The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Bjorn Lomborg: how to actually meet Sustainable Development Goals

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

In 2015, the world’s leaders attempted to address the major problems facing mankind by setting the Sustainable Development Goals, a compilation of 169 targets to be hit by 2030. On this Munk Dialogue, we’re joined by Bjorn Lomborg, President of The Copenhagen Consensus, who argues that we need a total rethink in how we tackle and overcome our biggest challenges.  This new strategy, the culmination of a partnership between several Nobel laureates and more than a hundred leading economists, aims to deliver important targets - such as ending world hunger and the eradication of disease killers like tuberculosis and malaria - thereby saving 4 million kids every year and creating economic benefits worth one trillion dollars. In our discussion, Bjorn narrows down a few high impact, low cost solutions that will deliver real world results.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events.This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracy. Hello, monk listeners. Rudyard Griffith here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our continuing conversations called the monk dialogues. These are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. We go deep into the big issues that are transforming our world and shaping our future on each and every monk dialogue. Well, in 2015, the world's leaders attempted to address the major problems facing humanity by setting out the so-called.

sustainability development goals, a compilation of 169 targets to improve life around the world, all to be achieved by 2030. On this monk dialogue, we're joined by Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, who argues that the current strategy is running far behind schedule and failing to deliver results. The goal now must be to narrow down this ambitious set of targets to a few high-impact low-cost solutions that can end world hunger, eradicate killer diseases, and educate children from all walks of life. Bjorn Lomborg, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Hey, it's great to be here, Roger. Thank you.

Yeah, so nice to catch up again. It's been almost a decade, Bjorn, since we were together in Toronto for the Monk debate on climate change. A memorable evening. so much that's happened in the last 10 years. So I'm really looking forward to catching up with you and learning about all the different things that you've been working on. So let's start with Goren Longborg

as of February 2023. You've got a big new project underway. Tell us a little bit about it. Well, so this project is really, and I think a lot of people will be slightly surprised about nothing about all the other stuff that I've been talking about climate and all that. this is about the smartest things to do for the world.

So I think a lot of people don't really know that over the last seven and a half years, the world has promised something called the Sustainable Development Goals. We basically set targets from 2016 up to 2030 saying we're going to fix everything in the world. We're going to fix climate change, but we're also going to fix war. We're going to get peace. We're going to get everybody out of poverty and everybody out of hunger and everybody off of diseases and we're going to make green spaces and inner cities, and we're going to get everybody to recycle.

And the whole shebang. So we basically promised everything. We have 169 priorities. And when you have 169 priorities, you really don't have any priorities. And so what's happened is we're now halfway. So 2023 is halfway. And we can now see we're not going to make it.

Not even close. I mean, it's kind of obvious we're not doing the peace part. of it. It's also quite obvious we're not doing the climate part of it, but we're really not doing any part of any of these. And so what we're trying to say is look, instead of promising everything and failing all of this, maybe we should start talking about are there some really, really smart things where we could spend not too much money and actually achieve great impact? And the short answer is, yes, there is. We come out with 12 things that the world should do fairly cheap and it'll do an amazing amount of good. So these are kind of high impact. Then what's the other variable? Low cost, low organizational complexity. What's the sweet spot that you're trying to aim for? So it's really well-proven stuff. So it's stuff that we know we can do, even if we are

likely to not do it incredibly effectively. So this is not sort of a, oh, if we could all do this really well, then it would work out. This is stuff we already know. So, take for instance malaria malaria still kills about 600,000 people every year almost exclusively in Africa we know how to fix a lot of this we're not going to fix all of it and again none of the things I'm going to tell you about here will sort of fix everything because that's really really hard but we know that getting insecticides treated bed nets out to people is a great way to reduce the malaria burden because you have fewer mosquitoes. They can't get to you at night, but also when they sit on the net, they actually die. And so they transmit a lot less malaria.

