https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=D4ZsD3fL4_0
You’ve been wrestling with this since the mid 1990s, and you wrote a whole bunch of books, The Structure of Solutions and the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, I think was the first one, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I think really established your reputation and your notoriety for that matter, Global Crisis, Global Solutions, Cool It, Rethink HIV, How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, which I really liked. I thought that was a great book. Like truly a great book. Rajasthan Priorities, Bangladesh Priorities, Haiti Prioritizes, and Andhra Pradesh Prioritizes. And your latest book, which we’ll talk about a fair bit today, is False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. And so, well, with that introduction, I’m gonna let you talk about your work for a bit. Hey, thank you. It’s great to see you again, Jordan. So look, what I try to do, and really I have a big organization, well, actually a fairly small organization, but lots and lots of researchers that work hard on all these problems, is simply as you say, we don’t have infinite resources. We can’t do everything first. So it’s incredibly important that we have this conversation about saying, if you are to spend an extra dollar or a rupee or whatever your currency is, where can you spend that and do the most good first? Because as you also pointed out, there are lots of problems. And while we tend to think about them in the international arena, of course, most problems actually hit people on a very personal level, it kills them. And so, one of the things I find slightly ironic, as we’ve just come out of 2020, and everybody has been very, very concerned about COVID. And rightly so, it’s a big challenge. But at the same time, of course, every year about the same number of people die, as have died from COVID last year, every year, the same number of people die from tuberculosis. This is a very simple disease. We’ve known about it. It’s probably killed about a billion people over the last 200 years. So it’s probably one of the biggest killers of humanity. And we know how to fix it. We fixed it in the rich world, which is why we don’t worry about it anymore. But it’s also very cheap to fix in the developing world. But because it never gets any attention, we don’t talk very much about it. We don’t do very much about it. And that’s why 1.6 million people every year die from tuberculosis. And so, my point simply is to say, let’s have a discussion about saying, if you were to spend an extra dollar, would you do the most good if you spend it on tuberculosis, or on COVID, or on climate, or on infrastructure, or on the many, many other solutions that are out there? And what we do is we simply work with lots of economists to take a look at what is the cost of a solution and how much good will that deliver, not just in terms of economics, that is how much better off will we be, or how less worse off will we be, but also how much better will we be off socially, that’s typically people not dying, people not being sick, people not having to pay their doctors, not experiencing the loss of a loved one, and also environmentally, that’s not so much relevant for tuberculosis, but of course, when it comes to deforestation, or loss of wetlands, and the air pollution, indoor air pollution, and many of the other problems of the world also have an environmental component. We try to add up all of those. And so basically say, how much will this cost? How much good will it do when you incorporate all of these things and turn them into dollars? And then you can basically say, for every dollar you spend, you do this much good of social benefit. And then we simply ask, if there are lots of solutions where you’ll spend a dollar and maybe do a dollar and a half of good for the world, that’s nice, but there are some solutions where you can spend a dollar and do hundreds of dollars of good, shouldn’t we focus on the hundreds of dollars first, the place where you make much, much more good for every resource you spend. That’s really the thinking. It’s not rocket science, but we just don’t think about it very often. It kind of is rocket science, because one of the things you wanna do when you send a rocket into space is make sure that it doesn’t explode. And what that means is that you have to pay unbelievable attention to the details. I think it was an O-ring malfunction that brought down the challenger. And so an O-ring was rocket science in that situation. What really struck me when I started to think about international problems was precisely this lack of methodology. So I’m gonna recapitulate the claims you just made so that the listeners and viewers are very clear about, like you make a number of assumptions and all of those assumptions are questionable, but anyone who questions them bears the burden of coming up with a better set of assumptions and justifying them. And so you can imagine someone objecting to your rather casual acceptance of the idea that you can put a cost value on all of these problems. Anybody who might object to, who might have some emotional objections even to something like the monetary system and to capitalism, for example, might be appalled at the idea that you could put a dollar value to human life essentially. But in the absence of a better solution, well, that’s exactly what I mean. You have to have a better solution. So your first claim is that we have limited resources. Okay, so that seems reasonable. We have limited time, we have limited energy, we have limited resources that are at our disposal as individuals and as states. And so we can’t devote an infinite amount of resources to every problem. So that seems pretty much clear. If we’re gonna solve problems, we might as well start with the ones that are the most serious. So we’ve got to figure out how to define that. Then we wanna concentrate on the serious problems that we can fix. And then we wanna concentrate on the serious problems that we can fix most effectively so that we have some resources left over to solve other problems. Okay, so let’s start with the problem set itself. So for example, in your book, False Alarm, you talk about climate change and you, you’re a supporter of the claim that there is going to be climate change of approximately the degree, so to speak, that the International Climate Commission projects. And you also accept the