The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Bjørn Lomborg

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00:00:51.040 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

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00:01:12.040 Thank you.

00:01:42.040 Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish author and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a project-based

00:01:50.760 U.S. think tank where prominent economists are seeking to establish priorities for advancing

00:01:56.480 global welfare. He's the former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment

00:02:01.400 Institute in Copenhagen. Bjorn became known internationally for his book, The Skeptical

00:02:07.240 Environmentalist in 2001, and How to Spend 75 Billion Dollars to Make the World a Better

00:02:12.920 Place. Cool It in 2007, which is also a movie, and lately published in 2018, Prioritizing

00:02:20.760 Development, a Cost-Benefit Analysis of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, among many

00:02:27.040 other works and books. And so I'm hoping we'll have a very productive conversation today, and

00:02:32.460 welcome to this discussion. Thanks a lot, Jeremy. All right, so why don't you just start

00:02:38.420 by letting people know what you've been up to over the last, let's say, two decades. I know

00:02:43.880 that's a very broad question. And why? I mean, I've been interested in talking to you because

00:02:48.660 I read a number of your books a few years ago, and I was interested in your economic analysis

00:02:54.500 as a way of determining which crises, let's say, or which potential crises are real, and

00:03:01.960 also how they might be managed most intelligently. Thanks a lot, Jordan. And so, you know, fundamentally

00:03:08.920 what I try to do is to say, and this really is very, very obvious, we only have a limited

00:03:14.420 amount of resources. So let's make sure we focus those resources on the places where we can help

00:03:20.660 the most, where we can do the most good. Remember, what is it that we mostly focus on in the world?

00:03:25.760 It's very often the things that get the headlines, the things that people talk about. And very

00:03:31.160 often that ends up being the things that have, you know, the cutest animals or the most crying

00:03:35.560 babies of the groups with the best PR. And surely that's not the right way to prioritize. The right

00:03:41.720 way should be to look at, if I spend a dollar or a peso or a rupee here, will I do more good

00:03:48.600 than if I spent that same dollar or rupee a peso over here? So basically asking across all the

00:03:54.360 different areas you can spend resources, where do I help the most? Now, obviously, that's a huge

00:04:00.220 conversation in and of itself, because it's not easy to just determine that. But the basic idea is

00:04:05.080 simply to say, let's focus on the places where you can do the most good, rather than the places where

00:04:11.380 it makes us feel the best about ourselves. So that's really what I've been trying to do for two

00:04:16.880 decades. And, you know, prioritizing the world and trying to say, where should you spend money,

00:04:22.400 of course, makes the projects that we say, these are the really, really great interventions.

00:04:27.940 They all love us and think we're like the best things that slice bread. But of course, the projects

00:04:32.820 and the policies that are not so effective, they think we're terrible. So, you know, it creates a lot

00:04:37.960 of antagonism and makes a lot of people annoyed and interested. But I think it's crucial to ask these

00:04:43.460 questions. Well, one question would be, what's the alternative? You know, like when I was looking

00:04:48.200 at the UN Development Goals, for example, if I remember correctly, there was something approximating

00:04:52.500 200 of them. And this was a few years ago, I worked on a UN panel. And I thought, well,

00:04:57.480 the problem with 200 goals is that you can't have 200. They're not goals if there's 200 of them,

00:05:03.620 because you absolutely have to prioritize in order to move forward, assuming some limitation on

00:05:08.240 resources, which is exactly what what you what you just described. And so then then the question

00:05:14.220 would become, well, how do you calculate benefit? And that's a really difficult problem, which is,

00:05:19.600 I think, why it wasn't addressed with the mishmash of 200 goals, apart from the fact that you're going

00:05:24.480 to offend people by rank ordering their priorities. So why don't you tell people a little bit about the

00:05:29.740 about the methods that you used? Because I think they're extremely interesting.

00:05:33.460 So you're absolutely right. The sustainable development goals, we actually work with the

00:05:38.440 UN back in 2015, when they were doing this, I, it was, it was, it was about 60 to 90, it was very

00:05:45.120 unclear. UN ambassadors, I actually met with a quarter of them in New York and talked to each one

00:05:50.500 of them said, shouldn't we try to, you know, focus on the targets that would do the very most good?

00:05:55.140 And of course, each one of them said, yes, individually. But the, the combined effort of all

00:06:02.220 the UN ambassadors was, of course, not to actually do the best goals. It was to get everybody's goals

00:06:07.380 in there. So, you know, the Norwegians had three ideas, and the Brazilians had four, and everybody

00:06:12.040 else had, you know, three or four that they wanted in there. That's why we ended up with 169 targets,

00:06:17.720 which, of course, simply means you promise everything to everyone everywhere. And that means

00:06:22.620 a lot of people are going to be very disappointed when 2030 rolls around. And we haven't actually dealt

00:06:28.280 with all the things that we promised. Right. So what happens there, what happens there is

00:06:32.640 that you, the people who are doing that, and including everyone on the list, maximize short

00:06:38.440 term emotional well being of the people who had been doing the consultation at the cost

00:06:43.160 of medium to long term progress. But then again, they're not going to be around in 2030 in all

00:06:47.940 possibility to suffer the consequences of that. So or at least, yeah, or at least they're not

00:06:52.860 nobody's going to see that we failed to do as much good as we possibly could, because

00:06:57.400 we will have done a little bit of good everywhere. But doing a little good everywhere is not nearly

00:07:02.920 as good as doing an enormous amount of good in the places where you can do the very most

00:07:07.300 good with extra resources. Again, remember, we're estimating the total cost of the SDGs is

00:07:12.740 somewhere in the range of two and a half trillion dollars. And the actual amounts available is about

00:07:19.480 140 billion dollars. So we literally have five percent of what we're promising. So we're promising

00:07:25.640 the world. And then we say, hey, here's a small amount of money. And let's spread it thinly. So

00:07:30.600 everybody gets a little bit of it. Okay, so that's that's so that's partly where you derive your premise

00:07:36.100 that we're dealing with limited resources is that you're actually using a real number. And the number

00:07:41.100 you're using is what's actually available. And when you wrote how to spend 75 billion, you basically

00:07:45.800 took half of what it was available. That yes, that was about much, much earlier on. And that was

00:07:52.000 mostly sort of a, you know, it's a fun idea to say, how would you spend a specific amount? Yes,

00:07:56.800 and that was half. So so we weren't saying we should spend all of it in the exact way that we

00:08:01.800 were talking about. Okay, so to agree with you, so to agree with you, people have to agree that

00:08:06.880 everything can't be done for everyone all at once at infinite expense, and that it's useful

00:08:12.260 practically, and and also, even in a utopian sense, in the desirable sense to rank order,

00:08:18.960 so that the obvious money that's available, the money that's genuinely available can be targeted

00:08:24.180 best. And so then the next question would be, how do you go about that in the least controversial

00:08:29.420 and most empirically sound manner to do the rank ordering? So we use cost benefit analysis, which is a

00:08:36.700 very well established economic tool that tries to say, all right, for each of the proposals that you

00:08:41.640 come up with, how much will that proposal cost? Now remember, this is not just economics, most of

00:08:48.000 the costs will be money. But for instance, if you want to immunize small children, you also have to

00:08:54.560 ask the mothers to spend perhaps a day to go to the place where their kids will be immunized,

00:08:59.700 that'll both cost them labor, they can't do labor that day, maybe they'll have transportation costs, 0.98

00:09:05.380 they'll have food costs, there'll be extra other costs. So we try to add all of those costs up and say,

00:09:10.560 okay, so what's the total cost of this project? Then we look at all the benefits. And remember,

00:09:14.920 the benefits are both economic, yes, but they're also social, for instance, kids not dying or kids

00:09:20.260 not being sick. And they're often also environmental. So we try to take all of those, all of those

00:09:26.340 benefits, so both the economic, the environmental and social benefits, add them all up into one number

00:09:32.080 that is denominated in dollars or rupees or whatever your currency is. And then you can say,

00:09:37.680 well, for this many dollars, you can do this much good. And that means you can also say for every

00:09:43.220 dollar spent, you can do this much good. Now, obviously, I'm simplifying this. But in a sense,

00:09:49.280 what it means is if you do it right, and a lot of economists spend a lot of time trying to make

00:09:53.620 this right. If you have all the same parameters across all these different areas, it actually means

00:09:58.560 you can start comparing different interventions across all the different areas and say, where do you

00:10:04.280 get the biggest bang for your buck? And of course, that is what matters if you're actually going to

00:10:09.480 do good. So we did, and this is not, please don't buy this book, because this is a very long and

00:10:15.120 academic book. But we did this long and academic book with more than 50 of the world's top economists

00:10:20.420 looking across all these different areas. But the beauty is, you can actually put it in just one

00:10:26.560 chart. And I'm going to show you that. And then we'll also put it up on your website.

00:10:30.280 So this is the one page chart that has all the targets here. And for each of the targets,

00:10:38.100 there's an analysis that says, how much will this cost? How much good will it do? And then it shows

00:10:43.080 for every dollar spent, how much good will it do? If it's a long line, it'll do a lot of dollars of

00:10:48.360 good. If it's a short line, not so much. So it really becomes this very simple menu for the world

00:10:54.460 to say, where can you spend your resources? And of course, this doesn't mean, you know, just like when

00:10:59.640 you go into a restaurant, you get a menu doesn't mean you buy the cheapest thing or the most

00:11:04.400 nutritious thing. Maybe you're in the mood for, you know, an unhealthy cake. But it's incredibly

00:11:10.360 important to know what is the cost and what's the benefit. And knowing this makes it a lot more

00:11:16.840 likely that the world is going to focus itself on some of the really long bars where it can do a lot

00:11:22.160 good for every dollar or rupee or peso spent. Okay. So now, if I was thinking about critiquing

00:11:29.000 this, let's say from a social science or a political perspective, the first thing that I

00:11:35.240 would object is, well, how is it that you know that your calculation of the costs and the benefits

00:11:42.200 are accurate? And how do you know that they're essentially as free as possible of any undue

00:11:50.920 political bias? So because your critics no doubt will object, as perhaps they should,

00:11:58.460 that there will be, let's call them implicit biases, even though I'm not a fan of that idea

00:12:04.480 in some sense. There's going to be underlying presuppositions that weight the manner in which

00:12:08.960 the economic calculations are made. And then, of course, you also have to buy the idea that the

00:12:13.340 cost-benefit analysis approach is actually valid. So can you tell me what you guys did to forestall

00:12:19.240 such or to take such criticisms into account? Sure. And so, first of all, we don't just ask one

00:12:25.920 team of economists. We also have other teams critiquing those economists. And we exactly try

00:12:31.140 to make sure that there's sort of critiques from both sides, if you will. So we know that this is

00:12:35.940 not just an ideologically driven number, but it's actually an empirically pretty clear number that says,

00:12:42.420 for instance, if you focus on vaccinations, you're actually going to do, and what we find is,

00:12:47.460 you're going to do $60 of social good for every dollar you spend. Now, you could argue, well,

00:12:54.060 what would be sort of the ideological spin you could put on that? Well, one thing is to say,

00:13:00.000 well, did you measure all humans as equal? Yes, we actually did. And of course, you could argue

00:13:05.520 from an economic point, the same point, that they're not. I think very few people would want to do that.

