How to make the world better. Really. With Dr. Bjørn Lomborg. (prrbooi9PNw)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=prrbooi9PNw

Bjorn Lombard 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 dollars 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 Thanks, Leiter. 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 and and why I mean 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 and and 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 Thanks a lot Jordan and so, you know 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 talk about and very often that ends up being the things That have you know, the cutest things that we can do That have you know, the cutest animals or the most crying babies of 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 a rupee Here will I do more good than if I spent that same dollar a rupee a 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 that slice bread But of course the the projects and the policies that are not so effective. They think we’re terrible So, you know 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. 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 what you 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 them about the methods that you used because I think they’re interesting So you’re absolutely right the the sustainable development goals We actually work with the UN back in 2015 when they were doing this. I it was it was it was about 60 to 90 it was a very unclear UN ambassadors I actually met with a quarter of them in New York and talked to each one of them said shouldn’t we try to Focus on the targets that would do the very most good and 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 had 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 you promise 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 right? So what happens there what happens there is that you the people who are doing that and 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 So 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 is not nearly as good as doing an enormous amount of good in the places where you can do The very most good with extra resources again 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 Okay So that’s that’s 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 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 it was available That yes, that was much much earlier on and that was mostly sort of a it’s a fun idea to say How would you spend a specific amount? Yes, and that was half So so we weren’t saying we should spend all of it in the exact way that we were talking about Okay 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 genuinely available can be 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? 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 That’ll both cost them labor they can’t do labor that day maybe they’ll have transportation costs They’ll have food costs. There’ll be extra other costs 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 are often also environmental So we try to take all of those All of those benefits so 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 now Obviously, I’m simplifying this yeah What it means is if you do it right 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 gonna do good So we did and this is not 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 gonna show you that and we’ll also put it up Here 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 doesn’t mean you buy the cheapest thing or the most nutritious thing Maybe you’re in the mood for you 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 a group here pay so spent okay, so now If I was thinking about critiquing this let’s say from a social science and our aura or our Political perspective the first thing that I would object is well How do you how how is it that you know that your calculation of the costs and the benefits are? Accurate so you and and how do you know that they’re? Essentially as free as possible of any undue political bias So because the urge 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 Compositions 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 to take such criticisms into account? 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 $60asocialgoodforeverydollaryouspendNowyoucouldarguewell,whatwouldbesortoftheidealideologicalspinyoucouldputonthat?Well,onethingistosaywell,didyoumeasureallhumansasequal?YesWeactuallydidandofcourseyoucouldarguefromaneconomicpointatthesamepointthatthe{y}^{\prime }renotIthinkveryfewpeoplewouldwanttodothatButwhatwedoisacrossallthisalltheseareasallpeoplearerankedasequallyimportantThatisequallyvaluableandtha{t}^{\prime }sobviouslypoliticalconsiderationButIthinkoneifwewerelookingacrosstheworldthatistherightoneIfanythingthatprobablymeansthatmostrichcountrypeoplearevaluedatwaytoolittleComparedtowhatthe{y}^{\prime }reactuallywillingtodothemselvesButthismeansthatweactuallygetthewaitingrightinintensesenseofsayingwhereareyougoingtospendextramoneyifyourgoal?Istohelpthemostintheworld,right?Okay,soyouusedanapproachthatwasbasicallyIwouldsayasolidmeasurementapproachfromfromthetheoreticalperspectivebecausetheideawouldbetohavemultiplemeasuresofthesamephenomenonorsetofphenomenaandandtoseewheretheyDovetailandsothatwouldbeanissueofreliabilitysoifyouhavemultipleteamsofeconomistsandTheyallconvergeonsomethingthatapproximatesanagreementandyoulookatadiverserangeofopinionsThenyoucanbereasonablycertainthatyo{u}^{\prime }veconvergedonsomethingtha{t}^{\prime }srealandthenyoualsohaveanelementofpeerreviewinthereYes,anotherwayofGoaheadandexactlybothoftheseareobviouslyimportanttomakesureasyousayyougettheReliabilityandyouactuallygetsomethingthatresemblessomewhatofatruthButtherealpointhereisofcourseinsomewayifwejusttakeastepbackThisisnotaquestionaboutgettingtheabsolutenumbersexactlyright.ImeanthatwouldbewonderfulifwecoulddothatButwhenIjusttoldyouthatyouknowvaccinationeverydollaryouspendwillgiveyou$60 back in dollars 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? $600yougetbackbecausereallythepointhereistocompareacrossalltheseotherthingsthatyoucouldalsohavespentthatmoneyonAndtherewehaveamuchgreaterSortofreliabilitybecausew{e}^{\prime }reprettysurethatevenifyouchangetheassumptionverymuchYouwillstillgetmuchofthesamekindofpictureYouwo{n}^{\prime }tgetexactlythesamepicture,butyo{u}^{\prime }llverymuchgetthesamesortofpicturewhichindicatesthatther{e}^{\prime }safewtargetsTha{t}^{\prime }lldoanamazingamountofgoodandther{e}^{\prime }salotoftargetsSojustdoalittlegoodandsoagainwetrytosayisdotheamazingtargetsfirstOkaysothemostcriticalthingforyouguystogetrightistherankorderingandnottheabsolutemagnitudeaslongsoaslongasyourmethodisStableacrossallthedifferentdomainsthentherankorderingshouldberelativelystablenowDidyougetaParetodistributionwithregardsto?PositiveimpactofinvestmentlikeisthereahandfulofinterventionsthatthatareclearlyheadandshouldersabovetherestintermsofgeneratingpositiveeconomicoutcomeandandWhatandwhatproportionofthetotalnumberofsay170goals?Likeifyoudidifyouaccomplish10$32 of good so more than four times more good So you can simply spend your the same dollar and do more than four times more good Then you would do if you just scatter shot 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 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 Not there’s a 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 And 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 fewer of those kids are gonna die few of moms are gonna die so we actually estimate you’d see about six hundred thousand 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 we actually have the last Big free trade discussion from doha back in 1999. It’s basically, you know, stopped 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 here Maybe you could tell people in some in some detail what what what that would mean practically like what are the sorts of barriers that you guys Determined were particularly troublesome that need to be addressed So we actually estimate it 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 a sorry in the developing world would be about a thousand dollars richer per person per year In 2030 so by the end of these sustainable development goals, we would lift 145 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, uh, 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 uh, uh a family planning or or or a 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 uh, Attention from from celebrities and get in the newspaper and that’s not because they’re 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 let’s talk about global warming because my okay so my my 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’ll be listening to the detractors because I believed after I had reviewed the un development goals I’d come to the same conclusion that you had come to before I knew what you had done Which was these things need to be rank 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 up from an agnostic perspective Let’s 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 while 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 bother so many people because they have an a priori commitment To what constitutes the most salient catastrophe? and that’s clearly at the moment is is the idea that climate change Or global warming depending on how you want to phrase it constitutes such an immediate and pressing threat of of overwhelming economic magnitude that a sacrifice of any amount is worth some probability of forestalling that and so um 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 Yeah, so we actually uh, we we had two Nobel laureates, uh look over all of these 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 Uh 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 Uh, so clearly what you should be doing is scrap those subsidies for fossil fuels Not only because they lead to more uh 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 There are other places where 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 Uh expanded immunization as we talked about that’s an incredibly good way. We know that we’re right now cut child mortality That is under five mortality from about 12 million kids dying every year in 1990 to about 6 million That’s a fantastic achievement. Of course 6 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’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’ll actually do 60 dollars worth of good another incredible investment is in nutrition uh, 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 uh long in school you learn less and you come out and you actually are not very productive We know this now we 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 refound 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 learned 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 just 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 thereabouts Right. And so what you’re doing is forestalling cognitive deterioration in the 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 and so yeah It’s also for other people right if you’re good, you’re likely to make other people better too. Yeah, 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 that nutshell, correct me if i’m wrong That seemed to be where you guys focused or where that where your focus took you and so Can 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 and more people die Not of infectious diseases because we’ve actually tackled many of those but they die 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 we give this to 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 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 you know, it’s been with us for hundreds of years and and we’ve 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? 