claim that much of that is manmade. But then you situate climate change as a problem in a host of other problems. So I’d like to know how you came up with the set of problems to begin with. So very clearly it’s impossible to enumerate all the problems that we have. But what we try to do is we’ve taken our starting point of the UN’s different definitions. So for the SDGs, the last set of goals that the UN has used, the ones that are running from 2016 to 2030. SDGs are? Sustainable Development Goals. So they’ve basically looked across a wide range of areas. So talking about health, obviously a big issue, poverty, obviously a big issue, the issue of education, the issue of being able to live securely that is without violence and in many different ways. And they enumerate a lot of different other things, clearly avoiding loss of biodiversity, avoiding living on an uninhabitable planet like climate change, many of these other things. Now, I’m not saying that this is a perfect list, that it’s made by a committee, but it’s probably one of the best ways that we can say humanity has tried to enumerate all the different challenges that we’re facing. That’s the political aspect of this is a consensus. There’s been somewhat of a consensus with regards to the set of problems, even if not with regards to their prioritization. And so the UN has made itself open to some degree to its constituent members to list whatever problems they see as pressing. And those would include women’s rights and diversity and oceanic management. And while virtually every problem that you can think of that might’ve hit the headlines or been a target of media attention over the last say two or three decades. And so again, people might quibble with that list, but then it’s instrumental that they develop a better list and justify it. So you start with the UN list and that’s been derived as a consequence of lobbying pressure and political machination and all those sorts of things. And hypothetically, that’s good enough. And then the next question is how to address these? And I was very frustrated when I first encountered that list of goals because I thought, well, there is no possible way that these can all be addressed in the next 30 years with any degree of success. It’s just too complex. We have to start somewhere. The problem with that is that as soon as you say that you have to start somewhere, then you take one need above all others and you say that those who lobbied for that particular need take priority. And you need a justification for that. That’s something other than power struggle or political expediency or even effective messaging. It might be nice to have a more hands-off objective method. Okay, so then you organized a team of economists fundamentally, right? Why economists and not biologists say? So you definitely need all the knowledge from biologists, especially when you’re talking about things that impact the natural world. You need to talk to epidemiologists when you’re talking about diseases. You need to talk to doctors also about diseases. You need to talk to educational experts when you talk about education. But the crucial bit that’s connecting all of them is to talk about what are the resource needs that is basically how much money are we gonna have to pay in order to get a solution when you talk about global warming or a solution for education or a solution for tuberculosis or COVID or any other thing. So what we’re talking to is all those economists who do that. So climate economist or education economist or health economist. These are all guys who interface with all of the specific knowledge, but they also study how much is this gonna cost and how effective is this solution going to be. So it’s basically about saying, what can you do about global warming or what can you do about COVID? Remember, no solution is gonna fix all of the problem. Most solutions will fix part of the problem. And so what we’re saying is, what will a realistically best sort of effort look like? How much will it solve and how much will it cost? And then we try to estimate what’s the relative value that you provided to the world. And as you started off saying, that’s a difficult task, but it is crucial if we want to know that we’re not just focused on the topics that have the most cute animals or the people who scream the loudest in the media, but actually know what works. A postmodern critic of your work might claim that it’s inter-radically contaminated with the bias brought to it by the discipline that you chose to do this election and by the, what would you say? By the unexamined political motivations of the participants, those being the economists. But you don’t rely on the judgment of one economist. You have a sequence of economists analyze these problems. That’s correct. And then you aggregate across their findings. I believe that’s the method. Yes. And again, look, it’s impossible to imagine that anyone can do this entirely objectively. So as you’re pointing out, clearly economists come with a certain way of looking at the world. They typically start, take the starting point of saying, there’s limited resources. How much will the resources do here? What’s the opportunity costs? So typically, for instance, if you want to vaccinate children in third world countries, it means that their moms will have to take off typically the whole day, walk with their kid to this place where they’re gonna get vaccinated. That has a significant cost for the family. You need to incorporate that cost. Economists will tell you not taking that into account is a failure of recognizing that’s part of the cost of vaccination. But of course, it is only one way of looking at it. I happen to think that it’s a fairly convincing way. And as again, as you point out, at least you have to come up with another way of looking at this if you want to criticize and say we should do something else. Yeah, well, that can’t be reiterated too many times is that it isn’t good enough to point out the hypothetical flaws of this approach. It’s only good enough to put forward a viable alternative. And I haven’t seen a viable alternative. No, right now, the way the world organizes its priorities is very much about who gets to set the agenda, who have the cute examples, the things that we care the most about, the things that are easy to get into the media and so on. And surely that’s not necessarily the best way to decide how we spend trillions of dollars on global issues.