00:13:10.680 But what we do is, across all these areas, all people are ranked as equally important,

00:13:17.320 that is equally valuable. And that's obviously a political consideration. But I think, one,

00:13:22.260 if we're looking across the world, that is the right one. If anything, that probably means that

00:13:28.000 most rich country people are valued at way too little compared to what they're actually willing

00:13:32.840 to do themselves. But this means that we actually get the waiting right in the sense of saying,

00:13:38.180 where are you going to spend extra money if your goal is to help the most in the world?

00:13:43.420 Right. Okay. So you used an approach that was basically, I would say, a solid measurement approach

00:13:49.140 from the theoretical perspective, because the idea would be to have multiple measures of the same

00:13:55.600 phenomenon, or set of phenomena, and to see where they dovetail. So that would be an issue of

00:14:02.980 reliability. So if you have multiple teams of economists, and they all converge on something

00:14:08.180 that approximates an agreement, and you look at a diverse range of opinions, then you can be

00:14:13.260 reasonably certain that you've converged on something that's real. And then you also have

00:14:16.940 an element of peer review in there. Yes. Another way of... Go ahead.

00:14:22.320 And exactly. Both of these are obviously important to make sure, as you say, that you get the

00:14:27.480 reliability, and you actually get something that resembles somewhat of a truth. But the real point

00:14:34.180 here is, of course, in some way, if we just take a step back, this is not a question about getting

00:14:38.940 the absolute numbers exactly right. I mean, that would be wonderful if we could do that. But when

00:14:44.180 I just told you that, you know, vaccination, every dollar you spend will give you $60 back in the dollar,

00:14:49.220 it'd be very, very unlikely that that's the right number. But it's much, much more about getting the

00:14:54.860 order of magnitude, right? Right. Sure. Is it $60, or is it $600 you get back? Because really,

00:15:01.640 the point here is to compare across all these other things that you could also have spent that

00:15:06.200 money on. And there, we have a much greater sort of reliability, because we're pretty sure that even

00:15:13.840 if you change the assumption very much, you will still get much of the same kind of picture. You won't

00:15:20.000 get exactly the same picture, but you'll very much get the same sort of picture, which indicates

00:15:24.620 that there's a few targets that will do an amazing amount of good. And there's a lot of

00:15:28.660 targets that will just do a little good. And so again, we try to say is, do the amazing targets

00:15:33.480 first. Okay, so the most critical thing for you guys to get right is the rank ordering, and not the

00:15:37.840 absolute magnitude. So as long as your method is stable across all the different domains, then the

00:15:44.020 rank ordering should be relatively stable. Now, did you get a Pareto distribution with regards to

00:15:49.400 positive impact of investment? Like, is there a handful of interventions that are clearly head

00:15:57.420 and shoulders above the rest in terms of generating positive economic outcome? And what proportion of

00:16:03.060 the total number of, say, 170 goals? Like, if you did, if you accomplish 10% of the 170 goals,

00:16:09.940 how much of the economic bang for your buck would you accrue?

00:16:13.740 I should actually just say I didn't plant that question. That's wonderful, because that's exactly

00:16:19.040 what we tried to do. So if you do across all these areas, every dollar spent will do about $7 of good

00:16:25.640 if you just did it across all of them equally, which is probably unreasonable to assume, but it's not

00:16:30.780 unreasonable in sort of first order approximation. If you spend it on the best 19 targets, you would do

00:16:38.660 $32 of good, so more than four times more good. So you can simply spend the same dollar and do more

00:16:46.340 than four times more good than you would do if you just scattershot it across all areas. And again, what

00:16:52.780 you also have to remember is a lot of the things that we're looking at which are really, really

00:16:56.460 effective are also things that are much easier to do. So two of the best things that we point out

00:17:02.680 is actually contraception. So family planning for women. Why? Because if you do that, there's about 1.00

00:17:10.720 13% of women that still don't have access to contraception. And if they got that access, 0.80

00:17:17.860 they would be able to better space their kids. And we know that that means that you can actually have

00:17:21.900 your kids when you're ready to have them. That means you put more effort and investment into your kids

00:17:27.280 so they'll grow up better, they'll be fed better, they'll have a greater chance of surviving,

00:17:31.740 but they'll also become more productive in the long run. It also means fewer of those kids are

00:17:36.460 going to die, fewer moms are going to die. So we actually estimate you'd see about 600,000 fewer

00:17:42.000 kids die. And you would get a demographic dividend that is basically because you have slightly fewer

00:17:48.760 kids, you can invest more in them, you get better return on every kid, you have slightly higher growth

00:17:54.620 rates. And so we estimate for every dollar you spend on family planning, you will do $120 of social

00:18:00.960 good. The other great thing is invest in free trade. Free trade is something that we've sort

00:18:07.720 of forgotten. We actually had the last big free trade discussion from Doha back in 1999. It's

00:18:15.900 basically, you know, stopped being a concern, obviously with Trump, but also with many other

00:18:20.880 people who've sort of given up on free trade. Yet we have to remember that one of the basic things

00:18:26.000 that have made us wealthy is the fact that we trade with each other, you do what you're good

00:18:30.760 at. And I do what I'm good at. And that means when we exchange, we actually all get better off.

00:18:35.580 There's some issues here.

00:18:36.960 Maybe you could tell people in some in some detail, what what what that would mean practically,

00:18:42.200 like what are the sorts of barriers that you guys determined were particularly troublesome that

00:18:48.160 need to be addressed? So we actually estimated what would it take to get a reasonably successful

00:18:54.760 Doha round, which would not be free trade, but it would be freer trade. So it would simply be reduced

00:19:00.780 tariffs, make it easier for everyone to trade across the world, especially from the developing world to

00:19:06.520 the developed world. And one of the outcomes we found was not only that on average, every person in

00:19:12.180 the world would be about sorry, in the developing world would be about $1,000 richer per person per

00:19:17.820 year in 2030. So by the end of these sustainable development goals, we would lift 145 million

00:19:23.980 people out of poverty. But we would simply make everyone better off because if you're in a poor

00:19:30.540 country, you would be able to sell the things that you do best, a little easier, a little cheaper,

00:19:35.980 and hence be able to market more of it. And you'd be able to buy back more from other developed

00:19:41.040 countries. And that would make everyone better off. So again, this is not rocket science. I mean,

00:19:46.680 if you look at China, for instance, China over the last 30 years lifted, what, 680 million people out

00:19:53.380 of poverty, very largely driven by the fact that they could trade with the rest of the world. Imagine

00:19:58.520 if we could make that happen for sub-Saharan Africa, if we could make that happen more for Latin

00:20:03.280 America. So again, it's more about realizing that for very little money, some of these things can do

00:20:09.380 an amazing amount of good. And we tend to forget because there's no focus on these issues. We

00:20:15.320 don't think about family planning or free trade or indeed vaccinations. We think about all kinds of

00:20:23.140 other things like plastic waste or global warming or many other things that have a lot of sort of

00:20:29.020 attention from celebrities and getting in the newspaper. And that's not because there are no

00:20:34.380 problems. But it's about getting a sense of what's the magnitude of how much good we can do

00:20:39.380 with little money. And let's talk about global warming because my, okay, so my, my, I've talked

00:20:46.980 to lots of people about your work. And you know, you obviously have a lot of admirers and you have a lot

00:20:51.280 of detractors. And I'll be listening to the detractors because I believed after I had reviewed the UN

00:20:58.400 development goals, I'd come to the same conclusion that you had come to before I knew what you had done,

00:21:03.320 which was these things need to be rank ordered because otherwise it's, it's not a plan. It's not

00:21:07.680 a strategy. And so then there has to be some mechanism for rank ordering them. And I ran across

00:21:12.540 your work and I thought, well, that seems to be exactly right. I mean, from a, from an agnostic 0.83

00:21:17.380 perspective, let's say it's an interesting idea because what you have to start with is the willingness

00:21:22.220 to be agnostic about what the worst problems are. And, and while the worst and most solvable problems,

00:21:28.440 let's say at the same time, you have to be agnostic about that. And I actually think that that's part of

00:21:32.920 the reason why what you do bothers so many people because they have an a priori commitment to what

00:21:37.420 constitutes the most salient catastrophe. And that's clearly at the moment is, is that I, the idea

00:21:44.020 that climate change or global warming, depending on how you want to phrase it, constitutes such an

00:21:51.520 immediate and pressing threat of, of overwhelming economic magnitude that a sacrifice of any amount is

00:21:58.560 worth some probability of forestalling that. And so, um, one of the things that's striking about

00:22:06.760 your list, and maybe what I should do is have you tell us what the top seven or eight are, just so

00:22:12.080 that we have some sense of what the priorities are. Because one of the things I noticed was that

00:22:16.860 they don't tend to include measures that are designed to forestall global warming.

00:22:21.440 Yeah. So we actually, uh, we, we had two Nobel laureates, uh, look over all of these evidence,

00:22:28.920 all of this evidence and set priorities and come out with 19 targets that they focused on. And

00:22:34.380 actually one of them was, uh, stop fossil fuel subsidies, which is obviously a stupid idea in 0.99

00:22:40.000 so many different ways. Uh, remember this is most in developing countries, uh, where it's very often done,

00:22:45.260 uh, to, you know, basically pacify the population a little bit like you, uh, make, uh, subsidies for

00:22:51.160 bread or other things. Uh, but of course the idea of subsidizing fossil fuels like Venezuela has done

00:22:56.500 and Indonesia has done, uh, is basically a way of subsidizing fairly wealthy people to drive their

00:23:02.460 car that you have to have a car in order to enjoy this, uh, and drive it more and actually create more

00:23:08.100 congestion, more air pollution, and with very few benefits. Uh, so clearly what you should be doing is

00:23:14.440 scrap those subsidies for fossil fuels, not only because they lead to more, uh, air pollution and

00:23:19.720 CO2 emissions, but also because they're just terribly bad use of public resources that could

00:23:24.880 have been spent on education or health or other places where they could have done a lot more good.

00:23:29.700 But just to give you a sense of some of the other ones that we were talking about, uh, expanded

00:23:34.480 immunization, as we talked about, that's an incredibly good way. We know that we're right now cut 1.00

00:23:40.660 child mortality, uh, that is under five mortality from about 12 million kids dying every year in

00:23:47.260 1990 to about 6 million. That's a fantastic achievement. But of course, 6 million is still

00:23:52.540 a mind boggling number. That's way, way too large. And we actually know that by investing about a billion

00:23:58.040 dollars, we could save a million kids every year that you've got to almost say that again for a

00:24:03.880 billion dollars. You could save a million kids lives every year. Why the hell is that not one of our top

00:24:09.740 priorities? And that's also why we show for every dollar spent, you'll actually do $60 worth of

00:24:15.160 good. Another incredible, uh, investment is in nutrition. Uh, so, you know, everybody kind of

00:24:21.680 knows that it's, it's not right that people are starving and we know that we could actually feed

00:24:26.900 everyone. The main reason why people are still starving is because they don't have enough money.

