I mean...

  • Bjorn: I would just say, we're not talking about those last thirty percent that are

  • You know purely about you know, should we have transgender bathrooms or something?

  • Yeah, that's possibly a bad idea because that actually has cost them and building a third

  • bathroom is something but yeah, there are some things that are mostly just about

  • What do you think? What do you believe? What what are your intuitions? rather than actual costs

  • Jordan: Right, but there's no way of adjudicating between those claims

  • That's the problem

  • and all the people do is push each other around about them if they can

  • Bjorn: The point is there's still a substantial amount of issues where you do need to look at resource allocation and there we have a good argument

  • The second part the second sort of criticism which is a very fair criticism is we don't look at inequality

  • So economists are very very bad at dealing with inequality because fundamentally that's a political issue

  • So when we look at you spend a dollar and you do $60 worth of good, we don't look at who gets that $60 now

  • To be fair most of the things as you

  • you also pointed out most of the things that we actually indicate a really really low hanging fruit in the world are things that will

  • Help the world's poorest mostly because the world's poorest have so many things that they haven't gotten that would be hugely beneficial

  • For them, so it mostly actually helped also inequality

  • But we don't measure it and so we don't actually look at 'Would this be a good

  • expenditure in the sense of helping the world's poorest?' Mostly it would but it's not part of our framework and

  • Jordan: How Come?

  • making that well because

  • Because cost-benefit analysis is basically assuming that everybody is equally worth we talked about that

  • Earlier, there's there's no way of sort of making well you can but it becomes incredibly

  • Unclear and very unintuitive if you start making weightings on who is actually worth more

  • So so we are we're again saying it's a little bit like the menu, you know

  • You get in the restaurant we're telling you hey

  • The spinach is cheap and it has lots of vitamins and the cake is expensive and it's bad for you

  • But you know you go ahead and make the choice

  • And I think that's the fair way to have that conversation that we're telling you some important facts about your decisions

  • but these are not the only things that are going to guide your decision, and I'm absolutely

  • Happy to say that so so in some sense you asked me to be Devils Advocate

  • I just think it's important to clarify

  • We don't look at all issues because we only look at issues that require resources and we don't deal with inequality

  • Which is also an important issue but apart from that

  • We have to make priorities and we're simply making it a little clearer at the end of the day

  • You can choose to totally disregard it

  • But I would imagine that you would at least like to know

  • What does the evidence tell you if you spend a dollar here how many people will you save how many lives will be improved?

  • how much environment will be improved and so on versus all the other things where you could have spent that dollar and done

  • different amounts of good in all those different areas and

  • That's what we provide with the menu

  • Jordan: So do you, okay. Okay. Well I appreciate that very much. Um, do you have any sense off the top of your head

  • What the total capital expenditure for the minimization or eradication of tuberculosis

  • Actually would be? what are you talking about in absolute dollar amounts?

  • Bjorn: so it and and it depends a lot on because

  • so we estimate it you need about two billion dollars the the

  • the global funds that we were also campaigning with are saying it's about

  • 5.8 billion dollars and to be quite honest I'm not quite sure of which of these two numbers is the right number

  • I think the you know

  • Compared to you know, just to give you a sense of proportion the the amount of subsidies that we give to solar and wind

  • Is about a hundred and twenty billion dollars right now

  • So, you know, we're talking about a very very small amount and certainly it's a very small amount. You know, it's about what

  • three four percent of global development

  • Spending so the amount of spending that we that we spend every year to try and help

  • Improve the world and it will probably be one of the very very best things that we could do. So again,

  • Jordan: People need to know these things and I think that if they did know they would start to care if they actually knew so okay, I got two

  • final questions for you

  • I think and then I'll ask you if there's anything else you wanted to bring to people's attention that you thought was particularly necessary

  • okay, so the first one is um

  • To what degree do you think... I'll ask all three questions... To what degree do you think you've been making headway?

  • Like obviously you're you've been successful in putting together your institutes and and your work has garnered a substantial amount of attention

  • Published and otherwise and so it's not like you've been silenced and and and imprisoned or anything like that

  • and so... Are the reasons for optimism as far as you're concerned? And

  • And then the next thing that I'd like to ask you about is what's happening in France

  • because one of the things that the people who are pushing

  • For radical current interventions with regards to long term climate change haven't factored in is the reverse

  • apocalyptic issue

  • Which is that there's going to be substantial resistance to the short term costs that will cause

  • Spin-off disasters of their own and so the French example seems to be a very interesting case in point

  • so so the first question was

  • 'How do you feel about the impact that you're having?' And the second is 'What do you have to say about what's happening in France?'

