Bjorn Lomborg and his team at the Copenhagen Consensus think tank in Denmark have been working for years on a project called "Spending Prioritization" to help us prioritize our spending on solving the world's most pressing problems. And they've got a lot of ideas. In this episode of the Daily Wire Plus podcast, we talk to Bjorn about the project, and talk about some of the ideas they've been working on for the past decade and a half, and why they think we should all be prioritizing the things we can do the most for the most amount of money, in the shortest amount of time, with the highest return. We also talk about what they're working on, and what it means to prioritize the things that matter the most to us, and how we can make the most of our time and money to make the biggest impact on the world we can. This episode is sponsored by Enbridge Sustain Smartflow. To learn more about their Smartflow, visit EnbridgeSustain.smartflow.org/sustain. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes and promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. We'll be looking out for you in the coming weeks for our upcoming ad-free version of the show. Thank you for supporting the show! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's your favorite thing you're doing? 2: What do you like about the show? 3: What are you looking forward to in 2020? 4: What would you like to do in the next episode? 5:30 - How do you'd like to hear from me in the future? 6: What is your biggest pet peeves? 7: What s your biggest takeaway from this podcast? 8:15 - What are your biggest piece of advice? 9:40 - What is the one thing that you're looking for in the world? 10:00- What are some of your biggest challenge? 11:00s - What kind of thing you would like to see me talk about in 2020 and why you're most passionate about? 12:00 | What s the most important to you? 13:30s - Why do you want me to talk about it? 14: What's the biggest thing you re going to do next? 15:40s - what do you think about the future of the planet?
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00:00:30.000Hello, everyone, watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms and on the Daily Wire Plus, too. I'm here today. I'm pleased to be here today live. So that's also good.
00:00:55.520With Bjorn Lomborg, who runs a think tank called Copenhagen Consensus in Denmark, and Bjorn has done the most detailed and reliable analysis of spending prioritization, I would say.
00:01:09.800There are a number of enterprises that are underway on the international front, but it's a chaotic mess of jumbled priority, and that's a big problem because it makes everything super expensive and inefficient, which might be a feature rather than a bug.
00:01:24.780And Bjorn and Bjorn and Bjorn and his team have spent, well, it's more than a decade now, damn near 20 years, determining how to prioritize our approaches on the national and international front in relationship to the multitude of problems that beset us.
00:01:43.360And it's important to stress multitude because we have a proclivity in the woke West to reduce the entire panoply of problems that confront us or opportunities, depending on how you look at it, to a single climate emergency, and then to reduce that to a single cause, carbon.
00:02:00.980And then to assume that if we oppose carbon, we're now acting as the appropriate representatives of the Messiah on the planet.
00:02:08.900And none of that constitutes acceptable theology, let's say, let alone policy.
00:02:14.100So I'm going to talk to Bjorn today about what he's been up to recently, but then we're going to walk through 12 projects that Bjorn and his team of economists, team of, it's a meta team of economists, because there's many teams working, what they believe, where we can do the most good for the least amount of money in the shortest period of time with the highest return, all of that, multidimensional calculation.
00:02:46.660So I'm a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
00:02:51.460And so I gave the first presentation of the project that you just described, which is basically a project that tries to say, look, we'd love to do everything in the world.
00:03:00.360And everybody sort of promises everything in the world.
00:03:03.520And we actually have it documented because the world has made 169 different targets, its priorities.
00:03:12.640They're called the Sustainable Development Goals, where we promised we're going to fix, as you mentioned, climate.
00:03:18.260But we're also going to fix world peace and we're going to get rid of corruption.
00:03:22.520We're going to make sure that everybody are well-educated and don't starve and get out of poverty and that we get more parks for handicapped people in urban areas and we recycle more.
00:05:07.820You have to build the local apparatuses.
00:05:09.600And so I asked the powers that be, why the hell there were 200 goals?
00:05:16.200And their answer was, well, each of the priorities has a constituency somewhere spread across countries or in a given country.
00:05:24.700And we don't want to offend anyone by rank ordering our priorities.
00:05:30.460And I thought, well, that's all well and good.