00:24:30.760 It's not because we can't produce it. So it's because they're poor and they don't actually have

00:24:34.560 the demand capacity. But the real tragedy of malnutrition is that if you get it when you're

00:24:41.960 really small, so from zero to two years of age, your brain develops less. And that means when you

00:24:47.800 get into school, you're actually less able to learn. And that stays with you for your entire life.

00:24:53.580 You stay less, uh, long in school, you learn less and you come out and you actually are not very

00:24:59.620 productive. We know this now. We, we've had this as a theoretical argument for a long time. Uh, but

00:25:04.760 researchers and some of the researchers that we work with have now actually proven this because they

00:25:09.480 went back to an old study, uh, done in Guatemala in the late 1960s, uh, where researchers went to two

00:25:15.860 small villages in rural Guatemala and gave the kids there. So the really smallest there to two year

00:25:20.980 olds, good food. And then they took two other rural villages nearby and gave the kids essentially

00:25:26.860 sugar water. Of course you couldn't do this today, but the brilliant thing about it is, is our

00:25:31.980 researchers then refound these kids. They're now in their late thirties, early forties, and you could

00:25:36.740 see what had happened. And it was exactly what the theory predicted. If you had gotten good food,

00:25:42.860 you stayed longer in school, you'll learn more every year in school. And so when you came out,

00:25:48.300 you were much more productive. And one of the ways we measure that is you had higher incomes.

00:25:53.380 If you avoid it being stunted, you had 60% higher income. That's just a phenomenal outcome. So again,

00:25:59.700 spend money, for instance, on malnutrition by getting good food and also research and development into

00:26:04.760 better yielding varieties. And you can do an incredible amount of good for every dollar. We

00:26:09.400 estimate $35 or thereabouts. Right. And so what you're doing is forestalling cognitive deterioration

00:26:15.320 in the, in the first two years. And because cognitive ability is a great predictor of long-term

00:26:19.680 success, then you're producing people who are much more likely to be economically productive for

00:26:25.720 themselves and for other people. Right. And so, yeah. And the crucial bit is it's also for other

00:26:30.000 people, right? If you're good, you're likely to make other people better too. Yeah. Right. Oh yes.

00:26:35.240 That's an absolutely crucial issue. So, so yeah. So, so it's quite striking. It was quite striking to

00:26:42.580 me when I came across your work to find out to what degree it was focused on targeting children's

00:26:48.420 health in some fundamental sense in the developing world. That seems to be, I mean, if you had to put

00:26:53.680 it in a nutshell, correct me if I'm wrong, that seemed to be where you guys focused or where that,

00:26:59.240 where your focus took you. And so what else? Can I just say, because there's also some other very

00:27:05.640 low hanging fruit, for instance, what you're seeing increasingly across the world is that more and more

00:27:10.580 people die, not of infectious diseases because we've actually tackled many of those, but they die

00:27:16.200 from old age diseases like cancer and heart disease. Those are by far the biggest issues. Cancer,

00:27:22.940 it turns out to be fairly costly to deal with, but heart disease, we've actually now figured out

00:27:27.860 pretty much how to deal with, not to the extent that we will live forever, but that we can make

00:27:32.480 people live much longer. And that's basically by giving them very cheap and off patent heart

00:27:37.900 medication. So we give this to a lot of middle-aged people in the developed world. And it's very,

00:27:43.940 very cheap to also do in the developing world. So we can save about three years of life for these 0.54

00:27:49.240 elderly people, both men and women, and it costs peanuts and you can basically make all lives longer. 0.86

00:27:56.800 And so that's one of the places where we also show there's a huge benefit.

00:28:00.960 We also emphasize, and this is again, one of the depressing things that we should be focusing a

00:28:06.460 lot more on tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is now the world's leading infectious disease killer. It's no

00:28:12.260 longer HIV AIDS. That's still a good idea to invest in, but it's actually an even better idea to invest in 1.00

00:28:18.280 tuberculosis. But again, because it's an old disease, it's, you know, it's been with us for hundreds of

00:28:23.020 years. And we've kind of learned how to fix it a hundred years ago. It's not an issue in the

00:28:28.320 developed world. So most people don't want to hear about it, don't care about it, but it's a crucial

00:28:33.180 killer that kills 1.4 million people every year in the developing world. And we have the means to

00:28:38.700 eradicate pretty much all of those deaths very, very cheaply. So again, that's one of the places

00:28:43.700 where we say spend money here because you can do an amazing amount of good. So I think we're just

00:28:48.580 looking for where are the really good deals. If you want to do something about global warming,

00:28:54.520 as you then mentioned, you should ask yourself, well, how are we going to fix this? So there's

00:28:59.840 two things to global warming. One is, as you mentioned, there's a sense in which people believe

00:29:04.800 it's the overwhelming danger that's going to undermine the entirety of human civilization.

00:29:11.000 And just like pretty much all other problems, that's just not true. This is a problem. It's not the

00:29:16.380 end of the world. If you look at the economics that's been done, the Nobel Prize was just

00:29:21.580 awarded in climate economics to William Nordhaus this year. And he's been a guy working almost

00:29:27.860 three decades on what are the costs and the benefits of climate action. And he finds the

00:29:34.500 cost of climate. So climate change is about, and he's backed up by a lot of other economists,

00:29:40.980 is somewhere between 2% and 4% of GDP by the end of the century. So remember, by then we'll be,

00:29:48.540 say, four or five times richer. So we'll be 405% as rich as we are now. But we will see a drop in our

00:29:56.120 incomes worth about 2% to 4% less than we would otherwise have had. That's a problem. But it's by

00:30:03.400 no means the end of the world. And that's the first thing you sort of need to recognize. This is a

00:30:08.320 problem is not the end of the world. Because if you think it's the end of the world, as you rightly

00:30:12.480 pointed out, then you're willing to throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. But if it's a problem,

00:30:17.640 you will act exactly like what I think we should do with all problems, say, all right, there's a lot

00:30:22.440 of problems. Let's ask, where can we spend a dollar and fix most of that problem? And unfortunately,

00:30:28.960 that's not climate change. It's actually really, really hard to just change a tiny bit of climate change

00:30:34.720 with a lot of money. And that's why we find that most of the interventions that you do for climate

00:30:39.920 change turns out to be fairly poor. They're not necessarily bad investments. Some of them are.

00:30:45.120 But even, you know, for instance, adaptation or get more energy for poor countries, give you sort of,

00:30:52.820 you know, $2, $5 back in the dollar, which is nice. But in the big scheme of things, there are much,

00:30:58.700 much better places you can spend your resources on.

00:31:01.000 Okay, so let's look at this. Well, because I'm really curious about this,

00:31:06.140 because I can't see any a priori problems with your method. It seems to me to make a lot of sense. And

00:31:12.880 if your goal is to do the most amount of good in the shortest period of time with the least amount

00:31:18.440 of resources, which seems like a pretty damn good goal, then and to be realistic about what's

00:31:23.620 attainable, then I can't see that anyone's done a better job from a methodological perspective than

00:31:29.500 you guys have. Okay, but now but you still face a tremendous amount of opposition. And most of that

00:31:34.580 does come from the climate side of things as far as I can tell. And so it's, I've been trying to

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00:34:29.600 And so when I reviewed the climate literature, which was a few years ago, I had some real concerns

00:34:36.800 about measurement accuracy and so forth because it's a very complicated issue and it's not

00:34:41.280 the constants that should be associated with increase in carbon dioxide aren't obvious and

00:34:47.700 there's quite wide error bars around them. And then carbon dioxide has all sorts of weirdly

00:34:51.840 complicated effects like increasing global greening, which is quite an interesting one.

00:34:57.320 And so anyways, and it also struck me that if you project out the climate change estimates across

00:35:04.720 about a 50 to 100 year period, the error bars grow very large as you move outward, obviously,

00:35:10.000 because the errors multiply. And then it struck me that we're in a situation where the error bars out

00:35:16.760 50 years are so wide that even if we did what people recommended now, we could never be sure that

00:35:22.340 it actually worked. Because you can't, the propagation of error across all those decades makes the picture

00:35:29.680 so blurry two or three, four decades down the road that there's no way of garnering evidence about

00:35:35.460 the effectiveness of your intervention. And if it's a high cost intervention, that seems to be a

00:35:39.400 really bad idea. So, okay. So, and I'm going to step one more step backwards, which is, so

00:35:45.480 I also found it difficult to trust the climate science. And the reason for that was that it struck me as

00:35:53.900 motivated by issues, at least in some part, that were outside of the science. It seems to me that

00:36:03.820 a tremendous amount of what motivates people's psychological commitment to the idea of climate

00:36:09.220 change is something like an underlying anti-Western or anti-capitalist ethos. And that the idea is that

00:36:17.400 we should restrict growth and we should restructure the economic system. And that would address climate

00:36:22.140 change. And that would be a positive thing and forced all the apocalypse. But the real goal seems

00:36:26.860 to be more to find an ethical justification for the political position that requires the retooling

00:36:32.080 of these economic systems. And so, so, well, I guess the first thing I'd like to know is what you,

00:36:40.840 does that strike you as a reasonable argument? Because I can't see otherwise why people would be

00:36:45.680 objecting to what it is that you're doing. Yeah. So there's, there's a lot of questions and then

00:36:51.280 let me just try to unpack, unpack some of this. So we, I think if you look out, yes, there's a lot

00:36:58.940 of uncertainty going forward. Some of that actually cancels out when you're saying, well, we're uncertain

00:37:04.940 about how much the temperature rise will be. But we do know that if the causal mechanism is CO2 leads

00:37:10.460 to higher warming, if you take some of the CO2 out, you will get less of it. Now we don't exactly know

00:37:15.980 how much, where you'd get it less, whether it was a lot and up down here a little bit, or whether it

00:37:22.000 was here and down a little bit, but you actually get a little bit the same thing. So you can take

00:37:26.820 some of the error bars up because you're only looking at the difference and you're not actually

00:37:31.920 looking at the actual input. The other thing, I'm in no doubt that there's a lot of, you know,

00:37:38.360 other reasons why people latch on to social phenomena. So, you know, when, when some climate

00:37:43.780 scientists say we should cut carbon emissions because this is leading to a really dangerous

00:37:48.200 issue, there's a lot of other people who will see, oh, that actually fits with my ideological

00:37:52.440 presupposition. So I'll actually join in, in this, in this conversation. I think that happens in a lot