  • Bjorn: yeah, can I I'm gonna answer in reverse because I think the France point is really a good a

  • Good argument. If you ask people around the world, 'Do you care about global warming?' Almost

  • Everyone will say 'Yes'. Do you want to do something for global warming?

  • They'll say 'Yes', then when you ask them, 'How much are you willing to pay?' the typical answer

  • Both in rich and poor countries, is a couple hundred dollars per year

  • So it goes from a hundred to two hundred dollars. So fundamentally what people are saying is yes, I do worry about this issue

  • I'm willing to spend a little bit of money, but not very much

  • and I think this is the

  • Fundamental thing that we just have not been able to get to the attention of a lot of people who are pushing for

  • really really radical solutions

  • you're never going to succeed in a democratic situation if

  • If you keep ramping up

  • The taxes on fossil fuels if you keep making energy more more expensive. It's going to harm first of all the poor the most

  • very very regressive and that obviously is

  • I

  • Mean it's a lot of heartache for a lot of poor people

  • These are typically also the people who at least able to defend themselves because they're just so busy

  • Just surviving their day today

  • So it typically has to hit the middle class before you really get sort of an eruption as what you've seen in France and elsewhere

  • Let's remember. There's also a lot of other issues in France. So it's not just because they put, you know, three three cents on

  • a liter of diesel

  • But it is an issue of saying if you push people too far you will actually not be able to do the solution for climate

  • And so you're very very expensive solutions are never going to be a long-term viable

  • You know

  • When you predict these ideas of saying if we had Obama

  • And if he would actually have managed to put a carbon tax on on co2 remember?

  • He actually had a Democratic Congress the first two years of his presidency

  • And they were still not able to get a carbon tax implemented. Of course when you have a Republican Congress

  • It becomes really hard when you have a Republican president. Also, it falls apart. You just can't do this for a hundred years

  • It's just not going to work out and that's why

  • and we never got to that we actually did a

  • climate consensus where we brought together

  • 27 of the world's top climate economists, three Nobel laureates to look at where can you do good for climate and what they found was

  • The by far best investment to tackle global warming is to invest in green energy R and D

  • So fundamentally if we could invest in making better green energy for the future

  • hopefully eventually get it to be so cheap that it out compete fossil fuels we will solve global warming just simply because

  • The green energy became cheaper if you'll allow me a slight detour

  • Back in the 1860s the world was hunting whales to extinction because whales have this wonderful

  • Should I just say that again, yep. Yeah, right

  • Back in the 1860s were hunting whales to extinction because whales have this wonderful oil that just burns a lot cleaner and a lot more

  • bright

  • And so it was wonderful for the houses and in in North American and Europe

  • to burn this whale oil and they were all excited about it and it had the

  • bad side effect that was actually

  • pushing Wales to extinction now the sort of

  • Global warming approach to that problem would have been to say could you please turn down the light?

  • Could you please have it a little less light in your room?

  • And of course you would have entirely failed what did save the whales was we discovered oil, you know?

  • fossil fuel oil which were actually burning cleaner

  • It was much cheaper and you didn't have to go out and kill whales for it

  • And so what happened in about a decade was you stopped killing whales because you got a better

  • technological product and we've seen this a lot of times the technology can simply

  • Invalidate an old issue a problem that you thought was almost intractable if you get cheaper smarter

  • new technology people will switch

  • Jordan: right so imposing expensive limits on people is not an

  • Appropriate long-term solution

  • Because of implementation resistance and cost and the best solution is to come up with a

  • Well, let's say to put it in a cliched manner is to come up with a better solution

  • which is cheaper energy that's that has all the advantages and fewer disadvantages and that's really how you solve the problem

  • Bjorn: wind turbines solar panels and I'm just taking the two most popular things and

  • batteries together if they were cheaper than fossil fuels which they aren't right now, but if they were of course

  • everyone would buy them we'd stop buying coal-fired power plants

  • So it's really not rocket science that way now I'm not saying it's gonna be easy and it's certainly not gonna happen right now

  • But it's the only viable long-term solution. It's much cheaper and much more effective

  • So we estimated that for every dollar spent you'll actually do about 11 dollars of climate benefit.