And if you run the models, we could save about 200, almost 200,000 people from dying each year just by putting up more nets. And we know how to do that. Again, you've probably heard these stories. Well, some people are going to use them for bridal nets instead, or they're just going to put them up somewhere else or you know use them as fishing nets and stuff like that we're assuming that people will do just that you know that they will waste some of it some of it won't work you'll put it up wrong just like we've done with all the others but even then even if we do all of this in in a sense not too well we know that because it's a very cheap intervention for every dollar spent and this is the sort of metric that we use you can actually save so many people and you can also make

you can also make them more productive, that for every dollar spent, you will deliver $48 of social benefit. That's a fantastic outcome. And so, again, our argument is simply to say, why don't we, along with all the other things, you know, we should still try to do all the really wonderful things that we want it to do, but maybe just first do these 12 amazing things. And the trick here is the total cost of these 12 things is about, you're going to be a lot of $30 billion a year. That's not nothing, but you know, remember that's a, you know,

that's a rounding error in most other things that we spend money on. Just to give you one example, we spend about a hundred billion dollars globally on makeup. You know, so maybe, you know, maybe we can afford a $30 billion. And the benefit would be that you would save about 4.2 million kids every year, and you would generate benefits, and this is almost exclusively for the world's poorest half, so about 4.1 billion people, you'd create benefits worth about a trillion dollars. So economic benefits worth a trillion dollars. So say four million lives and generate a trillion dollars in benefit, which is about 10% of their GDP right now, that would be an amazing achievement, and we can do that for 30 billion. So our point is simply to say,

Why don't we do these incredibly smart, cheap things that we know how to do? Right. Give us a couple other examples. Mosquito Nets is a great one. What are a few of these other low-cost, high-impact outcomes that we could drive through a program like this? So education, obviously, is one of the big things in all kinds of ways. It's also a big thing in the rich world. We all feel like we could do better in education, but especially for the world's poorest.

So it's almost half a billion kids in low and low middle income countries, which is where we're looking, that basically go through primary school that is often terrible. It's terrible in many different ways. You know, there's just barely a classroom. There's lots of kids in each of these classrooms. The teacher is often not very well prepared and not very well educated, him or herself, perhaps even. And so the question is, how do you deal with this? You know, we've managed to get all kids in classrooms, which is great.

That's still a big achievement, but they don't learn very much there. You know, one study, so we do a lot of tests of these kids. And one study is where you try to see, do they actually, can they read and understand? Because we've gotten everybody to be able to spell through words. So one test here for 10-year-old is VJ has a red hat, a blue shirt, and yellow socks. What color is the hat? And unfortunately, 80% of these kids, the right answer is red, by the way, but, you know, 80% of these kids can't answer this question. So they can read the individual words, but they can't string them to get.

Of course you're not actually going to be able to pull yourself out of poverty, pull your country out of poverty, become productive citizen of the world, if you don't learn how to do that. So there's a couple of really interesting ways how not to do it. And then there are some incredibly good ways how to do it. So unfortunately, Indonesia is the one that has actually tested both of the really bad ways to do it. So they decided to double the number of schools across the country, which, of course, is a nice thing. And it cost a lot of money. And it made it easier for everyone to go to school, but nobody learned anymore. So we've done the study, not we, but, you know, really.

researchers have done the studies, turns out there's no impact of that. They also doubled, or almost doubled, the teacher pay. And because we could actually do studies, because they didn't do it in the same regions all at the same time, you could actually see it had, predictably, an incredible effect on teachers. They were much more happy. But it didn't change the learning of the kids at all. So this famous paper is called Double for Nothing. You know, you double the amount of spending, but you don't actually get anything on the indicator you want.

However, there are some really, really great ways to do education that we are then advocating. It's basically two things. One, you can try to make the teacher better. The other one is that you can try to teach the kid better. The first one is really about structured teacher plans. Again, remember, all of these teachers are struggling. If you have every year before you start, you have teachers. 10 days where you walk them through, what are you going to be teaching this semester or this year?

And then you give them structured teacher plans where they can see, oh, okay, I have to go through this that week. And then you send out text, well, you don't actually send out text message. You do it electronically, but you send out these messages and say, so this week, you're going to do this, this and this. That actually dramatically improves their efficiency in teaching. They're probably still not terribly good. The schools are probably still somewhat bad. But what happens is, and we have good evidence for this, that you can, for very little money, so we're talking about $15, $20 per pupil per year, you can actually make each one of these kids learn twice as much.

So it's like they go to school one year, but they learn two years of schooling. That's an incredible outcome. And this means that when they become adults, they will be more productive, they will have higher incomes, they will drive their economies, and this is basically incredibly good for the economy. Likewise, if you look at some of the other things, so how can you make kids learn better? One of the things that I think we all struggling with in schools is you have all the 12-year-olds in the same classroom, right? So they're all learning at the same grade, but they're widely different, especially in developing countries. Some kids have no clue what's going on.