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 going to 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 On what are the costs 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 we’ll be you know, 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 it’s the end of the world as you rightly point 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 the 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 investment. Some of them are But even you know, for instance adaptation or or get more energy for for poor countries Give you sort of you know, two five dollars back on the dollar, which is nice But in the big scheme of things there are much much better places you can spend your resources on So, okay. So so so let’s look at let’s look at this well because i’m really curious about this hey because I can’t see any Apriori 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 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 or 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 going to 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 law 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 an underlog 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 forced all 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 Yeah, so there’s there’s a lot of questions in there. Let me just try to unpack unpack some of this. Uh, so 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’d get it less whether it was a lot and 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 up because you’re only looking at the difference And you’re not actually looking at the actual input The 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 Pre-substitution, so i’ll actually join in on in this in this conversation. I think that happens in a lot of different areas Yeah, it does 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? 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 we ask How much will it cost to cut carbon emissions so much that we will see a significant change in temperature? And of course to remember we emit co2 not because we want to bother algor 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’re uh fertilizer that subsidize, you know 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 uh 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 novella lauret And the uh in climate economics and many others have asked And so it’s so it’s really important It’s really important to note that you’re not questioning the science as it stands now Consensus so that this is purely a consequence of economic calculation. This is this is only about saying good co2 impacts Warming and it does so in the way that 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 poor house that 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 either So I want to sort of dial back on the rhetoric both on the alarmists 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 poor house if you want to you know have solar panels in winter But no, these are both manageable costs. 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’d probably solve about one percent of it So basically by incurring a cost of one to two 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 is incurring Minus a slight amount and then you paid one to two percent every year That’s the basic idea 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 You’re actually incurring higher cost than the problem you’re trying to solve So we can 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 that actually not get very many benefits Okay 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? I think I mean if you read most of the internet, there’s a lot of things that’ll just say oh you’re a denier You can’t say, you know, sort of we’re going to ex-communicate 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 you know, that’s political posturing 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 that you can think about cost benefit analysis actually showing that climate impacts are worth doing One is to say ah 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 going to die kind of thing And you know, that’s not implausible, especially if you say sort of I’m not going to put a percentage on it, but it’s not it’s greater than zero So there’s a non-zero chance that global warming will spin out of control and will basically be You know relegate a few couple a hundred couples of humans living on an ice-free antarctica So 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 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 one percent chance of an infinite apocalypse, it’s worth any donation of resources to stave it off so 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 there’s 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 also the possibility of political instability and and 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 loop spiraling out of control but we can’t introduce them into the argument unless we can parameterize them because All it it’s it’s an unfair game move in some sense because you can’t be not wrong about that You can exactly and and and you’re you’re basically saying if 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 the poverty sort of breeds a lot of risk But it’s also that they breed terrorism and willingness to you know, uh do a lot of bad things You know focused so it’s not just something that happens But you know, uh thrown by terrorists and our ability to keep you know All the plutonium in the world under under lock and and you can get catastrophe from anything Yeah, so abject poverty for example, you could imagine that there might be two socioeconomic 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 and the sense that the world isn’t laying itself out fairly and that that would justify political political and revolutionary instability And then 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 and a lot of other things, you know, once you once you get failed states you get a lot of bad things happen 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 of large-scale political political and economic instability And that’s another way of staving off an apocalypse Yes, okay, and then on and so Can I just say so nordhaus actually looked at this the nobel lorat? Because some people argued exactly what you said is 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 uh, the earth yet and nordhaus did that. I thought that was very very elegant Uh, we know that we