00:37:59.520 of different areas. And what we try to do is to sort of step back and say, look, I'm not going to get

00:38:05.020 into all of that. I'm simply taking as the starting point. We're economists. I'm actually

00:38:09.640 not. I'm a political scientist, but all the people I work with are economists. We just take as given

00:38:14.440 what the climate scientists are telling us. I think it's a, it's a, it's an interesting conversation

00:38:20.540 and say, did they actually get it somewhat wrong? And I think certainly, you know, somebody should be

00:38:26.200 looking into it, but, but, you know, I've met a lot of these climate scientists. My sense is that

00:38:30.580 they're good, hardworking, you know, scientists are actually trying to find out what, what's up

00:38:35.200 and down in this area. So we simply take our starting point with you and climate panel. What

00:38:40.320 we do is simply ask how much will it cost to cut carbon emissions so much that we will see a

00:38:47.900 significant change in temperature. And of course, remember, we emit CO2, not because we want to bother

00:38:54.080 Al Gore or anyone else. It's a byproduct of having a life that is incredibly much nicer than one we

00:39:02.220 would have if we didn't have access to a lot of energy. I mean, we can sit and talk here across the

00:39:07.640 continent, but also, you know, you have heating and you're cooling and you have fertilizer that

00:39:12.680 subsidize, you know, artificial fertilizer that basically feeds half the world population and a lot

00:39:18.320 of other benefits that come from mostly using fossil fuels. So if you want to get rid of some of those

00:39:23.700 fossil fuels, possibly all of them, you will have to replace it with more expensive energy. And

00:39:30.540 that's why it costs to cut carbon emissions. Now, that may be worth the cost, but that's exactly the

00:39:36.640 question that we try to ask. And that's what William Nordhaus, the Nobel laureate in climate

00:39:41.100 economics and many others have asked. So it's really important. It's really important to note that

00:39:46.220 you're not questioning the science as it stands now, the consensus, so that this is purely a

00:39:50.980 consequence of economic calculation. This is only about saying, good, CO2 impacts warming,

00:39:57.480 and it does so in the way that the UN climate panel tells us. Now, that's not entirely true,

00:40:03.020 because there's a lot of things that they tell us, and there's a whole variability, and we try to take

00:40:06.980 that into account. But honestly, it turns out that if you do it on the central estimates, you get pretty

00:40:11.860 much what I'm about to tell you. Okay. So what you find is, if you cut carbon emissions now,

00:40:17.140 you can have a little bit of impact in 100 years, but it will have a significant cost now.

00:40:23.480 It's not going to put us to the poorhouse. Nobody's talking about that. Just like we're not talking

00:40:28.380 about the end of the world if we don't do something about climate change. We're not talking about the

00:40:32.440 end of the world if we do something about climate change either. So I want to sort of dial back in

00:40:37.100 the rhetoric, both on the alarmists that say, oh my God, the world is coming to an end, or the people

00:40:41.160 who are saying, oh, we can't afford this, and we're all going to the poorhouse if you want to, you know,

00:40:44.960 have solar panels and wind turbine. No. These are both manageable costs. These are sort of in the

00:40:50.200 order, you know, two to four percent. But the problem is that if we do sort of things that cost

00:40:56.140 one to two percent of GDP right now, and for the rest of the century, we basically solve almost no

00:41:03.060 part of the global warming problem. We'd probably solve about one percent of it. So basically by incurring

00:41:10.620 a cost of one to two percent of GDP now and every year throughout the rest of the century, you'll

00:41:15.780 have solved almost none of the problem come 2100. So you still have to pay all the same problems that

00:41:22.920 global warming is incurring minus a slight amount, and then you paid one to two percent every year.

00:41:30.240 That's the basic idea of why most cost-benefit analyses show that unless you do it very carefully

00:41:36.540 and only do a little bit of cutting and do it really smartly, you're actually incurring higher costs

00:41:42.920 than the problem you're trying to solve. So we can thread the needle and do it really carefully,

00:41:48.700 but that requires a lot of smartness from a lot of politicians. But if we do it really bluntly,

00:41:54.180 we're just going to incur lots of costs and actually not get very many benefits.

00:41:57.700 Okay, so when the people who are not happy with you for not prioritizing climate change to the degree

00:42:03.120 that it should be, hypothetically, how do they criticize your statements? On what basis do

00:42:10.880 they decide that your conclusions are inappropriate? I think, I mean, if you read most of the internet,

00:42:17.140 there's a lot of things that'll just say, oh, you're a denier, you can't say, you know, sort of,

00:42:21.340 we're going to excommunicate you, we don't want to talk to you, that's not right. I'm not really going

00:42:26.100 to talk about those people because that's just, you know, that's political posturing rather than

00:42:30.080 anything else. I think there's a reasonable argument to be made to say, that's not the only

00:42:35.760 way that you can approach this. So there's two ways that you can think about cost benefit analysis

00:42:40.180 actually showing that climate impacts are worth doing. One is to say, ah, but there might be a

00:42:48.060 tiny risk, even just a tiny risk, that the whole world is going to spin out of control and we're all

00:42:52.980 going to die kind of thing. And, you know, that's not implausible, especially if you say sort of,

00:42:58.160 I'm not going to put a percentage on it, but it's not, it's greater than zero. So there's a

00:43:03.760 non-zero chance that global warming will spin out of control and we'll basically be, you know,

00:43:08.940 relegate a few couple, a hundred couples of humans living on an ice-free Antarctica.

00:43:14.500 So that's a positive feedback loop argument, right? That we might trigger mechanisms like the

00:43:19.220 melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for example, that would flood the world or cause some

00:43:23.400 irreparable catastrophe of unparalleled magnitude. Okay, so I have a question about that because

00:43:30.020 that's a tricky one to address, right? That's kind of an apocalyptic argument. And then the argument

00:43:34.420 would be, well, if there's a 1% chance of an infinite apocalypse, it's worth any donation of

00:43:39.560 resources to stave it off. So one way of thinking about that is actually to multiply the catastrophes

00:43:46.900 because my suspicions are that that same argument could be used in relationship to a lot of the

00:43:53.920 other problems that you are trying to address. Like, I don't know what the probability is that if we

00:44:00.380 keep a substantial number of people in abject poverty over the next 20 years, let's say, more than we'd

00:44:05.800 have to, that we would increase the probability of the generation of epidemic and infectious diseases

00:44:13.900 disease. Because poverty, poor people are a risk to everyone in this, there's a horrible way of

00:44:20.620 thinking about it. But poverty is a risk to everyone, that's a better way of thinking about it. Because

00:44:24.840 decreased global human health is also a breeding ground for all sorts of catastrophes that might

00:44:30.480 emerge. And then there's also the possibility of political instability and nuclear war and all of

00:44:36.340 those things that are also equally apocalyptic. So it seems to me to be reasonable to some degree to

00:44:42.140 say, look, there's the possibility across a wide range of potential crises of unforeseen positive

00:44:48.400 feedback loops spiraling out of control. But we can't introduce them into the argument unless we can

00:44:53.060 parameterize them because all it's an unfair game move in some sense, because you can't be not wrong

00:45:00.240 about that. Exactly. And you're basically saying, if you allow it in this area, just because you like

00:45:07.700 that particular area and say, I want you to focus more money on my thing, which is climate change, you could

00:45:13.720 equally well do it in all kinds of other areas. And I actually think you can make your argument even

00:45:17.980 stronger. It's not just not, it's not just that poverty sort of breeds a lot of risk. But it's also that they

00:45:23.120 breed terrorism and willingness to, you know, do a lot of bad things, you know, focused. So it's not just

00:45:29.720 something that happens, but, you know, throw in bioterrorism and our ability to keep, you know, all

00:45:34.940 the plutonium in the world under lock. And, you know, you can get catastrophe from anything.

00:45:40.480 So abject poverty, for example, you could imagine that there might be two socioeconomic

00:45:45.640 contributions to that. There would be the absolute number of people in abject poverty who are therefore

00:45:50.800 desperate. And then there would also be maybe another contribution of excess inequality, and a sense that

00:45:57.680 the world isn't laying itself out fairly, and that that would justify political and revolutionary

00:46:03.580 instability. And also just, you know, state failure and many other things that we know make it a lot

00:46:09.840 easier for everyone to make really bad things, like we saw out of Afghanistan with 9-11, and a lot of other

00:46:17.620 things, you know, once you get failed states, you get a lot of bad things happening. Right, okay. So we try to

00:46:22.420 make people better off, we try to make people better off globally, so that we decrease the probability of

00:46:27.380 large-scale political and economic instability. And that's another way of staving off an apocalypse.

00:46:33.800 Yes. Okay, and then on the...

00:46:35.280 And so, can I just say, so Nordhaus actually looked at this, the Nobel laureate, because some people

00:46:41.120 argued exactly what you said, there's a tiny risk that things go really, really bad, so we should

00:46:45.820 spend all of our money on this issue. But of course, that's a failed argument, because likewise, there's a

00:46:51.600 lot of small risks everywhere else. We know one risk, which is being hit by an asteroid.

00:46:57.940 That could wipe out the Earth. Yet, and Nordhaus did that, and I thought that was very, very elegant.

00:47:04.660 We know that we can track all of those asteroids out there, you know, 99.99%. But we chose to only

00:47:13.560 track 90% because tracking the rest was too expensive. So you can actually see that we put a

00:47:19.660 price on how much are we willing to do this. And of course, that's just one place where we have a very

00:47:24.260 clear example, that we say, we care somewhat for the future, but we don't care about it entirely.

00:47:30.380 We have lots of other issues that we want to focus on right now. So that's just like every other area.

00:47:36.960 You have to argue, what is the risks and what are the opportunities to do this? And absolutely,

00:47:43.660 given that there are some risks, and there are probably more downside risks and upside risks for

00:47:47.480 global warming, we should probably do a little more than what we would otherwise do. And that's exactly what 0.74

00:47:52.060 the model show us. And those are the models that we use in making the estimate of how much should you

00:47:56.760 be paying for global warming. So yes, we should take that into account. But it's not a good argument.