Some kids are incredibly bored and way ahead. And then the teacher is basically trying to sort of find a middle ground where he or she is, at least teaching some of them. Imagine if you could teach to each individual kid's specific actual learning level. And there are two ways you can do that. You can either separate them into learning levels or, and I'm just going to tell you this other one, they do that in India, for instance. Or you can give them a tablet, so an iPad essentially,

One hour a day, so they're going to be sharing this with many other kids, right? That's one of the way to bring down the cost. So one hour day, you sit in front of this tablet. This tablet very quickly establishes, oh, you're one of those smart kids who are already way ahead, or you have no clue what's going on, right? And then adjust the learning to that exact level. So suddenly the kid is actually learning as if he or she had her private teacher. That increases their learning.

So just doing that one day, sorry, one hour each day, that over the year means that they learn three times as much as what they did before. So they'll actually learn three years of learning for one year in school. Now, again, it'll still cost. You have to get reliable power, so you need solar panels probably. You need to have a locker so they don't get stolen. You need to have this organized so that they can actually use it. There's lots of these studies. It's not cost-free. It'll cost about $27 per kid per year, but you get a huge benefit.

What we find is, on average, if you take all of these, and different sort of solutions will work for different countries, if you spend a dollar, you'll deliver $65 of social good because these kids will become much more productive and much richer once they get to adulthood. How come we're not doing that? Why are we focusing on all kinds of other things as well? how are we not doing the very most effective on education? So let's go to that point. If you want to look at a big, bold objective that we've set for ourselves, is this concept of net zero.

Some countries shooting for zero carbon emissions as early as 2030, others maybe quixotically thinking that another 20 years is going to help with a 2050 net zero target. Bjorn, you know that those types of ambitious sweeping goals seem to command a lot of public attention. They seem to capture our imaginations for better or worse. So what's going on here? Why do we tend to gravitate away from maybe these smaller, highly impactful, lower cost solutions towards grand design, grand theory, and these promises of sweeping systemic change? So I think part of it is because there's different weas involved here,

Right? So if you've already fixed education, you get a pretty good education, if you've already fixed malaria, then you start worrying about climate change. Look, I'm happy somebody is worrying about climate change. We should also be considering climate change. And rich countries can actually do this. You know, for a different conversation, I still think we can do this much smarter and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, fundamentally, this is also a problem. And, you know, we're in advanced civilization. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. So we can also focus on climate. But I think in the way that we talk about the world, we get these few really, really big things that we're talking about, like, you know, let's all go net zero. And that's going to cost, you know, the sort of standard studies from Bank of America, McKinsey, you know, those kinds of estimates, show this is going to cost five or six trillion dollars a year. I'm going to argue that we're probably neither going to finish this. We're not going to spend the money well. We're probably not going to deliver all that much benefit from it. But the real point here is to say, we should still spend some money on climate and actually try to fix it smartly. But surely, if we're going to talk about spending $5, $6 trillion a year, we could spend $30 billion.

Remember, that's what, that's one-two-thousand-th of that cost? Surely we could find that that's not true. And I was really bad at math. It was one-two-hundredth, right? So less a percent. We can certainly spend that money. and find a good way to do that. But the point here is to say

we should stop talking about as if there's just one problem in the world or if there's just one problem that the rich world cares about. If you're a poor person, if you live in the poorest half of this world, your main concerns is the fact that you kid might die tonight

from an easily curable infectious disease, that they don't have enough food, that they don't get good education, that there's corruption, there are all these other issues. And I'm not saying that should sort of blind us and then say, oh, then just don't care about climate change. Again, we can do many things at the same time. But at least we owe it to the world not just to suck up all the oxygen with

climate change and a few other things. It seems to me that when you talk about this and you then say, we should do more than climate change. People will then say, ah, plastic straws, right? Or we'll go on to some of these other things that's very first world issues. And sure. But again, one of the things that we find in this project is that we should also remember most people don't die from infectious diseases anymore, you know, because we've eventually we've eradicated in the rich world, and we're pretty well on our way to eradicate most of it in the, even in the poor world, so we increasingly die from cancer and heart attack. There's a lot of great things that we can also do for that. We're basically, again, saying you can do this very

cheaply in the poor world. But again, one of the amazing things that I think we've totally underappreciated is in the rich world, we have basically made people die a lot less from heart disease because we got those cheap pills. I don't know. There's a good chance that you're on them. I'm certainly on them. A lot of older people in the rich world are on these. You know, it basically lowers your blood pressure and it makes it much more likely that you're going to survive another six or seven years. Those people, you know, those people are. Pills are incredibly cheap. We should make sure that those get out to everyone.