  • Okay, so that's on alternative energy R&D

  • Bjorn: You know, so so it's it's not the best thing but it comes down here

  • So it actually you know, it's a pretty good investment. Yeah, it's not the best in the world but we should definitely be doing

  • okay, the second question that you had was the you know the optimism so

  • You know fundamentally how much of an impact does this have?

  • Well, it's had the impact and very predictable impact that when we come out and say for instance in

  • More immunization gives you $60 back on the dollar the people who are doing

  • Immunization tells you all the time you should fund us because we do $60 of good for every dollar you spend so very clearly

  • I sat down with a guy from from a

  • a Family Foundation a big Family Foundation than you know, we were at a malaria event and

  • We sat and politely conversed and he

  • He would say, so what do you do?

  • I work with the Copenhagen Consensus Center, you know totally blanks there and then I asked him what do you do?

  • Well, we work with malaria

  • Did you know that actually if you spend a dollar and malarial do 33 dollars worth of good now?

  • I was like, yeah, we did that and

  • Yeah, this is exactly the point we're not we're not there to you know get attention

  • We're there to make sure that we get attention to some of these top ideas

  • And I think we definitely helped a lot of these top ideas get a little easier ride in the world

  • Jordan: Okay, so let me ask you another must benefit. Okay? So yes, so what if I said

  • Wouldn't it be interesting

  • interesting in doing a meta

  • cost-benefit analysis on how much money you would need to raise and spend

  • to effectively market your findings?

  • You know and to hire people who are really good at doing such marketing so that you had the appropriate

  • advertisements and so that you because you're your this is not a criticism believe me, but your approach is very

  • academic and very

  • objective and and that's all well and good and reliable and valid and all of those things but

  • Do you do could your economists compute the utility in dollar value of

  • establishing an

  • extensive an appropriate marketing scheme? because

  • you'd think that there are let's see you because I've been watching what's been happening with the Democrats in the US and they a

  • PAC that that I know about has been

  • making new ads for the Democrats trying to move them towards the center and they've had a substantial amount of impact because the

  • advertisements have been very professionally crafted and constructed and so

  • well, I don't I don't know what you think about that, but I mean..

  • Part of the reason I'm interviewing you today is because I want to put this up on YouTube and I want to get it out

  • there in podcast so that more people know about this and so

  • alright

  • Bjorn: yeah, so the short answer of course is we have tried to do that because we're economists and we think yeah we

  • Would be a good idea. So let me just tell you about something else that we have done

  • So so we've been working a lot and we were just talking about the globe

  • And so when you do prioritization on the planetary scale, it's academically very interesting

  • But unfortunately, the impact is mostly that people say yeah, that's probably true somewhere else, you know

  • So when we go and tell the Indians this they'll say yeah

  • That's probably true for Mexico. And Mexico will say it's probably true for Argentina. And so so everybody just pushes it off to somebody else

  • The globe is never anyone's problem. Yeah, someone else needs to fix us and so what we've increasingly done is to do this in nations

  • So we did this a couple years ago in Bangladesh

  • And in the nation of course is an overlap between who actually decides where to spend the money and the problems that we're analyzing

  • So we did the exact same thing for just for Bangladesh

  • So we did a part I station list of all the things so we talked to everyone in Bangladesh

  • We got them to say what are the best things that you want to focus on?

  • what are the smartest new solutions we worked with PRIMUS think-tank the

  • Finance minister everybody else and talked about where can you actually spend money right? Again? This is this is a menu

  • That's not entirely politically correct. Certainly the politicians don't like all of this but what they, you know, the finance minister would go

  • Oh, yes. Yes, I like this

  • Yes

  • And so they did some of the things I say

  • Jordan: That solves the Tower of Babel

  • Problem to some degree is in too much distance

  • yeah, there's too much distance between the local and the global and so yes, you're using the nation-state as a psychological meaningful intermediary

  • Bjorn: Yeah, so there we actually estimate that every dollar spent on what we were doing does, you know at least

  • $10,000 worth of good simply because we helped shift spending in

  • Bangladesh both on their national budget, but also the development budgets spending in Bangladesh

  • And again, we didn't change, you know Bangladesh to suddenly become super rationally. Yeah