00:48:02.280 That was that was one argument. I'm sorry, I'll try to be a little with the other argument. The other

00:48:06.980 argument is that people will say, one of the reasons why it doesn't pay to do global warming is

00:48:12.240 because you have to pay now, but the benefits come far up into the future. So basically, you do something

00:48:17.980 now that's fairly costly. And then you get a tiny benefit in 100 years. So you have to really say

00:48:24.240 the future is incredibly important. In economic speak, that is that the discount is really low,

00:48:30.020 that you really care a lot about the future. Now, a lot of people would argue, we should, you know,

00:48:35.060 we're rich, we should be able to care enormously about the future. And if you change that parameter

00:48:41.260 enough, and you say we care enormously about future generations, it actually turns out that global

00:48:46.660 warming becomes a good deal. You know, doing something about global warming actually becomes

00:48:50.480 goes from, you know, saying, you spend a dollar and you do a couple cents of climate damage to

00:48:54.960 sorry, to avoid climate damage, you actually spend a dollar and you might do $2 of climate benefit. So

00:49:00.860 it actually turns it into a good idea. But here's the kicker. If you care that much about the future,

00:49:07.380 you change every other one of all of these priorities and make them boom, right? Because what

00:49:13.040 obviously happens is, you've just said, I care so much about the future that the guy that I will

00:49:18.000 save from not having tuberculosis and dying from it tomorrow, will now go on to have a successful

00:49:23.380 life, his kids will live longer, they'll do better, he will have a better his, you know, nation will do

00:49:29.480 better. That means they'll be much, much better off in 2100 and so on. And that means this is no longer

00:49:35.140 a question of saying you spend a dollar and you do $43 worth of good, but you spend it all and you

00:49:40.520 a thousand dollars worth of good. So what you've achieved is basically just made everything a

00:49:46.780 great idea. And that's also intellectually what making the discount rate very, very small. What

00:49:52.340 it means is you should basically starve, you should just eat porridge every day and spend all of the rest

00:49:58.560 of your money on the future because you care so much about it. Right now, if you do that, I applaud

00:50:04.260 your sort of your consistency. But most people just don't do this. And we certainly don't do this in the

00:50:10.160 way that, you know, we don't seem to care all that much about our pension systems, which are in many

00:50:14.500 rich countries going to fail in the next 20 to 40 years and all these other issues. So as long as

00:50:20.040 you're saying, no, no, what you're really saying then is on climate, we want to care a lot about

00:50:24.660 the future, but we don't want to do it in all other areas. You're going to be consistent. You need to do it

00:50:29.280 across all areas and then you need to be very hungry and only eat porridge. Right. Okay. So your claim

00:50:33.780 basically from a methodological perspective is that your rank ordering remains constant across

00:50:38.200 variable discount rates. Yes. Right. And that's a really, that's a really important, that's a really

00:50:42.920 fundamentally important point. It's not entirely, I got to say, it does change some of these. Yeah,

00:50:47.980 sure. Because obviously, you know, education, for instance, is one of those where you pay now and

00:50:52.820 you only get benefits 10, 20, you know, 50 years out when the kids grow up and they actually become much

00:50:57.440 more productive. So there is a change, but mostly the rank ordering remains the same. And I'm simply just

00:51:03.540 insisting that people need to be consistent. You can't just say the future is important when you

00:51:08.580 talk about climate. Yeah. If you want to say the future is important, it's important across all

00:51:11.940 areas. And then you really have to do everything and, you know, forego having a good life yourself.

00:51:17.200 Right. Right. Okay. Well, so the other thing that's worthwhile pointing out about the discount rate is

00:51:21.580 that, you know, you can make a case that the future is more important than the present,

00:51:26.400 especially because it extends out so far. But, but the other reason that people discount the future is

00:51:31.200 because you can't make the case that you can predict the outcome of your actions. And that

00:51:36.820 means that the error in prediction magnifies itself as you move out farther in timeframe. And so what

00:51:42.300 happens is you get to a point where there isn't a lot of point in adjusting your behavior in the

00:51:47.640 present. If you look like a hundred years out, let's say, or a thousand years out, because you

00:51:52.000 actually can't calculate with any accuracy, the consequence of your actions or inactions. And so the,

00:51:57.480 the cumulative error makes discounting the future, the appropriate thing to do, because

00:52:02.820 you can predict what's going to happen if you act now, now, and maybe tomorrow, but you get much

00:52:07.820 less accurate as, as you move forward. So even in the best case scenario, where we had the best wishes

00:52:13.580 for the future, that doesn't mean we could justify incredibly radical sacrifices now, because we

00:52:18.500 can't calculate their cumulative impact.

00:52:21.080 No, there's a good, there's a good way of thinking about this. You know, if you look at what

00:52:25.760 previous generations has done for us, the only thing that they've really managed to do is to

00:52:31.320 give us a lot more knowledge. So investment in knowledge is actually a great way to help future

00:52:36.340 generations, because it helped them in all kinds of ways. And we can't really predict how, but it's

00:52:40.960 probably a good idea to leave them with a lot of books. I'm using that as a metaphor. But trying to

00:52:46.800 help them in a specific way, imagine back a hundred years ago, yeah, our forefathers back in the 1920s,

00:52:53.620 uh, no, 1910s, uh, would have, would have done reasonably to help us now. Chances are,

00:53:00.700 they would have wasted a lot of money on things that never turned into problems. There's a wonderful

00:53:05.320 book called today. Now, uh, uh, sorry. Oh God, I'm forgetting. Uh, tomorrow now. Oh God. What? Uh,

00:53:14.980 anyway, it's, it's, it has a great and clever title, which I've clearly screwed up now. Uh, but it,

00:53:20.600 it was, uh, back in 1893, uh, the, uh, the world fair in Chicago, I believe asked 50 of the world's

00:53:27.980 smartest people to predict what would the world look like in a hundred years. And so all of them

00:53:33.840 first started said, you know, I love the fact that I'm not going to be around when this prediction

00:53:37.960 comes, you know, true or not. Uh, but then they made all their predictions and they were almost

00:53:42.940 entirely off. You know, there's some that were pretty close. Uh, you know, there's one that

00:53:47.720 predicted sort of email in the sense that, you know, those, I can't pronounce that pneumatic

00:53:54.320 pneumatic tubes, which is sent away and, you know, it would sort of suck it out. And so you could send

00:54:01.860 a letter somewhere. They imagined that that would be a worldwide thing. And so you could actually send

00:54:06.420 a letter everywhere. You just sort of put it in the very, very long tube. Right. Right. Which is kind

00:54:10.820 of right. And you can sort of see, yeah, yeah, that's not entirely wrong. You know, got the whole

00:54:15.660 technology wrong, but the right idea. But the fundamental point is we're probably wrong about

00:54:21.360 so many things, as you say, that trying to help the world in the future by, for instance,

00:54:27.080 cutting temperature might be one of the least effective ways of helping. Okay. So, so there's

00:54:32.260 another thing that's interesting about that. I think that speaks to the fundamental intelligence

00:54:38.640 of your approach. So one of the things that has struck me as highly likely is that given how

00:54:44.900 complex things are and how rapidly they're changing, that the best thing we could do to

00:54:50.340 prepare ourselves for the future would be to make better people, smarter people, wiser people,

00:54:56.300 more responsible people, all of that. So there's a psychological element to that. And so I would say

00:55:01.860 some of my work has concentrated on that and the public lectures that I've been doing. But what's

00:55:06.080 interesting about your approach, the economic approach, is that you're diverting a lot of

00:55:10.120 resources to the creation of better people for tomorrow by investing, especially in childhood

00:55:16.520 nutrition. So if you, and I suppose this is kind of how economists look at the world, but maybe

00:55:21.840 biologists could look at it this way too. If you think of people as general problem-solving machines,

00:55:27.060 which is not a bad way of thinking about us, then it might be that given that you don't know which

00:55:32.380 problems are going to be paramount, what you want to do is improve the machines that will solve

00:55:36.540 the problems, whatever those problems happen to be. And so that investment in early childhood

00:55:41.700 development seems particularly apropos in that regard. And so having said that, I want to return

00:55:49.640 to the climate issue one more time, because here's something peculiar. This is something I don't

00:55:54.880 understand. It's a real mystery. So let's say that, just for the sake of argument, that most of the

00:56:00.960 people who are concerned about climate change and its relationship to economic development are on

00:56:05.600 the left side of the spectrum. Okay, but let's also say that those who are on the left side of the

00:56:11.240 spectrum are hypothetically also concerned with the economic well-being of the most dispossessed,

00:56:17.800 and that those might be equally important concerns, and they're integrally locked together.

00:56:22.420 Well, the strange thing about so many of your recommendations is that they're directly aimed at

00:56:28.380 addressing the immediate now concerns of the fundamentally dispossessed. And so you'd think

00:56:34.780 that that's part of the reason that I can't understand why there's so much objection to your

00:56:40.400 methods, because it's not like what you came up with looks like support for something that's

00:56:46.760 like a right-wing agenda by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, first of all, it's predicated on

00:56:51.620 the idea that there's a certain amount of development aid, especially directed to children,

00:56:55.640 you said not exclusively, that would be of great use. And it seems to me to be undeniable that the

00:57:01.320 most dispossessed people in the world are impoverished infants of impoverished people. 0.96

00:57:07.700 So if some of the objections to what you're doing are ideologically motivated, why doesn't that

00:57:15.580 cancel it out?

00:57:17.360 That's a good question. I don't quite understand it. My sense is that in some way, so I was in New York

00:57:24.060 in September, there was the first ever summit at the UN for tuberculosis. And I was there because

00:57:31.820 one of the things that we've identified is this is a great investment. And of course, all the

00:57:36.000 tuberculosis people love us because, you know, we're pointing out you should spend more money on their

00:57:40.360 problem. And unfortunately, almost nobody went. I wrote an abet together with the South African health

00:57:47.960 minister, and it was widely published in the developing world. But almost no one in the developed

00:57:53.280 world picked it up. It was only when I wrote an other op-ed where I said there were two meetings

00:57:57.520 taking place in New York. One was this TV place where, you know, biggest infectious disease killer

00:58:03.060 in the world, where almost nobody turned up. And then there was the other meeting, which Macron and

00:58:08.540 the French president and Bloomberg and others attended to, which was the climate summit, which

00:58:14.320 everybody attended to.

00:58:15.620 You know, I sort of pointed out the disparity. And then it was picked up in all kinds of developed

00:58:22.340 country papers. I think fundamentally, it goes down to saying, while everybody says they care a lot

00:58:28.100 about the world's poor, the reality is that, you know, you care somewhat for it. But most rich,

00:58:35.860 well-meaning people probably care a lot more about the fact that they worry that their kids might be in

00:58:40.760 a position where global warming is really going to undermine the climate.

00:58:43.680 Right, but even that doesn't make sense. Because look, we already established the fact that

00:58:48.320 there's equal reason to be apocalyptically concerned about unchecked poverty and inequality.

00:58:55.260 So this is why I suggested to begin with that one of the lovely things about the idea of climate

00:59:01.180 change is that it really justifies the idea of overthrowing the current system or of undermining

00:59:06.800 the current system. And that if you're inclined to do that, rather than inclined to truly help the

00:59:12.400 dispossessed, let's say, then you'd be more inclined to support a theory that justifies that sort of

00:59:18.100 radical, let's say, interventionist policy. And I can't see a way out of that logically, given that

00:59:23.900 the work that you're doing on tuberculosis is a great example, is directly and evidentially

00:59:31.480 associated with a marked increase in the well-being of the dispossessed. And so you'd think that

00:59:38.120 you'd think that would attract the proper amount of ideological attention, but it doesn't. And that's

00:59:43.860 that's a great mystery. There's something about that extraordinarily good.