But again, you can sort of see why, you know, one set of the people who are arguing about climate change can sell amygdine. That's a lot more fun than Bjorn sitting here and rattling a pill cage and saying, but we have cheap pills. But, you know, in a world that can actually walk and chew gum, we should also do the cheap pills. So in your conversations with people in the developing South, what are they saying to you?

because the message through the media often is that their concerns are also these big macro concerns. You've talked about, you know, climate being one of them. The, you know, endless procession of COP conferences that we have that demand a lot of public attention, maybe rightly so. But the result, I think, is a perception here in the developed West. The developing South is largely aligned with us on what. what our priorities are for helping them. You think that's, give us your assessment of that. So I think there's two things to that.

One, obviously, you know, if you come and rattle a bag as we did with climate and say, would you like $100 billion a year? Most countries will say yes. When they then realize, well, we didn't actually mean that we're gonna give it away. We'll sort of cook the books until it looks like we gave you $100 billion.

They get a lot more. not surprisingly either so there there's some sense of this you know we worked in in Malawi last year and they you know it's one of the poorest countries in the world and they have a lot of the budget as being determined by rich Western development organizations and so not surprisingly Malawi is very attuned to what it is that you know Germany and Canada and everybody else actually want to do with their money now given it's their money it's perhaps not unreasonable that you have to listen to what they also want. These are taxpayer money after all. But I think

we need to also recognize that Malawi have some really, really basic issues like, for instance, with education. They're now actually rolling out the thing I was just talking about with the iPads across their entire primary school. And one of the reasons is because of these analyses that show it's an incredibly effective policy. But it's hard for them to raise the money because a lot of Westerners come and say, but don't you want help with your methane leakage from your garbage dumps? And in the big scheme of things, yes, we would like that too,

and that'll give us some energy and that's good. Most of these proposals are not bad. It's just a question of saying, do you want to do a little good for you at all or a lot of good for you at all? But I think there's an other way in which we're very much misrepresenting. sending them. So most people in the developing world want to get out of poverty. And they want their nations to rise. So we work with Bangladesh. One of their main focuses was that they wanted to stop being a low-income country. And their goal was we want to become

a lower middle-income country, which I think most people probably have no idea. That means going from sort of like $2 a day up to now they're at $7 a day. That's an incredible achievement. course it means you can suddenly afford more food for your kid you can afford to make sure that they get an education you can get a lot of the things that we take totally for granted that's what comes with the seven dollars per day but and with all that said let's also remember in developing countries just like here politicians have to get your vote or at least get your acceptance if you're in a more sort of dictatorial estate like china or something you you've got to do stuff that actually resonate with people. And so you end up making some of the same proposals.

You make things that sound great that make everybody say, oh, yeah, I want one of those, instead of perhaps saying, what do we know works? And so what we're saying is these are some incredibly effective policies. They might not be terribly sexy. They may not be the best things that you want it to solve. But this is what science actually knows work. This is what economics can tell you for very little money, you can fix a really huge important problem. And so, again, when I go to developing countries, they're often like, but what about, you know, peace? What about, you know, climate change? What about corruption? All these sort of different things. And we have partial solutions to some of them, just to give you on the corruption rate.

Corruption probably costs about a trillion dollars a year. So, and obviously we don't know because, you know, It's in the black economy, so it's an estimate. But, yeah, it's a huge problem. And we don't really know how to get rid of corruption in most places, but there is one thing that we do know. So most developing country spending goes to procurement. So basically, you know, the government buying, you know, stick-it notes and pens all the way up to roads.

And obviously, the roads matter a lot more because they're much, much more costly. So it's almost half of public spend. that goes to procurement, procurement is incredibly corrupt. Not surprisingly, you know, you have a lot of money going through very few hands and you can basically influence it and get a lot of money out of it. So in Bangladesh, for instance, it turns out they have this, you have to hand in a bid to the government for this particular road or whatever it is. But in reality, the ruling elites have already decided who is going to get it.