  • I simply changed a little bit we gave if you will head wind to the poor ideas and

  • Tailwind to the good ones behind so we did that in Haiti we're now doing this in India together with Tata trust. I just came back

  • That's why I'm a little jet lag or a little bleary-eyed

  • I just came back from from Ghana where we're going to do our next project. So we wanted to bring this to Africa

  • Jordan: Great so you can do it globally

  • and locally

  • Bjorn: Yes

  • And I think I'll have a lot more

  • Opportunity to actually get people's attention when you talk specifically to the nation states where you're actually going to be making these decisions

  • But obviously if it's true in Ghana

  • It's probably also true in the neighboring state. You're going to get the overlap in exactly

  • so I think I would love to you know have

  • a lot of

  • extra sort of PR ability

  • but I think what we what we really need is just

  • Simply to be able to come up with all these great ideas and I think we are reasonably successful

  • but the problem in some way is

  • We're advocates of all the boring stuff, you know

  • All the stuff that gets the attention are the ones that have the crying babies and the cute animals

  • Jordan: The thing is, it's not true. It's not what you're doing isn't boring. It's absolutely exciting beyond belief

  • I mean, I don't believe that it is dry and I don't believe that it doesn't have a powerful narrative message

  • It's just that there are

  • Reasons that the narrative message is obscured and I think putting your finger on the gap between the local and the global

  • Is a good one? That's smart because you see the same problem starting to emerge for example with the EU where the overarching

  • bureaucracy is so distant from the people on the ground that there's a

  • disconnect in identification and so to harness their latent power of the nation-state and it's patriotism and its

  • Its economic what would it's rather local economic structure seems to me to be a really smart

  • solution but I I really I was thrilled when I came across your work and

  • I mean on an emotional level because I thought well wow if we really wanted to do good if that was the goal and

  • we wanted to do it intelligently and carefully and and

  • agnostically to some degree and in a non

  • Ideologically self-serving manner with would be a lovely thing to manage if it was possible

  • then this seemed to be an incredibly exciting approach and I

  • Believe that there's every reason to assume that with proper

  • Publicity that people could really get behind the idea that we wouldn't have to have tuberculosis in ten years, you know

  • And and that some of these things could really and you know

  • I've talked to people in on my lecture tour about the things that we could do to make the world a better place and

  • There's no shortage of enthusiasm for that. It's just that there's a fair bit of cynicism

  • But there's a lot more ignorance is like well, we just don't know what to do. But your

  • Prescriptions say well, here's 10 things. You could do one of them and one of them would work

  • So you've got a bit of a choice there we wouldn't have to take our number one priority as your own

  • But you could take number five and you'd still do a lovely job and it might be in accordance with your own motivations. Okay?

  • Can can can you get me

  • PDFs for example of the relevant whatever you think is relevant that would inform people in short order?

  • I will post in the description of the video, so

  • Whatever material you'd like to have disseminated as a consequence of this conversation

  • Just get that to me and I'll post it and any blurb you want me to put in the description that all also do that

  • with whatever ratings

  • Bjorn: When do you need it for?

  • Jordan: As soon as as soon as you can get it because I'll put this part

  • Very soon like in the next day. All right

  • Okay, is there anything else that you would like to say that we haven't covered

  • Bjorn: All right, first of all

  • I I think it's wonderful the way that you're you're talking about this as sort of an outsider that it's actually exciting because we

  • And we probably make this mistake

  • But we think of ourselves a little bit sort of technocrats and and you know Fiddlers on the margin

  • Kind of thing and it actually you're right and it is exciting

  • Actually if we could actually spend our resources four times as well as what we're doing right now

  • So instead of saying all the things that are politically great making us all feel warm and fussy

  • actually doing the things that perhaps are not top of mind not top of the

  • The the agenda, but we just do an amazing round of good. Why the hell are we not doing that?