00:59:47.340 And it's a good point. And I think you have a consistent argument. The thing that I've decided a long

00:59:54.760 time ago, that I don't want to argue, and I think that's probably the difference between

00:59:59.200 being more psychologically focused. I don't want to argue on what I think might be people's

01:00:04.840 sort of inner motivations. I want to actually take them at face value. And, you know, many people I

01:00:10.160 meet, they say, I worry a lot about climate change. I worry a lot about the world's poor. And then I try

01:00:15.320 to show them, well, if you actually do that, why the hell would you be focusing on spending lots of

01:00:20.300 money that'll almost do no good, instead of spending possibly less money and doing it probably about

01:00:25.580 more good. And it creates some cognitive dissonance. And I think it switches people a little bit

01:00:32.340 towards spending smarter. But yes, you're right. But telling people...

01:00:36.660 It also might just be ignorance. You know, it's like, what you're doing is pretty new.

01:00:41.960 And it takes a long time. I mean, it's not new for you. And it's not new, considering the span of a

01:00:47.880 single lifetime. But, you know, what you're doing is very radical, in some sense. And there isn't

01:00:54.040 anybody else doing it. And so it might be that it will take 20 years, or 25 years, or something

01:00:59.880 like that, for the approach that you're publicizing and have developed, for people to actually

01:01:06.640 know about it. You know, and so what do they say? You should assume ignorance instead of malevolence

01:01:12.000 when you can. I do think that ignorance is a part of this. It's not obvious to everyone that

01:01:17.520 there is this method of rank ordering, that people have done it, and that there are consequences to

01:01:22.660 that that could be laid out in an intelligent economic plan. You know, and I know that it takes

01:01:27.520 a finding in the scientific literature, if it's going to make its way into the public, something

01:01:32.460 approximating 15 years. And that's only the ones that actually do manage to make it. And so it could be

01:01:39.880 that just way more people need to know what you're doing and why and how it was done before it gets

01:01:45.800 the steam going. I'm interested in the psychological issues, in part, to try to help figure out what it

01:01:51.600 would take to motivate people to be more attentive to the sorts of solutions that you and your people

01:01:57.780 have been putting forward, and to eliminate those barriers. But it could just be, as I said, it could

01:02:03.840 just be ignorance. And look, one of the problems that we're facing constantly, and I know

01:02:09.700 why there's no one else doing this than we're doing, because when you do prioritization,

01:02:15.760 you inevitably end up antagonizing a lot of people. I mean, climate change is the most obvious

01:02:21.560 one. But for instance, sanitation, water and sanitation, huge problem. So, you know, there's

01:02:26.860 about two and a half billion people affected by this. One of the points that we emphasize is that

01:02:31.880 doing sanitation, while a good thing to do, it probably only pays you about $3 back on the dollar.

01:02:37.960 Why? Because it's actually fairly costly to do sanitation, and also because the benefit's not

01:02:43.720 nearly as great as what many have assumed, and this is the new global burden of disease estimates,

01:02:48.720 that the real problem is that what you're doing with sanitation is that you're not removing fecal

01:02:53.700 matter from the environment, you're simply reducing the amount. And so you're not actually having all

01:02:58.260 that much of an impact on the disease. You're having a little bit, but not nearly as much as what we

01:03:02.580 would like to see. That obviously pisses off all the people who are doing sanitation. And, you know,

01:03:07.860 we end up pissing off a lot of people. And the truth is, I think it's necessary, if you're going

01:03:13.240 to do this, that when you rank order, of course, the causes that come out on top love it, and the

01:03:19.200 causes that don't, don't love it. But it's also important to make that argument. And so at the end of

01:03:25.460 day, certainly my sense is, it's necessary to do it, but it will always entail a great amount of sort of

01:03:33.240 unease. Because it doesn't feel like we're saying, you know, kumbaya, and we should do everything. But

01:03:40.300 we're actually saying, no, you should do these things, but not all of these things. Although they seem

01:03:44.940 nice, they're just not in the same league.

01:03:48.020 Right, right, right, right. Well, that's, it would be nice if we could do everything good that we possibly

01:03:55.180 could all at once. But it's not, it's not realistic, because you can't do everything at

01:04:01.260 once. And you don't have infinite resources, as we've already pointed out. So, okay, so what would

01:04:06.660 you say would be, if you're going to play devil's advocate against your own position, which I presume

01:04:12.040 you've done a lot of anyways, what, are there criticisms against your, let's say your, your aims and

01:04:19.700 your methods that you regard as unresolved? Like, what is it that you're doing that's still weak and

01:04:26.800 wrong in your own estimation? Or where are the, where are the limitations in your methods?

01:04:31.340 Well, look, there's, no method does everything. So we have two very obvious problems. One is,

01:04:37.400 not all issues is about money. So we're looking at how do you prioritize money? But sometimes money is

01:04:44.240 not the issue. For instance, on free trade, as we talked about before, we estimate the benefit is

01:04:49.460 incredible. But we actually look at the cost as the cost of subsidizing Western farmers, because those

01:04:55.840 are the ones that basically make a, you know, killing from not freeing up global markets. And those are the

01:05:02.320 ones that usually kept, held it back. But what has happened is it has become much more sort of an

01:05:07.980 emotional thing. It's sort of an identity thing. And I'm not sure how we would cost that. So to the

01:05:13.760 extent that things have not nothing to do with money, but they're just simply about political

01:05:19.120 willingness or interest or want, then we are not making the argument that is going to convince you.

01:05:27.400 So in some sense, we are telling you where can you spend money, but we're not talking about the

01:05:32.060 things that don't require money. Right. So people would object that you're that the problem with your

01:05:36.640 method is that you're measuring everything that can be tangibly measured from an economic perspective,

01:05:42.200 but that's actually a small fraction of the universe of properly attended to.

01:05:47.540 Yeah, I would tend to say it's probably, you know, sort of 70 or 80%. I'm not quite sure how you'd make

01:05:52.880 that up. But you know, the biggest, the biggest policy decisions in most countries is the national

01:05:59.020 budget. It's very clear that that is a very substantial part of what we decide how we're going

01:06:04.160 to allocate money. Well, the problem with the objection is that, well, the people who are

01:06:12.760 objecting could be right, that your methods are narrow. I mean, you're making the case that

01:06:17.820 they're not as narrow as a, yeah, as a pessimist might assume, but that puts the onus on them to

01:06:23.160 come up with an alternative way of ranking. Right? I mean, I would just say, we're not talking about

01:06:29.020 those last 30% that are, you know, purely about, you know, should we have transgender bathrooms or

01:06:34.960 something? Yeah. Well, that's possibly a bad idea, because that actually has cost and building a third

01:06:40.080 bathroom or something. But you know, there's some things that are mostly just about what do you think?

01:06:45.740 What do you believe? What are your intuitions, rather than actual costs? Right, but there's no

01:06:51.540 way of adjudicating between those claims. That's the problem that all the people do is push each

01:06:56.100 other around about them if they can't. And the point is, there's still a substantial amount of issues

01:07:01.160 where you do need to look at resource allocation. And there we have a good argument. The second part,

01:07:07.160 the second sort of criticism, which is a very fair criticism is, we don't look at inequality. So

01:07:13.640 economists are very, very bad at dealing with inequality, because fundamentally, that's a

01:07:18.760 political issue. So when we look at you spend a dollar and you do $60 worth of good, we don't look

01:07:24.860 at who gets that $60. Now, to be fair, most of the things that you also pointed out, most of the

01:07:32.400 things that we actually indicate are really, really low hanging fruit in the world are things that will

01:07:36.320 help the world's poorest, mostly because the world's poorest have so many things that they haven't

01:07:41.380 gotten that would be hugely beneficial for them. So it mostly actually help also inequality. But we

01:07:48.100 don't measure it. And so we don't actually look at, would this be a good expenditure in the sense

01:07:55.820 of helping the world's poorest? Mostly would, but it's not part of our framework. And there's

01:08:01.660 making that well, because, because cost benefit analysis is basically assuming that everybody is

01:08:09.380 equally worth. We talked about that, that earlier, there's, there's no way of sort of, well, you can,

01:08:16.100 but it becomes incredibly unclear and very unintuitive, if you start making weightings on,

01:08:22.200 on who is actually worth more. So, so we are, we're again saying, it's a little bit like the menu,

01:08:29.060 you know, you get in the restaurant, we're telling you, hey, the spinach is cheap, and it has lots of

01:08:33.460 vitamins, and the cake is expensive, and it's bad for you. But you know, you go ahead and make the

01:08:39.120 choice. And I think that's the fair way to have that conversation, that we're telling you some

01:08:44.020 important facts about your decisions. But these are not the only things that are going to guide your

01:08:48.400 decision. And I'm absolutely happy to say that. So, so in some sense, you asked me to be, you know,

01:08:53.240 devil's advocate, I just think it's important to clarify, we don't look at all issues, because we

01:08:58.360 only look at issues that require resources. And we don't deal with inequality, which is also an

01:09:04.080 important issue. But apart from that, we have to make priorities. And we're simply making a little

01:09:10.540 clearer, at the end of the day, you can choose to totally disregard it. But I would imagine that you

01:09:15.280 would at least like to know, what does the evidence tell you if you spend a dollar here? How many people

01:09:20.960 will you save? How many lives will be improved? How much environment will be improved, and so on,

01:09:25.920 versus all the other things where you could have spent that dollar and done different amounts of

01:09:30.780 good in all those different areas. And that's what we provide for the menu. So do you, okay, okay,

01:09:37.100 well, I appreciate that very much. Do you have any sense, what do you, off the top of your head,

01:09:43.200 what the total capital expenditure for the minimization or eradication of tuberculosis actually

01:09:48.760 would be? What are you talking about in absolute dollar amounts? So it, and it depends a lot on,

01:09:55.440 because, so we estimated you need about $2 billion. The global funds that we were also

01:10:02.700 campaigning with are saying it's about $5.8 billion. And to be quite honest, I'm not quite sure which of

01:10:10.760 these two numbers is the right number. I think the, but, you know, compared to, you know, just to give

01:10:17.040 you a sense of proportion, uh, the, the amount of subsidies that we give to solar and wind, uh, is

01:10:22.800 about $120 billion right now. Uh, so, you know, we're, we're talking about a very, very small amount,

01:10:29.640 uh, and certainly it's a very small amount and, you know, it's, it's about what, um, three,

01:10:35.120 4% of global development, uh, spending. So the amount of spending that we, that we spend every

01:10:40.820 year to try and help improve the world. And it will probably be one of the very, very best things

01:10:45.540 that we could do. So again, very, very small things. People need to know these things.

01:10:49.700 And they, and I think that if they did know that they would start to care if they actually knew.

01:10:54.180 So, okay. I got, I got two final questions for you, I think. And then I'll ask you if there's

01:10:59.360 anything else you wanted to that bring to people's attention that, that you thought was particularly

01:11:03.460 necessary. Okay. So the first one is, um, to what degree do you think I'll ask all three questions.

