https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FGWSa654bRc
So if you configure the apocalypse and hell properly, then you take it upon yourself to carry a very heavy moral burden. And that burden is to put your life together. And that means to be productive and generous and honest and concerned with life more abundant for everyone. And you have to retool your whole psyche in some sense to aim towards that. And that takes that’s 100% dedication and lifetime of effort. But if you’re worshipping at the altar of a false god, let’s say what you’re looking for is shortcuts to put yourself to put yourself in a position where you have the moral advantage and where you can claim reputation stakes because of that. And all of this false moral posturing that comes along with these shallow analysis is in my psychological estimation, nothing but a narcissistic trip to replace competence with the false competence of the Machiavellians and the psychopaths. And because I mean, your work struck me so hard, Bjorn, because I worked on the UN report on sustainable development for the secretary general. I worked on that for a couple of years. And one of the things that really came to the forefront for me, there were two things. Three. One is we stupidly overfished and destroyed the oceans. That’s a really nasty thing. And we didn’t have to do that. The second was, oh, all the data shows that if you make poor people rich as fast as possible, they stop polluting and start caring about the environment. So isn’t that something we could make everyone rich and the planet would be better off? And then the next thing was, well, what’s the rank order of importance of our problems? And I went back to the UN central agencies, authorities a couple of times, the other people who were working on the report, and there were many of them and said, well, you guys have 200 goals here or whatever it is. 400 or 169. It’s like that’s not any goals. Goals have to be prioritized because you can’t do 200 things at the same time and all 200 things aren’t of equal importance. And they said, well, there’s a constituency for each of these goals. And if we prioritize them, we’ll annoy someone. It’s like that’s not a good reason. And and then next we don’t have a methodology for prioritization. I thought, well, that’s a big problem. Does anyone and the only one I came across and maybe you could explain this a little bit. The only one I came across was you. And so you tackled this problem, which I thought was I really thought that was a stroke of genius, Bjorn. And if the Nobel Prize committee had any sense, you would have been a recipient of the Peace Prize for this work because it’s signally important. So you want to outline what you do and what you’ve concluded. So thank you very much. I mean, I should just say what we’re doing is not rocket science. And as you point out, it’s kind of obvious if you have 169 targets, which is what the UN has, you have no priorities. And so we simply try to work with some of the best economists across the world to look at where can you spend an extra dollar or an extra rupee or an extra shilling or whatever your currency is and do the most good. This is an objective question. And of course, you can have a lot of conversations about how do you value different things because remember you need to include everything. So they’re both going to be economic costs. They’re also going to be social costs. You know, for instance, if you vaccinate someone, not only has it a cost from the hospital part of the thing, but you also need to take people’s time to get vaccinated. Maybe they need to get off work. And there will also be environmental costs. For instance, if you put up a new power plant, not only does have cost, but it will also add to more pollution and more CO2 emissions. You need to include all of that. And likewise, there are going to be lots of benefits, both economic, social and environmental benefits. Now, what we try to do is to include all of the costs and all of the benefits and account them in dollars. This is something economists have done for 30 years. And obviously, it feels a little sort of really, can you do that? You know, how many lives are you going to lose? But remember, we do that, you know, uncontroversially in many different contexts. One obvious place is when you put up roads, you decide what kind of security are you going to have on a road? Are we going to have, you know, a hard center line so people can’t run into each other? It’s more costly, but it also saves more lives. And governments around the world make those tradeoffs depending on how many lives you’re going to save and how costly is it going to be? That kind of consequence thinking we put into all of these issues. And then we basically came out with a list of saying these are the very best things to do. These are the so, so, so good things to do. And these are actually the dumb things to do. And so we simply tried to say, do the smart stuff. And I appreciate you saying that this is something that the Nobel committee should be looking at. But I think, you know, in some sense, it’s so obvious. It’s not rocket science, but we don’t do it exactly as you say, because nobody wants to offend anyone. So we just say everything is important. Well, we also end up worrying about the stuff that makes the headlines, which very often is global warming and other, you know, yes, problems, but perhaps not the most important ones. Well, we also do it because we’re lazy and ill-informed and treacherous because we want to take the easy moral path instead of plowing through. Like, let’s say your work. And I’d like to point out, by the way, to those who are listening, you can argue about the accuracy of cost benefit analysis because it’s hard to price everything and to value everything. And you can debate about how you might do that. But Bjorn, who is doing something closer to rocket science in some sense than he admits, he got teams of economists together, multiple teams to independently produce lists of cost benefits by problem. And then he averaged across the ratings. And I know as a diagnostician and as a researcher, that’s how you come up with reliable calculations. And so those are calculations that could be replicated and valid calculations. And a valid calculation is one that actually bears some resemblance to the real world. And so what you did is in some sense in retrospect self-evident, but it’s also very, very sophisticated conceptually. But what is also so remarkable is that it’s a singular attempt. Despite the fact that we’re jumping up and down about the coming apocalypse and everyone’s got their panties in the knot as a consequence of it. No one has sat down and done the hard edged economic analysis that you have done. And then you’ve taken a hell of a lot of flak for it, too, because you end up prioritizing things like, well, stopping tuberculosis and feeding children instead of what shutting off Europe’s energy supply so that we can reduce carbon dioxide and and pat ourselves on the back for saving the planet. And you faced an awful lot of vitriol as a consequence of this, too, which I also find unbelievably appalling because. All of your work is devoted clearly