And so they put up goons outside the office where you have to hand in the bid. And so you can't do it. What turns out, and this has been known for a long time, but we still argue there's about, you know, there's about 40 countries that still haven't done it. You could do e-procurement. So essentially do procurement, but like on eBay. So you bid it out and everybody can bid in everything. It's much, it's very cheap to do. and it makes it a lot harder to do corruption.

You'll still be corrupt, but slightly less so. And what we find is this can save you somewhere between half and $3 billion a year if you do this well, and it costs peanuts. So what we're arguing is you can't fix all of corruption. You certainly can't fix some of the really, really great corruption that we see on TV and stuff. But here is a structural proposal

that for very little money can do somewhere between, $100,300 of good. Why don't we do that first? And actually, when we showed this to Bangladesh, the finance minister was, I love that, partly because it would actually make him about $700 million every year, because he could do this cheaper and then spend the money elsewhere.

He would have to take a battle with a lot of the people who would no longer be getting all the sealed envelopes. But they've actually achieved much of it, not all of it, but much of it. So again, We give, if you will, practical things that can be done. They're not all of it. They're not going to solve everything you care about,

but they are going to deliver an amazing amount of good at very low cost. Hey, Monk podcast listeners. I wanted to let you know about our other weekly audio program. It's called Friday Focus. And hey, guess what? It comes out each and every Friday. It's half an hour long. And it provides you with a master class on international events,

all the big issues and ideas. shaping our world. We've got that for you. Each and every Friday, here at the Monk Debates, simply access via our website, triplew monkdebates.com. Click on Friday Focus in the top right navigation. You'll get all the details or check out a sample of the program in the same podcast feed as the main Monk Debates podcast. I hope you'll join us for the next edition of the Friday Focus podcast. Now back to our program. For people listening, they may have in the back of their mind those that phrase the Millennium Goals, which were set out by the United Nations as, again, supposedly important benchmarks to kind of measure progress when it came to development across a variety of sectors. I think the consensus was that the Millennium Goals fell well short of promise in terms of the ambition and then the reality.

How is what you're talking about different than the Millennium Goals? And what do you think the learnings could be from that experiment with this idea of, you know, targeted metrics that are moved incrementally by, you know, primarily NGO groups, civil society? you know, and state donors. So it's a great example with Millennium Development Goals. They were set from 2000 to 2015, and that's really why we have the sustainable development goals. Remember, the UN has made lots and lots of promises before. We probably promised a full and free education about 20 times from the 1950s and up to

the 2000s, and we never achieved them. In 2000, we then said, now we really, really mean it. And we almost managed to do it. There's no doubt that part of what we promised would have happened anyway. So it's not like the Millennium Development Goals just sort of magically solved everything. And as you pointed out, we didn't also manage to do all things that we promised. For instance, we promised that we were going to reduce child mortality by two-thirds. And we only managed to reduce it by half.

But, you know, that's still, we went from 12 million kids dying every year to 6 million. kids dying each year. That's still six million too many, but it's amazingly much better than 12 million kids dying. So we did actually manage to achieve quite a lot of it. And some of this was because of the Millennium Development Goals. They were set basically by Kofi Annan, who was the UN Secretary General, and a few other guys in a back room. And these were all guys, actually, in 2000. And so there were 21, but we really only cared about nine of them. which is also a fun story in the other itself, but fundamentally, those very, very simple ones, so get people out of poverty, get them out of hunger, stop kids from dying, stop moms from dying,

and get better education. That's fundamentally it. That was very, very easy. We poured in a lot of money, but compared to everything else, we spend money on, still not all that much. And it gave an amazing amount of benefit. So, for instance, on vaccinations, we vaccinated a lot more. That probably saves about two million kids every year. So of the six million kids that we're saving, that we saved over that 15-year period, probably a third of these savings came from vaccinations. You know, just get rid of measles. This is, again, not rocket science. So you can do this very, very pointedly. And I think what happened was everybody felt this is wrong to have a couple of guys sit in the back of a room in the UN building put up all these targets. We should have everybody involved.