can track all of those asteroids out there 99.99 percent but We chose to only track 90 percent 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 opportunities to do this? And absolutely given that there are some risks and there are probably more downside risks and upside risks for global warming We should probably do a little more than what we would otherwise do and that’s exactly what the models show us And those are the models that we use in making the estimate of how much should you be 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 I’m sorry I’ll I’ll try to be a little more careful 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 up 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 you know, 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 sorry 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 what 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 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 this is no longer A question of saying you spend a dollar and 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 make 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 20 to 40 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 gonna be consistent you need to do it across all areas and then you need to be very hungry and only eat porridge Right. Okay. So your claim basically from a methodological perspective is that your rank ordering remains constant across variable discount rates Yes, right and that’s a really that’s a really important. That’s a really fundamentally important It’s not in time. I gotta say it does change some of these Yeah, sure Because obviously, you know education for instance is one of those where you pay now and you only get benefits 10 20 You know 50 years out when the kids grow up and they actually 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 Uh, the future is important when you talk about climate. Yeah, if you want to say the future is important It’s important across all areas and then you really have to do everything and you know forgo Having a good life yourself, right? Okay well so the other thing that’s worthwhile 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 time frame 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 out 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 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 you know books I’m i’m using that as a metaphor but trying to help them in a specific way imagine back a hundred years ago Yeah, our forefathers back in the 1920s. Uh, no 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 turned into problems. There’s a wonderful book called today now uh Sorry Oh god, i’m forgetting uh tomorrow now Oh god Anyway, it’s it’s it has a great and clever title, which i’ve clearly screwed up now, but it it was uh back in 1893 The uh the world 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 said, you know, I love the fact that i’m not going to be around when this prediction comes You know true or not. Uh, but then they made all their predictions and they were almost entirely off You know, there’s some that were pretty close. You know, there’s one that predicted sort of email in the sense of you know, those I can’t pronounce that pneumatic pneumatic tubes Yep, which is sent away and you know It 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 could actually send a letter everywhere You just sort of put it in the very very long tube, right? Right, which is kind of right 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 trying to help the world in the future by for instance cutting temperature might be one of the least effective ways of helping also, 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 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 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 happen to be and so that investment in early childhood Development seems particularly apropos in that regard and it 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 are 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 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 Concerns of the fundamentally dispossessed and so you’d 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 there 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 If some of the objections to what you’re doing are ideologically motivated. Why doesn’t that cancel it out? It’s a good question. I I don’t quite understand it my sense is that in some ways so so there 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 to both 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 obit together with the south african 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 an other op-ed where I said there were two meetings taking place in new york One was this tv place where you know, biggest infectious disease killer in the world where almost nobody turned up and then there was the other meeting, uh, which macron and the french president and Bloomberg and others attended to which was the climate summit which everybody attended to. Yeah. Yeah I sort of pointed out the this disparity and then it was picked up in all kinds of developed country papers 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 worry that their kids might be in a position Where global warming is really going to undermine right? But even that 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 market 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 that extraordinarily And it’s it’s a good point and and I I think you have a consistent argument The the thing that i’ve i’ve decided a long time ago that I don’t want to argue and and I think that’s probably the difference between Of being more psychologically focused. I don’t want to argue on what I think might be people’s Uh sort of inner motivations. I want to actually take them at face value and you know, 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? They’ll almost do no good instead of spending possibly less money and doing yeah About more good and it creates some cognitive dissonance and I think it it switches people a little bit towards Spending