00:05:32.300Plus, the upside of that from a political perspective is that you get all the moral cachet of being concerned about everything that you would be concerned about if you were good,
00:05:43.440without any of the responsibility for actually doing any of the difficult work.
00:05:47.880And so you can go to COP26 or whatever the hell it is and posture on the world stage about your commitment to these wonderful goals and appeal to 200 different constituents
00:05:57.080and walk away while having agreed to spend a tremendous amount of money stupidly, but shining, at least in your own eyes and in the eyes of the press.
00:06:31.540Look, it's much easier for politicians to just promise everything to everyone because then they just seem like good guys and they don't actually make any decision.
00:06:38.800Of course, they do in reality because every year you have a budget and you don't have infinite resources on your budget.
00:06:45.380So in your budget, you actually show what it is that you really care for.
00:06:49.200And so it ends up being a few things that you focus on, but often without much concern about efficiency.
00:06:55.100So what we're trying to bring to the table is, in a sense, and that's what economists can do.
00:07:00.200We're basically helping, and I should just say I'm a pretend economist.
00:07:03.320I'm actually a political scientist, but I work with a lot of really, really smart economists.
00:07:07.440And they look at how much will it cost and how much good will it do.
00:07:13.380Remember, some things are very desirable, but really, really hard to do.
00:07:17.660So, you know, for instance, getting rid of corruption in general.
00:07:19.900I'll actually tell you we do have one good solution.
00:07:22.280But in general, corruption, huge problem.
00:07:24.460It costs about a trillion dollars a year or more for the world, but we don't know how to get rid of it.
00:07:29.300It's really hard to do because the systems that are needed to get rid of corruption are exactly the ones that are corrupt.
00:08:01.360But now you've said very little by saying that because the devil in that situation is definitely in the details.
00:08:07.780And so you might want to fight corruption, but that's not a plan.
00:08:10.840And so you set up teams of economists that would rank order the goals, and then you averaged across the teams, which I also thought was brilliant methodologically.
00:08:22.400Because you could argue that any given economist's analysis of both costs and benefits has a margin of error of some substantive amount, right?
00:08:31.960And because it's hard to assess and to forecast.
00:08:36.380But technically speaking, from the perspective of a social scientist, I would say that that's an unbeatable methodology, even though it's still going to produce a somewhat problematic end.
00:08:47.440Because you zoom in on where there's multidimensionally measured consensus.
00:08:57.100And at least in principle, you'd be ironing out the errors of any given team of economists.
00:09:06.820Again, we're not trying to make the truth of the world, but we're just trying to make a much better resolution of what it is that we can do.
00:09:14.600So we try to identify what are things that we can actually do.
00:09:20.280And that we have good evidence for works at low cost with high benefits.
00:09:25.400And so what we're essentially doing is we provide, if you will, a menu for the world.
00:09:30.860So a menu typically comes with, you know, it tells you what you're going to get, how much you're going to get, a tiny pizza or a big pizza, and how much will it cost.
00:09:40.400And then, of course, you can make those decisions.
00:09:42.660So economists are not going to tell you, you should do this.
00:09:52.140So on the same way, in the world order, we make a list of all the things, of all the things you'd like to do, where are really smart, or that is really very effective policies that we know works that would help a lot of people at low cost.
00:10:12.640Well, and we should talk a little bit about that as a fundamental presupposition, too, because there's a kind of utilitarianism there, which is that all things considered, in the absence of other compelling reasons, you should do what you can the most efficient way.
00:10:29.620Well, because what efficiency means, because people might say, well, you know, some things are so important that it's worth spending the money on.
00:10:35.200It's like, yeah, but there's many things that are important, and unfortunately, when you spend, given that resources are not precisely infinite, when you spend money in one place, that means you're not spending it in another place.
00:10:48.600And so, though, if you believe that you have 12 things to do that are good, or 169 things, you have to value efficiency from the moral perspective, because in principle, efficiency is precisely that which allows you to address more than you would have otherwise been able to manage.
00:11:07.520And otherwise, what, are you going to make an argument for inefficiency, which is, so...
00:11:13.100Well, yeah, yeah, so this is, well, I like this, because it zeroed us in, your methodology.
00:11:20.260It also reduced a landscape of problems that was so diverse and disparate that there was no way anyone sensible could have possibly undertaken the enterprise.