And I applaud the intent. But what happens is when you ask everyone, what do you think should be the priority? You get everyone to say everything. And so we ended up now promising everything to everyone all the time. There's no way we can afford it. We're not going to do it. and we manifestly are not doing it. And so what I'm saying is, let's go back to promising less

and promising it smarter. Now, I still have some qualms about some of the things we promised in the Millennium Development Goals because they were not based on what's most effective. It was more sort of what feels like we really should do something about it. And what we're saying is, let's do the stuff that actually does the most good. So for instance, for moms and babies,

One of the things, and this blows my mind, every year, about 300,000 moms still die in childbirth. Now, it used to be the childbirth was really, really dangerous, but it's no longer so most places in the world, but in the poor part of the world, it still is. And every year in the first 31 days of a child's life, 2.1 million kids die. That's an amazingly large number, and that's a terrifying number. And, you know, it has lots and lots of implications. What we find is, and so this is the amazing thing, there's an incredibly cheap way to deal with this. So it's basically called BMK. That's a terrible short for, and I can't quite remember it, but it's basic emergency obstetric and newborn health care.

So it's basically making sure that you have very simple things. This is what World Health Organization are arguing for. Most kids are now born in hospitals, but most of these hospitals don't have these very basic things. Why? Because it's no fun to have these basic things for newborn children. It's much more fun to have the machine that says pling, if you've ever seen that Monty Python skid, right?

But yeah, where John Cleese think the only important machine in the room is the machine that says playing, because that's the expensive machine that all the doctors like. And of course, that's, it's a parody. But, you know, there is some truth to the fact that we like this sort of edge of the research part much more than these sort of basic things. One of those things that we should have in all hospitals is a little plastic bag that can get. children to start breathing. I didn't know that before I started looking at this, but it turns out that every 20th kid in the world, this is all in rich countries, when they come out, they don't breathe at first. So you have to actually, you know, hit them really

hard in the back and then they, you know, most of them will start, but one percent still won't. And then you need this little tube that you can actually get them to breathe and then they survive. If you don't have this tube and it cost about $25, it won't survive. Every hospital will probably survive about, or save about five lives each year for this $25 thing. Why don't we have this? And, you know, this is just one example of all of these things. So what we find is for about $3.5 billion a year, we could save 160,000 moms from dying, and we could save 1.1 million kids from dying. This just sounds like, you know, this sounds like Christmas Eve. We should be doing this. And again, not so sexy as all these other things you talked about, but again, just one of those many examples of things that for little money will deliver an amazing amount of benefit. So I'm simply saying when we're getting together here in September in New York and everybody's going to be, you know, saying, well, we're halfway with the SDGs and we've done nothing. Maybe that's not true. We've done a little bit, but not very much, right? Maybe we should say, all right, we should still commit to doing

everything because we're good people. But let's first do these amazing 12 things. Let's suspend $30 billion a year on this, a third of what we spend on cosmetics, and then we'll actually have fixed an enormous amount of benefit for the world. I think that's a pretty obvious shoe in first. So Bjorn, how is this project going? Are you raising money from the general public? Are you working with international foundations? To what extent have been, have you been able to translate these ideas into actual efforts kind of on the ground to deliver these kind of high impact,

generally lower cost solutions to life extending, productivity enhancing policies and ideas, as you've just enumerated? Yes. So the first thing is to recognize that we're academics. So we don't, we're not out there and actually making sure that here is one of those plastic things. We're trying to get the information out

so that everyone will spend their money smarter. So we're basically about getting this information out. You're actually the first podcast where I'm really talking about this. We are just about to start publishing this. So we've done absolutely nothing so far. We're hoping that a lot more people will have heard about this in half a year.

So we're going to be publishing 13 articles, so an introductory article, and on each of these 12 ideas. And a lot of the world's biggest papers around the developing world, so in Kenya, in Ethiopia, in Nigeria, in India, in Bangladesh, and Indonesia, many other places, we're also hopeful that we will get some of this out to rich countries. But again, you know, we're sort of like, yeah, tuberculosis, been there, done that. You know, we're not nearly as enthused about these things. But I'm hoping that we can get this conversation going. And what I think, so I'm also writing a book that will be out in a couple of months that will basically tell this story.