  • Thank you very much for getting me back in the groove in actually

  • Useful

  • Jordan: Think I think it's a mistake not to view what you're doing as an exciting adventure. I think it's a form of of

  • What it's a form of non-helpful humility. Yeah

  • Bjorn: yeah, and and I think we

  • Im Danish as background and one of the things we're very very good at is self-effacement. And so yes, you're probably right so

  • Jordan: You're calling people to a great adventure here

  • that's saying look we have enough resources so that we could deflect a small fraction of them and

  • Do an unbelievable amount of good and and there would be no downside to that

  • there would be no downside to anyone there would be nothing but upside even with some error and there's gonna be error and

  • so, of course

  • I think we'll find that people will respond to this video in a very very positive way

  • and because they're I I do believe that they're

  • As people become more aware that we are becoming richer and that we do have more resources at our disposal

  • That that's genuinely true and that with a bit of intelligent consideration

  • We could make things a lot less dismal for a lot of people

  • I think that they will start to view that as something that's part of a great global national and global adventure and and

  • Because you're agnostic and because you've done the legwork

  • Then people can also I think get behind that without any real cynicism. They can say look

  • Our money spent here is not going to be wasted we can be reasonably assured that if we're charitable in this direction

  • We're gonna do something positive. And so so anyways, like I said, I found it incredibly

  • Bjorn: wonderful

  • Let me just say again. We said a couple times that something that I've done III need to say, you know

  • I'm just a sock puppet that talks about all these things the this is the work of an

  • Incredible amount of really really smart economists. So more than 300 world's top economists, you know, seven Nobel laureates

  • Those are the guys have actually done the work and the work

  • You know giving the credibility to all it was this research and that's why we can say with great certainty

  • This is not just sort of a whim but something that is probably the best we know now

  • It's probably as you point out not entirely true, but it's certainly better than anything else we have right now

  • Jordan: Good, that's it. Well, that's actually the right comparison. It's like it's not absolutely true. Yeah, but no one's got a better idea

  • Right. So we go with the best idea that we have

  • Exactly, right, right. All right

  • well

  • look

  • it was a great pleasure talking to you and

  • I'm hoping that you know a million people who watch this and that will get another million

  • Podcasts out of it and that this will help disseminate what you're doing broadly. I think that would be

  • Lovely you bet

  • Bjorn: Thank you. It was it was great, also meeting you and I hope our paths will cross again soon and you know

  • We should we should make a habit of this.

  • Jordan: Yes. We definitely should well when you start to develop some more of the National indices

  • Have you worked on any Western countries like Canada or the United States?

  • Bjorn: So, We I want it to do that

  • So we haven't done it in the US just simply because it's so disfunctional in so many different ways

  • we've seen a couple of other people trying to do this without our involvement and

  • One of the things we're really really good at is that you know

  • You get all these economists to do all this stuff and the first draft of the paper is this is really hard

  • We need 10 years a lot of research money, and then we'll probably get you something and you know

  • We say that's that's nowhere you got it

  • you give it your best shot get use the information that's out there now and give us a knowledge because

  • Politicians are gonna make decisions next year and and what has happened in those two places. So they did one in Holland they did

  • It might actually be Canada but that was like 10 years ago. It ends up very much like a very interesting anthology of

  • Points that yes. Yes. I

  • Know sort of consistency is what we're trying to achieve

  • Jordan: What would it cost to have something like this done for Canada?

  • Bjorn: The short version is it cost about two and a half million dollars and we it's it doesn't really scale

  • well, so

  • For Ghana is the same thing as doing it for Canada.

  • Jordan: How long would it take?

  • Bjorn: 18 months

  • Jordan: God that's such a good idea. So two and a half million dollars 18 months. Yeah, okay

  • Well, I'm going to wrap that around

  • Maybe we can figure out how to raise the money

  • Bjorn: We should we should try and do that. That would be good

  • I I think there would be a lot of interest in Canada

  • And Canada would be great way to also get sort of Bridgepoint into the US without doing it in the US

  • Jordan: Well, that would be good because we're flailing about politically and it would be nice to

  • Okay, so so that's that's that's that's that's fodder for another conversation

  • We I've got a couple of other conversations that I'd like to have with you about policy development and also about marketing

  • But we'll save those for another time

  • Bjorn: Brilliant Jordan it was great talking to you again. Thank you. I will send you the stuff so basically tonight.

  • Jordan: OK wonderful. Wonderful. Yep. Well I'll get this up as soon as I can

  • Bjorn: Wonderful. All right. Talk to you soon. Okay

  • Again, bye. Bye

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish author and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a project based US think tank

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如何讓世界變得更好。真的和比約恩-倫博格博士一起。 (How to make the world better. Really. With Dr. Bjorn Lomborg.)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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