towards specifying the most good that can be done in the most efficient possible manner. And why someone would be attacked for that is that’s really a great mystery. Well, you’re obviously undermining this very shallow religious commitment people have to their apocalyptic pretensions. And that’s the primary reason. But it’s also unbelievably appalling. Sorry, Bjorn, but I think it makes a lot of sense because you are heretic, right? I mean, in previous times, it’s like, you imagine you are in a fictional island culture and what they do is every year they throw a virgin into a volcano in order to get a good harvest. And then you come along and say, wait a moment, you actually could get a good harvest without throwing the virgin into the volcano. There will be many people who would say, but we are used to throwing that virgin into the volcano. Right. I think I think we it’s a technical problem. But I think a lot of it and this has been, I would argue, foster since the 1960s. But it’s a it’s a cultural problem so much. I did this has been kind of instituted in education. I decided, you know, in the 70s, it was the new ice age. It was all these kind of things. I think this the consciousness for the do for environmental doom has kind of been, you know, inflicted upon the younger generations now for at least two generations. And then you I think again, I think technically everything you say is right. But maybe you could also speak a little bit to I mean, William Northouse did get a Nobel Prize, right? Kind of talking in a similar direction. And I wonder why is he never in a talk show? I don’t know. Maybe he’s a reclusive. I don’t know. But he’s never in a talk show. Like he’s barely ever quoted. So I wonder I wonder why it is. I think because he is less outspoken than you are, but I think he would probably also be seen as a heretic. So so it’s that’s why you see more Thunberg’s and less less Lomborg’s and less Northouse’s. Yeah. Why why we see Greta Thunberg instead of you on the international stage is just that’s just maybe she’s the virgin we’re sacrificing to the volcano, you know. So I think it’s you know, you’re both right. And in very specific sense, I think what you just mentioned about the UN that they didn’t want to offend anyone. Remember, we basically come out and say, as you said, you know, we should be focusing on on free trade, contraception for women, vaccinations for a lot of rotoviruses, you know, a lot of these very, very simple things that you can do a lot about tuberculosis, food for kids. It’s also a way to get better schooling, better schooling, all these kinds of very, very simple things. And and the reason why they didn’t want to prioritize it was because they didn’t want to offend anyone. But as you point out, who gets offended? Well, when we put down some of the solutions that people argue for climate change, they’re not bad. They’re just not very effective. Some of them are actually bad. And, you know, the thing that we’ve just done in Europe, we’ll probably end up seeing in half a year was very bad. But fundamentally, that pisses off a much bigger segment than, you know, everybody who does tuberculosis think we’re, you know, the we’re the what’s the smartest thing since sliced bread. So it’s it’s not that there’s not constituents out there that like what we do. All the ones that get up on top think it’s amazing and not surprisingly. But there’s just so many more people who are advocating for the bottom things. In that sense, I think it’s it’s it’s more a question of saying, well, this is almost a poll of saying, what is it that makes sense for people? What is the religion that we make makes us feel like we’re doing something for the world? And for most people, it feels much better to be saving the planet, which you unfortunately are not actually doing instead of saving some kids lives, which just feels like, yeah. You know, our prime minister in Canada has just decided to do the same thing to Canadian farmers that that the Netherlands has done to the Dutch farmers. He’s going to force them because he likes to use force because he’s saving the planet, even though he’s not. He’s going to force them to reduce their nitrous oxide output. And here, get this man. This is something he decided that he’s going to do that without calculating the ratio of pollution produced to food produced. And so the provinces and the farmers are pushing back and saying, well, how about you judge our polluting use on the basis of how much food we produce? Wouldn’t that be like vaguely reasonable? And the answer from the feds is being no, we want an absolute reduction. And that’s exactly an example of this low resolution, narcissistic moralism that is substituting both for genuine religious conviction and for genuine knowledge. I would say our prime minister in Canada, he is he if it isn’t Jacinda Ardenne and Kamala Harris, it’s definitely Justin Trudeau, who are the poster people for this sort of thinking. So just just very briefly, it’s a it’s a great example of how economists would approach this conversation. It’s basically saying, look, there is something nice about this idea of reducing nitrogen deposits. It actually, you know, especially bio, just but also other people like the fact that there are low, low fertilizer areas where where different kinds of sparse plantations live. And that can be a nice sort of ecosystem. But if you ask most people, how much are you willing to pay for that? So the other set is we can’t produce as much food. We can’t keep our culture. A lot of farmers are going to go bankrupt. And of course, also that you’re just going to move this nitrogen deposit to, for instance, developing countries instead. Right. Exactly. You have to ask, so what’s the weighing of these two things? We do that all the time. And let me just give you this one obvious consequence called thinking. When you when you talk about the speed limit, most people, you know, if you if you don’t. So in the US, about what? 40,000 people die on the roads every year, mostly because people drive too fast. And the simple question is, well, shouldn’t you do something about it? If you if you don’t reflect very much, people would just say, yeah, that number should be zero. Well, there’s a very obvious way to get it to zero. It is to put the speed limit at five kilometers or three miles an hour. Now, nobody would get killed, but nobody would get anywhere either. So that’s of course why we don’t actually do it every year and every day. We decide that all of us. Yes, I would like to go at a reasonable speed and that will end up meaning some people will die. There’s a tradeoff here. Now we can have a sensible conversation. Do we want to have, you know, like, sorry, I’m a little unsure. Well, I should use miles or a kilometer. I’m just going to go with miles. Right. Okay. We use 55 kilometers. I didn’t do that. Did I 55 miles or 85 miles? And that’s a fine conversation. But nobody suggests it should be zero or three miles an hour. And that’s the conversation that we need to have in all these other things. So when we’re talking about nitrogen deposit, of course, we all want to have less rather than more. But we also have lots of other things we want to do.