And I think there's a lot of people who want to find how do I do good. And the point here is basically to say there's a lot of ways where you can do a little good for a lot of money. And then there's a few places where you can do a lot of good for the same money. And I think most people get the idea we should do that first. So I'm hoping that we will all pressure our governments, we will all tell our politicians and will tweet all these things to get people to do a little more of the smart stuff. I'm grown up enough to know that just because I say this is a good idea,

it doesn't mean it's suddenly and magically going to happen. But I think if we put out these 12 amazing things where you, for little money, can do all this amazing stuff, it'll become a little easier for governments, for NGOs and everybody else to do this. So obviously, we're working with a lot, so we're saying, for instance, for tuberculosis, for every dollar spent, you'll do $48 of good. Not surprisingly, the Stop TB organization that this is their goal. They're like, we're great?

Yes, this is a great study. And they're going to be pushing that. And likewise for malaria, likewise for most other of these organizations. So of course, there's a lot of organizations out there who love it, just because we're saying they're doing really good stuff. But I think this has the opportunity to make it a little more likely that will actually do great stuff. And again, we have a saying here at my think tank.

We're economists, we're rationalists. I would love the world to do all the smart stuff. But in reality, we're not going to do that. So our goal is not to get it all right, but to get everything a little less wrong. If we could actually move the needle a little more towards being smart, I would consider that a wonderful achievement. In the last couple months on this podcast, we've had William McCasselon, one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. There's a lot of what I'm hearing from you,

born, that seems kind of synced up with effective altruism. Am I right to put those two things together? And it seemed like a natural kind of constituency for your research. I know Will as well, and we certainly agree on a lot of things. I think the main difference is probably that the effective altruists,

there's one very big methodological difference that they don't want to discount the future. So if you ask most people, do you want a dollar today, or most people don't care about a dollar, do you want $100 now or $100 in a year? They'll take the $100 now, right? Which kind of makes sense because in a year, who knows sort of thing for a lot of different reasons. And we'll also be richer. If you ask the same thing about 100 years, you'd probably, you know, definitely take it.

And this basically means money and things that happen, good stuff that happens, is more important now than it is in the future. the effective altruists believe very, very strongly that actually everything is equally matterful all the way out into infinity, which has this awkward situation of saying that we don't really matter. All that matters is the billions and hundreds of billions of people who are going to be living,

you know, tens of thousands of years from now. I can't quite visualize it. And of course, it kind of means that we should just be saving up for those guys. We should not spend anything on ourselves, We should just do everything for the future. That's why they're very worried about existential threats, that kind of thing. And to me, that's just not a correct representation of reality.

That's just not how we are. I think it makes for great conversation. I think they have a lot of fun things. You know, for instance, one of the things I love about Will is his way of saying, you know, people give a lot to dog and cat shelters. But the most animals that suffer everywhere in the world are, you know, cows and pigs. that we have in our in our big big farms and and and the reason why we care about the cats and and dogs is a little bit like what we talked about before because those are the ones that are

in our mind we don't see newscasts about all these others but of course we need to recognize that so I think they do some great stuff but in fundamentally what we try to do is much more sort of nitty gritty into the reality of right now right other than talking about how we're going to save mankind in 100 or in 1,000 years. I love that they're there, but in that way we sort of spread our efforts into different areas. Fair enough. I think in my mind, what links you both is this idea of potential, right, and that there is vast amounts of human potential in the present, in the moment,

which is going wasted across this planet, children who are never identified as the, you know, remarkable scholars that they are. And they never go on to careers that allow them to make the contributions that arguably for the likes of William McChassel and the effect of Ultras could secure the very future that they would like us, you know, not to discount going into, you know, into the millenniums. I agree. It's hard to think of it. It's very sci-fi.

But thank you, Boer. This has been a fascinating conversation. Congratulations on all your work. We're going to keep an eye out for. your book and the specific kind of outputs of your think tank as you move through these Big 12 solutions. So we'll share that information with our Monk members as it becomes available. And again, just great to catch up with you again and touch base.

I really enjoyed this conversation. Roger, it was great to talk to you. Thanks. Well, that wraps up our dialogue today with Bjorn Longborg. I want to thank him for coming on the program and giving us a lot to think about. an optimistic message about how we can with a few focused priorities and principles, we can achieve worldwide change. If you've enjoyed this Munk Dialogue or you've heard things on our other Munk podcast that have sparked your curiosity, please send us an email. We'd love to hear how we're doing.

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