01:11:12.080 To what degree do you think you've been making headway? Like, obviously you're, you've been successful

01:11:17.640 in putting together your institutes and, and your work has garnered a substantial amount of attention

01:11:22.920 published and otherwise. And so it's not like you've been silenced and, and, and imprisoned or

01:11:28.560 anything like that. And so are there reasons for optimism as far as you're concerned? And, and then

01:11:35.560 the next thing that I'd like to ask you about is what's happening in France? Because one of the things

01:11:40.940 that the people who are pushing for radical current interventions with regards to long-term

01:11:47.040 climate change haven't factored in is the reverse apocalyptic issue, which is that there's going

01:11:52.260 to be substantial resistance to the short-term costs that will cause spinoff disasters of their

01:11:58.280 own. And so the French example seems to be a very interesting case in point. So, so the first question

01:12:04.200 was, how do you feel about the impact that you're having? And the second is, what do you have to say

01:12:08.940 about what's happening in France? Yeah. Can, can I, I'm going to answer them in reverse because I think

01:12:14.840 the, the France point is, is really a good, a good argument. If you ask people around the world,

01:12:20.220 do you care about global warming? Almost everyone will say yes. Do you want to do something for

01:12:25.360 global warming? They'll say yes. Then when you ask them, how much are you willing to pay? The typical

01:12:30.620 answer, both in rich and poor countries is a couple of hundred dollars per year. So it goes from a hundred

01:12:36.920 to two hundred dollars. So fundamentally what people are saying is, yes, I do worry about this issue.

01:12:42.380 I'm willing to spend a little bit of money, but not very much. And I think this is the fundamental

01:12:46.840 thing that we just have not been able to get to the attention of a lot of people who are pushing for

01:12:52.600 really, really radical solutions. You're never going to succeed in a democratic situation.

01:13:00.140 If you keep ramping up the taxes on fossil fuels, if you keep making energy more and more expensive,

01:13:07.160 it's going to harm, first of all, the poor the most, very, very regressive. And that obviously

01:13:12.800 means a lot of heartache for a lot of poor people. These are typically also the people who are least

01:13:21.120 able to defend themselves because they're just so busy just surviving their day to day. So it

01:13:27.140 typically has to hit the middle class before you really get sort of an eruption as what you've seen

01:13:31.560 in France and elsewhere. Let's remember there's also a lot of other issues in France. So it's not

01:13:36.100 just because they put three sets on a liter of diesel, but it is an issue of saying, if you push

01:13:44.680 people too far, you will actually not be able to do the solution for climate. And so your very,

01:13:49.860 very expensive solutions are never going to be a long-term viable. When you predict these ideas of

01:13:55.080 saying, if we had Obama and if he would actually have managed to put a carbon tax on CO2, remember,

01:14:01.920 he actually had a democratic Congress the first two years of this presidency, and they were still

01:14:07.580 not able to get a carbon tax implemented. But of course, when you have a Republican Congress,

01:14:12.920 it becomes really hard. When you have a Republican president also, it falls apart. You just can't do

01:14:18.360 this for a hundred years. It's just not going to work out. And that's why, and we never got to that,

01:14:24.140 we actually did a climate consensus where we brought together 27 of the world's top climate

01:14:29.420 economists, three Nobel laureates, to look at where can you do good for climate. And what they found

01:14:35.200 was the by far best investment to tackle global warming is to invest in green energy R&D. So

01:14:42.980 fundamentally, if we could invest in making better green energy for the future, hopefully eventually

01:14:48.900 get it to be so cheap that it will out-compete fossil fuels, we will solve global warming just

01:14:53.920 simply because the green energy became cheaper. If you'll allow me a slight detour,

01:14:58.700 back in the 1860s, the world was hunting whales to extinction because whales have this wonderful

01:15:07.740 should I just say that again? Yep. Yeah. All right. Back in the 1860s, we were hunting whales to

01:15:16.000 extinction because whales have this wonderful oil that just burns a lot cleaner and a lot more bright.

01:15:21.740 And so it was wonderful for the houses in North America and in Europe to burn this whale oil and

01:15:28.320 they were all excited about it. And it had the bad side effect that was actually pushing whales to

01:15:35.220 extinction. Now, the sort of global warming approach to that problem would have been to say,

01:15:40.440 could you please turn down the light? Could you please have it a little less light in your room?

01:15:45.260 And of course, you would have entirely failed. What did save the whales was we discovered oil,

01:15:51.120 you know, fossil fuel oil, which were actually burning cleaner. It was much cheaper and you didn't have

01:15:55.620 to go out and kill whales for it. And so what happened about a decade was you stopped killing whales

01:16:00.760 because you got a better technological product. And we've seen this a lot of times that technology can

01:16:05.940 simply invalidate an old issue, a problem that you thought was almost intractable. If you get cheaper,

01:16:12.840 smarter, new technology, people will switch. Right. That's imposing limits, expensive limits on

01:16:19.420 people is not an appropriate long-term solution because of implementation resistance and cost. And

01:16:25.280 the best solution is to come up with a, well, let's say to put it in a cliched manner, is to come up

01:16:30.620 with a better solution, which is cheaper energy that's that, that has all the advantages and fewer

01:16:35.720 disadvantages. And that's really how you solve the problem. Wind turbines, solar panels, and I'm just

01:16:41.400 taking the two most popular things and batteries together. If they were cheaper than fossil fuels,

01:16:45.960 which they aren't right now, but if they were, of course, everyone would buy them. We'd stop buying

01:16:50.720 coal-fired power plants. So it's really not rocket science that way. Now, I'm not saying it's going to

01:16:54.760 be easy and it's certainly not going to happen right now, but it's the only viable long-term solution.

01:16:59.500 It's much cheaper and much more effective. So we estimate it that for every dollar spent,

01:17:04.220 you'll actually do about $11 of climate benefit. Okay. So that's on, that's on, that's on alternative

01:17:09.600 energy. Yes. Yes. Okay. So by far, you know, so, so it's, it's not the best thing, but it comes down

01:17:16.760 here. So it actually, you know, it's a pretty good investment. Yeah. It's not the best in the world,

01:17:21.520 but we should definitely be doing it. Okay. The second question that you had was the, you know,

01:17:26.320 the optimism. So, you know, fundamentally how much of an impact does this have? Well,

01:17:31.320 it's had the impact and very predictable impact that when we come out and say, for instance,

01:17:36.380 uh, in, uh, uh, uh, more immunization gives you $60 back on the dollar. The people who are doing

01:17:42.600 immunization tells you all the time, you should fund us because we do $60 and good for every dollar

01:17:48.620 you spend. So very clearly, uh, you know, I sat down with a guy from, uh, from, uh, uh, uh, a family

01:17:54.620 foundation, a big family foundation that, you know, we were at a malaria event and, and, and, you know,

01:17:59.680 he, we sat and politely conversed and he, uh, uh, he would say, so what do you do? I, well,

01:18:04.840 I work with the Copenhagen consensus center, you know, totally blacks there. Uh, and then I asked him, 1.00

01:18:09.540 what, what do you do? Uh, well, we work with malaria, you know, did you know that actually,

01:18:13.680 if you spend a dollar in malaria, you'll do $33 worth of good. And I was like, yeah, we did that

01:18:17.820 number. And, you know, and, and, and this, you know, this is exactly the point. We're not, we're

01:18:22.780 not there to, you know, get attention. We're there to make sure that we get attention to some of these

01:18:27.440 top ideas. And I think we've definitely helped a lot of these top ideas get a little easier ride

01:18:32.640 in the world. Okay. So let me ask you another cost benefit. Okay. So, so what if I said, wouldn't it be

01:18:40.800 interested, interesting in doing a meta cost benefit analysis on how much money you would

01:18:47.220 need to raise and spend to effectively market your findings, you know, and to hire people who are

01:18:54.260 really good at doing such marketing so that you had the appropriate advertisements. And so that you,

01:18:59.740 cause you're, you're, this is not a criticism, believe me, but your approach is very academic

01:19:05.020 and very objective and, and that's all well and good and reliable and valid and all of those

01:19:11.240 things. But do you, do you, could your economists compute the utility in dollar value of establishing

01:19:20.800 an extensive and appropriate marketing scheme? Because you'd think that there are, cause I've

01:19:26.720 been watching what's been happening with the Democrats in the U S and they've, uh, a pack that,

01:19:32.100 that I know about has been, uh, making new ads for the Democrats, trying to move them towards the

01:19:38.920 center. And they've had a substantial amount of impact because the advertisements have been very

01:19:43.440 professionally crafted and constructed. And so, well, I don't, I don't know what you think about that,

01:19:50.020 but I've been part of the reason I'm interviewing you today is because I want to put this up on YouTube

01:19:55.360 and I want to get it out there and podcast so that more people know about this. And so, all right.

01:20:00.800 Yeah. So, so the short answer of course, is we have tried to do that because we're economists and

01:20:06.800 we think that would, that would, that would, that would be a good idea. So let me just tell you about

01:20:10.520 something else that we've done. So, uh, so we've been working a lot and we were just talking about

01:20:14.760 the globe. Uh, so when you do prioritization on the planetary scale, it's academically very

01:20:20.920 interesting, but unfortunately the impact is mostly that people say, yeah, that's probably true

01:20:26.000 somewhere else. Yeah. So when we go and tell the Indians this, they'll say, yeah, that's probably true 1.00

01:20:30.000 for Mexico and Mexico will say it's probably true for Argentina. And so, so everybody just pushes

01:20:34.560 off to somebody else. The globe is never anyone's problem. You know, someone else needs to fix us.

01:20:40.440 And so what we've increasingly done is to do this in nations. Uh, so we did this a couple of years

01:20:46.380 ago in Bangladesh, uh, and in the nation, of course, there's an overlap between who actually decides

01:20:52.220 where to spend the money and the problems that we're analyzing. So we did the exact same

01:20:57.000 thing for just for Bangladesh. So we did a prioritization list of all the things. So

01:21:02.240 we talked to everyone in Bangladesh. We got them to say, what are the best things that you want to

01:21:06.820 focus on? What are the smartest new solutions? We worked with primers, think tank, the finance

01:21:11.200 minister, everybody else, and talked about where can you actually spend money? Right. Again, this is,

01:21:16.140 this is a menu that's not entirely politically correct. Certainly the politicians don't like all of this,

01:21:21.440 but what the, you know, the finance minister would go like, no, no, no. Oh yes. Yes. I like this.