00:11:31.660And then it's extraordinarily practical.
00:11:36.300Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:11:41.420Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:11:49.660In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury, it's a fundamental right.
00:11:54.780Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:12:03.980And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:12:07.300With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:12:14.680Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?
00:12:18.340Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:12:22.760That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
00:13:11.600And also, the other thing that I found very striking was that in comparison to the amount of money we're already spending on all sorts of things,
00:13:24.000the amounts that your teams have been recommending are really rounding errors in the total, let's say, international, in the total world of international or national governance.
00:13:34.940And so, but it's also demoralizing in some sense because you understand that we could do the 12 most important and efficient things
00:13:43.340and do a lot of good for a lot of people, especially the absolutely poor.
00:13:47.300And we could do that without really even noticing it.
00:14:02.000And, well, that's something we'll delve into today.
00:14:03.840So we're going to go through Bjorn's 12 suggested projects and talk about their cost, but also about what they could do for people.
00:14:15.900And tell me if you think this is true.
00:14:18.120So imagine that there's a rule of thumb ethic that underlies the selection of these projects.
00:14:23.660We talked a little bit about efficiency, but I think the ethic is something like,
00:14:27.780Well, if we could alleviate material poverty, absolute poverty, not relative poverty, but to start with, at least absolute poverty, enough for people to eat, make sure they have access to hygienic facilities,
00:14:42.280make sure they're not inhaling indoor pollution to the point that they're dying, they're not starving.
00:15:37.120And so we've tried to estimate, and this is an impossible task.
00:15:40.120So we reasonably assume that we've covered the whole area of saying, where can you get an enormous amount of good for every dollar or shilling or rupee spent?
00:15:50.820And what we find is, so we're looking at, where can you spend a dollar and at least do $15 of good?
00:15:58.020This is a threshold that we've set, which basically means that all the things we're talking about are incredibly good things.
00:16:06.320Imagine if you could give a dollar to this one project and you could do at least $15 of social good.
00:16:13.580Well, we should also point out that's not an expense then, that's an investment.
00:16:17.920Well, it is an expense in the sense that because if you've spent the dollar, you don't get $15 back.
00:17:12.520It'll cost a lot to make you a little better off, but it costs actually very, very little to make the world's poorest much better off.
00:17:19.380And so it also has this moral sense of that is how we should be prioritizing.
00:17:24.600Yeah, well, that's the proper payment for privilege, you know, I would say, is once you have the economic wherewithal to be contemplating projects of the sort that we're describing,
00:17:34.600you also have the moral requirement to do that in a manner that's intelligent.
00:17:38.600And also, you might say, that would address the problems of the people in the most want first.
00:17:44.260Yes. And one of the things that we find doing these projects is that it's amazing, as you also pointed out, that we spend so much time focusing on some of these other things like, you know, plastic in the oceans and climate change and many other things.
00:17:59.840These are all worthy things, mind you.
00:18:02.020And a lot of people will argue that we should do them because they will help the world's poor.
00:18:06.660The problem is they'll help them very ineffectively.
00:18:09.640So for every dollar spent, they will only help them in infinitesimal part.
00:18:14.660Whereas if we spend that dollar on some of these projects that we're going to be talking about, you can have an enormous impact right here, right now.
00:18:21.800So again, it's not to say that we shouldn't do all the other wonderful things.
00:18:25.340I'm simply making the argument we should probably do this first.
00:18:29.560And so just to give you a sense of proportion, just to get a scale of this, the 12 solutions that we come up with, they will, in total cost, about, you know, I'm giving you a rough estimate here because there's different ways to measure, it'll need about $35 billion a year in funding.
00:18:48.480And that funding could come from, you know, rich people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
00:18:52.640It could come from our development agencies, USAID or GIZ or whatever, you know, we're spending $175 billion in development aid every year.
00:19:01.740So surely we could afford $35 billion.
00:19:04.720This is, as you mentioned, a drop in the bucket.
00:19:09.740If we spent that amount of money over this decade, we would every year save 4.2 million lives.
00:19:18.000This is 8% of everyone who dies in the world.
00:19:20.540We could avoid 8% of all death in this world.
00:19:23.540Of course, we won't do that indefinitely because people have to die, but we would postpone that.