smarter, but yes, you’re right, but tell 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 There and there isn’t anybody else doing it and so it might it might be that it will take 20 years or 25 years or something like that for the approach that you’re uh, um Publicizing and have developed to for people to actually know about it You know, and so what what do they say? You should assume ignorance instead of malevolence when you can Oh, sorry, 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 to eliminate those barriers but but but it could just be as I said, it could just be ignorance And and look one of the one of the problems that we’re facing constantly and I know why there’s no one else doing this and we we’re doing because When you do prioritization, you inevitably end up antagonizing a lot of people. I mean Climate change is the the most obvious one. But for instance, uh sanitation water and sanitation huge problem Uh, so, you know, there’s about two and a half billion people affected by this One of the points that we emphasize is 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 and 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 see 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 the truth is I think it’s necessary If you’re going to do this that when you rank order, of course the the the the costs that come out on top Love it and the costs that don’t don’t love it But it’s also important to make that argument and so so at the end of the day certainly my sense is it’s necessary to do it but it will always Entail a great amount of sort of uh unease Uh, because it doesn’t feel like we’re saying, you know kumaya 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 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 going to 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 the where the limitations in your methods? Well, look there’s No method does everything so we have two very obvious problems. One is not all issues is about money So we’re 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 uh make a you know killing from not freeing up Global markets and those are the ones that usually Kept 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 uh, uh what? Uh, then we are not making the argument. Uh 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, right? so people would object that you’re 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 okay. I I would tend to say it’s probably you know, sort of 70 or 80 percent I’m not quite sure how you make that up But but you know, the biggest the biggest policy decisions in most countries is the national budget Uh, it’s very clear that that is a very substantial part of what we decide how are we going to allocate money? Well, the problem with that’s a big issue But we don’t know the only issue right? Well, the problem with the objection is that well the people who are objecting could be right that your methods are narrow I mean you’re making the case 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 I would just say we’re not talking about those last 30 percent that are you know, purely about uh, you know Should we have transgender bathrooms or something? Yeah Well, that’s possibly a bad idea because that actually has cost and and building a third Bathroom or something but you know, there are some things that are mostly just about Uh, what do you think? What do you believe? What what are your intuitions? Rather than actual costs, right? But there’s no way of adjudicating between those claims That’s the problem that all the people do is push each other around about them if they can’t 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, uh, 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 dollars worth of good We don’t look at who gets that 60 dollars now To be fair most of the things as you as you’ve also pointed out Most of the things that we actually indicate are 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 tent in the sense of helping The world’s poorest mostly would but it’s not part of our framework and there’s how come making that well because uh, Because cost benefit analysis is basically assuming that everybody is equally worth We talked about that that that earlier there’s there’s no way of sort of well you can but it becomes incredibly Unclear and and very unintuitive if you start making weightings and 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 you know, devil’s 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 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 for the menu So do you okay? Okay. Well appreciate that very much. Um, do you have any sense what? Do you 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? so it and and and it depends a lot on because So we estimate that you need about two billion dollars the the the global funds that we were also campaigning with Are saying it’s about five point eight billion dollars And to be quite honest, i’m not quite sure which of these two numbers is the right number I I think the uh, but you know Compared to you know, just to give you a sense of proportion, uh, the the amount of subsidies that we give to solar and wind Uh is about a hundred and twenty billion dollars right now Uh, so, you know, we’re talking about a very very small amount. Uh, and certainly it’s a very small amount You know, it’s it’s about what? Um Three four percent of global development, uh spending so the amount of spending that we that we spend every year to try and help Improve the world and it would probably be one of the very very best things that we could do. So again People need to know these things And I think that if they didn’t know that they would start to care if they actually knew so, okay, I got I got two Final questions for you. I think and then i’ll ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to That bring to people’s attention that 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 there 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? Yep, can can I i’m going to answer in reverse because I think the the france point is is really a good