01:21:26.340 Yeah. I see. And so they did some of the things. Huh? So that solves the tower of Babel problem to

01:21:31.200 some degree is that there's too much distance. Yeah. There's too much distance between the local and

01:21:35.520 the global. And so you're using the nation state as a, as a psychological intermediary. Yeah. So there we

01:21:43.120 actually estimate that every dollar spent on what we were doing, uh, does, you know, at least $10,000 worth of

01:21:49.080 good simply because we helped shift spending in Bangladesh, both on their national budget,

01:21:55.380 but also the development budgets spending in Bangladesh. And again, we didn't change, you

01:22:00.500 know, Bangladesh to suddenly become super rational or anything. Yeah. We simply changed it a little 1.00

01:22:05.340 bit. We gave, if you will, headwind to the poor ideas and tailwind to the good ones. And so we call

01:22:11.420 that in Haiti, we're, we're now doing this in India together with Tata Trust. I just came back. So that's

01:22:16.380 why I'm a little jet lag or a little bleary. I just came back, uh, from, from Ghana, uh, where

01:22:21.740 we're going to do our next project. So we want to bring this to Africa. Great. Great. So you can do 0.98

01:22:26.100 it globally and locally. Yes. And I think we'll have a lot more opportunity to actually get people's

01:22:32.080 attention when you talk specifically to the nation states where you're actually going to be making

01:22:37.040 these decisions. But obviously if it's true in Ghana, it's probably also true in the neighboring

01:22:41.680 states. You're going to get the overlap. Yeah. Exactly. So I think I would love to,

01:22:46.180 you know, have, have, uh, have, have a lot of, uh, extra sort of PR ability, but I think what we,

01:22:53.100 what we really need is just simply to be able to come up with all these great ideas. And I think we

01:22:58.480 are reasonably successful, but, but the problem in some ways is we're advocates of all the boring

01:23:04.300 stuff. You know, all the stuff that gets the attention are the ones that have the crying babies 0.99

01:23:09.080 and cute animals. Yeah. But God, it's the thing is, it's not true. It's not what you're doing.

01:23:13.160 Isn't boring. It's absolutely exciting beyond belief. I mean, I don't believe that it is dry and I don't

01:23:19.500 believe that it doesn't have a powerful narrative message. It's just that there are reasons that the

01:23:24.420 narrative message is obscured. And I think putting your finger on the gap between the local and the

01:23:30.100 global is a good one. That's smart because you, you see the same problem starting to emerge,

01:23:35.360 for example, with the EU where the overarching bureaucracy is so distant from the people on

01:23:40.700 the ground that there's a disconnect in identification. And so to harness the latent

01:23:46.320 power of the nation state and its patriotism and its, its economic, what would, it's rather local

01:23:53.560 economic structure seems to me to be a really smart solution. But I, I really, I was thrilled when I

01:23:59.820 came across your work. And I mean, on an emotional level, because I thought, well, wow, if we really

01:24:04.840 wanted to do good, if, if that was the goal and we wanted to do it intelligently and carefully and,

01:24:10.660 and agnostically to some degree, um, and in a non-ideologically self-serving manner, which would

01:24:16.920 be a lovely thing to manage if it was possible, then this seemed to be an incredibly exciting approach.

01:24:21.520 And I, I, I believe that there's every reason to assume that with proper publicity, that people

01:24:28.660 could really get behind the idea that we wouldn't have to have tuberculosis in 10 years, you know,

01:24:33.760 and, and that some of these things could really, and, you know, I've talked to people in, on my

01:24:38.160 lecture tour about the things that we could do to make the world a better place. And there's no

01:24:42.040 shortage of enthusiasm for that. It's just that there's a fair bit of cynicism, but there's a lot

01:24:47.740 more ignorance. It's like, well, we just don't know what to do, but your prescriptions say, well,

01:24:53.840 here's 10 things you could do one of them and one of them would work. And so you've got a bit of a

01:24:58.100 choice there. We wouldn't have to take our number one priority as your own, but you could take number

01:25:02.860 five and you'd still do a lovely job and it might be in accordance with your own motivations.

01:25:07.600 Okay. Can, can, can you get me PDFs, for example, of the relevant, whatever you think is relevant

01:25:16.020 that would inform people in short order, I will post in the description of the video.

01:25:22.600 Yeah. So that people can get access to that. So whatever material you'd like to have disseminated

01:25:27.340 as a consequence of this conversation, just get that to me and I'll post it and any blurb you want

01:25:32.780 me to put in the description, then I'll also do that with, with whatever. When do you need it for?

01:25:37.820 What? As soon as, as soon as you can get it. Cause I'll put this up very soon, like in the next day.

01:25:42.240 Okay. Yes. All right. Okay. Is there anything else that you would like to say that we haven't

01:25:48.940 covered? I mean, first of all, I think it's wonderful the way that you're, you're talking

01:25:53.940 about this as sort of an outsider, that it's actually exciting because we, we, and we probably

01:25:59.300 make this mistake that we think of ourselves a little bit sort of technocrats and, and, you know,

01:26:04.100 fiddlers and the margin kind of thing. And it actually, you're right. And it is exciting

01:26:08.500 because if we could actually spend our resources four times as well as what we're doing right

01:26:15.240 now. So instead of saying all the things that are politically correct and make us all feel

01:26:19.140 warm and fussy, actually doing the things that perhaps are not top of our mind, not top

01:26:24.660 of the, uh, uh, the, the agenda, but would just do an amazing amount of good. Why the hell

01:26:29.460 are we not doing that? So yes, thank you very much for, for getting me back in the groove and

01:26:34.200 actually saying this is incredibly useful. Yeah. Yes. I think, I think it's a mistake

01:26:40.860 not to view what you're doing as a, as an exciting adventure. I think it's a form of,

01:26:45.120 of what, uh, it's a form of non-helpful humility. Yeah. And I think we, I, I, I'm Danish, uh,

01:26:55.460 as background and, and one of the things we're very, very good at is self-effacement. Uh, and so,

01:27:00.620 yes, you're probably right. So you're calling people, you're calling people to a great adventure

01:27:05.620 here. Yes. You're saying, look, we have enough resources so that we could deflect a small

01:27:11.100 fraction of them and do an unbelievable amount of good. And, and there would be no downside

01:27:16.580 to that. There would be no downside to anyone. There would be nothing but upside, even with

01:27:20.960 some error and there's going to be error. And so of course there is. And I think we'll find

01:27:25.500 that people will respond to this video in a very, very positive way. And because there,

01:27:30.100 I do believe that there, as people become more aware that we are becoming richer and that we do

01:27:36.900 have more resources at our disposal, that that's genuinely true. And that with a bit of intelligent

01:27:42.080 consideration, we could make things a lot more, less dismal for a lot of people. I think that they

01:27:48.520 will start to view that as something that's part of a great global, national and global adventure.

01:27:54.200 And, and because you're agnostic and because you've done the legwork, then people can also,

01:28:00.320 I think, get behind that without any real cynicism. They can say, look, our money spent here is not

01:28:05.480 going to be wasted. We can be reasonably assured that if we're charitable in this direction, we're

01:28:09.860 going to do something positive. And so, so anyways, like I said, I found it incredibly

01:28:14.400 interesting. Wonderful. And let me, let me just say, again, we've said a couple of times that

01:28:19.720 something that I've done, I need to say, you know, I'm just a sock puppet that talks about all these

01:28:25.220 things. The, this is the work of an incredible amount of really, really smart economists. So

01:28:30.020 one of the three of the world's top economists, you know, seven Nobel laureates, those are the guys

01:28:34.360 who've actually done the work and who are giving the credibility to all of this, this research. And

01:28:39.680 that's why we can say with great amount of certainty, this is not just sort of a whim,

01:28:44.900 but something that is probably the best we know now. It's probably, as you point out,

01:28:49.120 not entirely true, but it's certainly better than anything else we have right now.

01:28:52.920 Right. So good. That's it. Well, and that's actually the right comparison. It's like,

01:28:57.560 it's not absolutely true. Yeah. But no one's got a better idea. Right. So we go with the best idea

01:29:03.560 that we have. Exactly. Right. Right. All right. Well, look, it was a great pleasure talking to

01:29:09.380 you. And I'm hoping that, you know, a million people will watch this and that we'll get another

01:29:13.960 million podcasts out of it. And that this will help disseminate what you're doing broadly. I think

01:29:20.100 that would be lovely. You bet. Thank you. And it was great also meeting you. And I hope our paths

01:29:27.900 will cross again soon. And, you know, we should, we should make a habit of this. Yes, we definitely

01:29:32.620 should. Well, when you start to develop some more of the national indices, have you worked on any

01:29:37.300 Western countries like Canada, the United States? So we, we, I wanted to do that. So we, we haven't

01:29:42.720 done it in the U S just simply because it's too dysfunctional in so many different ways. We've seen

01:29:46.740 a couple of other people trying to do this without our involvement. And one of the things we're really,

01:29:51.900 really good at is that, you know, you get all these economists to do all this stuff. And the first

01:29:56.240 draft of the paper is this is really hard. We need 10 years, a lot of research money, and then we'll

01:30:01.340 probably get you something. And, you know, we say, look, that's, that's nowhere. You've

01:30:05.380 got to, you know, give it your best shot, give use the information that's out there now and

01:30:09.500 give us a knowledge because politicians are going to make decisions next year. And, and

01:30:14.100 what has happened in those two places. So they did one in Holland. They did, it might actually

01:30:20.240 be Canada, but that was like 10 years ago. It ends up very much like a very interesting anthology

01:30:26.480 of, of, of points that, yes, yes, directions. I have no sort of consistency as what we're

01:30:32.620 trying to achieve. What would it cost? What would it cost to have something like this done

01:30:37.420 for Canada? Uh, so the short, the short version is it costs about two and a half million dollars.

01:30:43.880 Simply it's, it's, it doesn't really scale well. Uh, so doing it for, for Ghana is the same 1.00

01:30:49.220 thing as doing it for Canada. How long would it take? Uh, 18 months. God, that's such a good

01:30:55.660 idea. So two and a half million dollars, 18 months. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm going to wrap

01:31:00.620 that around and maybe we can figure out how to raise the money. We should, we should try

01:31:05.480 and do that. That would be fantastic. And I think there'd be a lot of interest in Canada

01:31:09.160 and Canada would be great way to also get sort of bridge point into the U S without doing

01:31:13.800 it in the U S. Yep. Yep. Well that, that would be good. Cause we're flailing about politically

01:31:18.100 and it would be nice to. Yes. Okay. So, so that's, that's, that's, that's, that's fodder for

01:31:24.060 another conversation. We, I've got a couple of other conversations that I'd like to have

01:31:27.320 with you about policy development and also about marketing, but we'll save those for another

01:31:31.740 time.

01:31:32.740 Thank you for your time.

01:31:38.740 Bye.

01:31:40.740 Bye.

01:31:41.740 Bye.

01:31:41.840 Bye.

01:31:42.340 Bye.

01:31:44.300 Bye.

01:31:45.300 Bye.

01:31:45.620 Bye.

01:31:45.920 Bye.

01:31:47.240 Bye.

01:31:47.920 Bye.

01:31:48.460 Bye.

01:31:48.720 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 08, 2018

Bjørn Lomborg

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