00:19:28.340That would be an incredible boon for a lot of people and a lot of societies.
00:19:32.900And at the same time, we would generate economic benefits worth $1.1 trillion.
00:19:39.680Just to give you a sense of proportion of what that means, that means that we could almost make sure that every person in the poorer part of the world,
00:19:48.040so the 4.1 billion people that we talked about before, could get about $1 every day, almost $1 every day each person.
00:19:57.240So these projects that cost virtually nothing could save 8% of everyone who dies and get almost all people in the lower, in the poorer half of the world, $1 a day.
00:20:08.300Okay, so I want to investigate something a little bit darker before we start our discussion about the projects per se.
00:20:14.580So one of the things that I see emerging on the chaotic and confused 169 goals front is an ethos that is also not precisely explicit, but that sort of lurks beneath the surface.
00:20:29.940And there are claims that go along with it.
00:20:32.100It might be that people who are listening think, well, this is all obvious, obviously we should spend money in the most efficient way, we should spend the least amount of money we have to spend, we should do it so that it does the most good.
00:20:42.800But we should also understand that there are real resistances to this approach.
00:20:47.460And so one of the resistances that's implicit and sometimes explicit is the notion that, well, first of all, we're playing a zero-sum game in the world, so if some people are rich, other people have to be poor.
00:21:00.040And then, which I don't believe to be true at all, and economists generally don't buy as an argument.
00:21:05.340And then the next argument would be, well, let's say we could make poor people richer, but that's not sustainable because to support everybody in the world at the Western standard of living
00:21:16.700would take five Earths, I've heard that figure bandied about, and there are probably, you know, there are way too many people on the planet.
00:21:23.280In any case, there should only be 500 million or a billion or maybe 2 billion if they lived, you know, in poverty.
00:21:30.640And so there's this notion that the planet is truly finite in some fundamental sense.
00:21:36.260There's definitely not enough for everyone, and there's no way that we can elevate the living standards of the poor because all that would mean is that we're going to use up all the available resources faster.
00:22:07.860There were a few people who were, you know, kings and dukes and those kinds of people.
00:22:13.720And then the rest of us were living in absolute poverty.
00:22:18.020We've pretty much eradicated most of that.
00:22:20.060Now it's only 10% that live at less than $1 a day or what is really $2.15 now.
00:22:26.380But, you know, so fundamentally, we can absolutely have a world that's much better, that's much richer, and one that's obviously much better for these people.
00:22:34.200Now, people are worried about, well, can we sustainably live on this planet?
00:22:37.880But what you have to remember is this is not a question of whether we have the resources to it.
00:24:07.040You both, you know, you cut down your forest to keep, you know, to slash burn so you can grow some food for your kids.
00:24:13.420You'll have terrible indoor air pollution.
00:24:15.520You will typically have very inefficient production.
00:24:18.220You will have all kinds of bad things.
00:24:20.440So what we really need, not just morally, to get people out of poverty and to get them to a good life,
00:24:26.280but also actually that's the only way we can get people to be so involved that they will want and they can afford to care about the environment.
00:26:09.500Yeah, well, people, the thing is it brings up this specter of the 1920s spats-wearing capitalist who's like a complete libertine on his time off.
00:26:17.440And, you know, it's hyper-consumption wealth.
00:26:21.060But that's not what we're talking about at the low end of the world.
00:26:23.480We're talking about providing people with enough material security so that they can adopt a longer-term view.
00:26:29.500So that they can start to pay attention to what sort of planet their children and grandchildren might inhabit.
00:26:34.860And so that there's both reliable provision of food and shelter, basic health care, hygienic availability, and opportunity for their children.
00:26:48.260And so it's not exactly wealth we're after here.
00:26:53.540But also, you know, the people who are watching this, but also everyone who's really worried about that we're going to become these libertines from the 1920s, do they live like that?
00:27:29.020Well, it's also, as you pointed out, it's also one of the things that struck me when I was doing my original research on this front 15 years ago was the overwhelming evidence.
00:27:39.900And Marian Tupi's group, HumanProgress.org, has done a nice job of delineating that,
00:27:44.480that there's actually a positive relationship between population growth above a certain level of standard of living, let's say,