a Good argument if you ask people around the world Uh, 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, you know goes from 100 to 200 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 Uh, if you know if you keep ramping up, uh the taxes on on fossil fuels if you keep making Energy more more expensive. It’s going to harm first of all the poor the most. Yes very very regressive and that obviously, uh is Means a lot of heartache for a lot of poor people These are typically also the people who are least able to defend themselves because they’re just so busy Uh, just surviving their day to day 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 on 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 your very very expensive solutions are never going to be 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 on co2 remember He actually had a democratic congress, uh the first two years of this Uh 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 Uh, and and we never got to that We actually did a a climate consensus where we brought together 27 of the world’s top climate economists three No, but lord 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 rd So fundamentally if we could invest in making better green energy for the future Hopefully eventually get it to be so cheap that it will outcompete fossil fuels We will solve global warming just simply because the green energy became cheaper if you’ll allow me a slight detour Do it do it Back in the 1860s, uh, the world was hunting whales to extinction because whales have this wonderful Should I just say that again? Yep. Yeah. All right Back in the 1860s We were hunting whales to extinction because whales have this wonderful oil that just burns a lot cleaner and a lot Bright and so it was wonderful for the houses in in in north american and europe to burn these This whale oil and they were all excited about it and it had the Bad side effect that was actually Pushing whales 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 about a decade was you stopped killing whales because you got a better technological product And we’ve seen this a lot of times that technology can simply invalidate on old issue A problem that you thought was almost intractable if you get cheaper smarter new technology people will switch Right, that’s imposing imposing limits 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 that has all the advantages and fewer disadvantages. That’s really how Problem wind turbines solar panels and 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 Not buying coal fire power plants. So it’s really not rocket science that way now I’m not saying it’s going to be easy and it’s certainly not going to happen right now But it’s the only viable long-term solution. It’s much cheaper and much more effective So we estimate it that for every dollar spent you’ll actually do about 11 dollars of climate benefit Okay, so that’s on that’s not that’s on alternative energy. Yes. Yes. Okay 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, uh in uh, 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 dollars in good for every dollar you spend so very clearly you know I sat down with a guy from uh from uh, A family foundation a big family foundation that you know, we were at a malaria event and and you know We sat and politely conversed and he uh, you know, he would say so what do you do? I well I work with the Copenhagen consensus center, you know, totally blacks there And then I asked him what do you do? Well, we work with malaria, you know Did you know that actually if you spend a dollar in malaria, you’ll do 33 dollars worth of good? And I was like, yeah, we did that number and you know, and and and 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’ve definitely helped a lot of these top ideas get a little easier ride in the world Okay, so let me ask you another cost benefit. Okay, so yes, so What if I said? Wouldn’t it be interested? 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 you’re 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 you could your economists compute the utility in dollar value of establishing an extensive and appropriate marketing scheme because you’d think that there are I see it because i’ve been watching what’s been happening with the democrats in the us and they’ve a pack that that I know about has been Making new ads for the democrats trying to move them to 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’d be 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 podcasts so that more people know about this and so all right Yeah, so so the short answer of course is we have tried to do that because we’re economists and we think that would That would be a good idea. So let me just tell you about something else that we’ve done So, uh, so we’ve been working a lot and we were just talking about the globe 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 Yeah So when we go and tell the indianses 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 off to somebody else The globe is never anyone’s problem. Yeah, someone else needs to fix this and so what we’ve increasingly done is to do this in nations Uh, so we did this a couple years ago in bangladesh Uh, and in the nation, of course, there’s 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 prioritization 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 like no no no. Oh, yes. Yes. I like this Yeah, and so they did some of the things hot so that solves the tower of babel problem to some degree Is that there’s 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 as a psychological Intermediary. Yeah, so there we actually estimate that every dollar spent on what we were doing Uh does you know at least ten thousand dollars worth of good simply because we help 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 rational or anything We simply changed it a little bit We gave if you will headwind to the poor ideas and tailwind to the good ones And so we know that in haiti we’re 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, uh from from gana, uh where we’re going to do our next project So we want to bring this to africa great great. So you can do it globally and locally Yes, and I think we’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 gana, it’s probably also true in the neighboring state. You’re going to get the overlap. Yeah, exactly So I think I would love to you know, uh have have uh, have Have a lot of uh extra sort of pr ability But I think what we what we really need is just simply to be able to come out with all these great ideas And I think we are reasonably successful But but the problem in some ways 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 cute animals Yeah, but god 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 A disconnect in identification and so to harness the latent power of the nation state and its patriotism and its Its economic what would it’s rather local economic structure seems to me to be a real 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 um and in a non-ideologically Self-serving manner which 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 10 years You know 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 Yeah, so that people can get access to that 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 Then i’ll also do that with with whatever links when do you need it for? What as soon as as soon as you can get it because i’ll put this up 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? 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 we and we probably make this mistake that we think of ourselves a little bit sort of technocrats and and you know Fiddlers in the margin kind of thing and it actually you’re right and it is exciting because it is ridiculously 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 correct making us all feel warm and fussy Actually doing the things that perhaps are not top of our mind not top of the The the agenda but would just do an amazing amount of good. Why the hell are we not doing that? Thank you very much for for getting me back in the groove and actually I really I really believe that and incredibly useful. Yeah Yes, I think I think it’s a mistake not to view what you’re doing as a as an exciting adventure I think it’s a form of of what it’s a form of non-helpful humility Yeah And and I think we I i’m danish As background and and one of the things we’re very very good at is self-effacement Uh, and so yes, you’re probably right. So you’re calling people to idea you’re calling people to a great adventure here But you’re 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 going to be error And so of course And I think we’ll find that people will respond to this video in a very very positive way and because there I I do believe that there 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 more less dismal for a lot of people I think that they will start to view that as something that’s part of a great globe national and global adventure and and because you’re agnostic and because you’ve done the leg work 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 going to do something positive And so so anyways, like I said, I thought it’d be incredibly Wonderful and let me let me just say uh again We we said a couple of times that something that i’ve done. I I I need to say, you know I’m just a sock puppet that talks about all these things This is the work of an incredible amount of really really smart economists So one of the three in the world’s top economists, you know seven noble laureates Those are the guys who’ve actually done the work and who are you know giving the credibility? Uh to all of this, uh this research and that’s why we can say with great amount of certainty This is not just sort of a 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 Right, so good. That’s it. Well, and 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 uh, I’m hoping that you know a million people will watch this and that we’ll get another million podcasts out of it and that This will help disseminate what you’re doing broadly I think that would be I think that would be lovely you bet. Thank you Okay, and it was it was great also meeting you and I hope our paths will cross again soon And uh, you know, we should uh, we should make a habit of this. Yes, we definitely should Yes, we definitely should well when you start to develop some more of the national indices Have you worked on any western countries like on canada or the united states or so we we I wanted to do that So we we haven’t done it in the u.s Just simply because it’s too dysfunctional 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 well That’s that’s nowhere you gotta you know, give it your best shot Use the information that’s out there now and give us the knowledge because politicians are going to make decisions next year Uh, 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 Uh, it ends up very much like a very interesting anthology of of of points that yes Yes directions have no sort of consistency as what we’re trying to What would it cost what would it cost to have something like this done for canada? Uh, so any sense the short the short version is it cost about two and a half million dollars simply it’s it’s it doesn’t really scale Well, uh, so you know doing it for for gana is the same thing as doing it for canada How long would it take uh, uh 18 months God, that’s such a good idea. So two and a half million dollars 18 months. Yeah. Hmm. Okay. Well, i’m good Maybe we can figure out how to raise the money 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 canna would be a great way to also get sort of bridge point Into the u.s without doing it in the u.s. Yep. Yep Well, that would be good because we’re flailing about politically and it would be nice to yes 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 brilliant Jordan it was great talking to you again. Thank you very good. I will send you the stuff Uh, so basically tonight that’s great. You’re wonderful. Wonderful. Yep. Well, i’ll get this up as soon as I can Wonderful. All right. Talk to you soon. Okay. Take care. Bye. Bye. Bye