Will Cain Country - Bjorn Lomborg: How to Unleash Efficiency to Solve the World's Problems

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

Can some of the most complicated and controversial political issues be solved through simple cost-benefit analysis? Author, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, the President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Bjorn Lomborg and Will dissect this very question.   Will and Bjorn discuss his new book, Best Things First: The 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest and our global SDG promises, deep diving into some of the world's most complicated and divisive issues from climate change to poverty.   Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing [e-mail] Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for $5.5 plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. Climate, nutrition, childhood immunization. Can we tackle the most controversial issues while making them so rational by doing the best things first? It's the Will Kane podcast on Fox News Podcast. What's up? And welcome to Wednesday. As always, I hope you will download rate and review this podcast wherever you get your audio entertainment, Apple, Spotify, or at Fox News podcast.

You can watch the Will Kane podcast on YouTube. And go follow me on Twitter for all the latest on the Will Kane podcast at Will Kane. Diorne Longborg is a climate scientist who has been one of the most open-minded, and in my estimation, authentic solution seekers, in issues ranging from climate to nutrition. He's written a new book addressing the problems plaguing the world and acutely the world's poorest and asking the question, why don't we try to do the best things first? In fact, now he's written a book on it, Best Things First, where he offers up 12 solutions to some of the biggest problems in the world. As I mentioned, I have a tendency, as you know, to focus, talk, and address the most controversial elephants in the room. And I do with Bjorn, but he doesn't just talk about climate immunization. He also talks about things that should be in some way much more obvious and much less controversial. to address, like malaria and tuberculosis. And he does so through a very rational means by simply

asking, what's the cost benefit on the solution to any of these problems? I think you're going to enjoy this conversation where we talk. And I push Bjorn at times into talking about some of the more controversial issues while he offers up solutions to some of the world's problems. Here is Bjorn Longborg. Bjorn Lomborg, it's great to see you again. The author of a new book, Best Things First, the 12 Most Efficient Solutions for the World's Porest and Our Global SDG Promises. Bjorn, tell me the central thesis.

What's it about best things first? It's about the best things first. It really is about saying, look, we promise all these different things in the world. We actually have, you know, the U.S. and every other country in the world. has literally promised to do all good things by 2030. So we promised to fix hunger and poverty and education. And oh, climate change in war and corruption and pretty much everything else, including getting organic apples to everyone.

So we've literally promised everything. And not surprisingly, we're failing badly. You can't promise everything and expect that actually works out. And so what we're trying to say is, look, if you can't do everything, we should do the best things first. And so we've asked lots and lots of economists to say, where can you spend a dollar and do a lot of good? And what they come out with is these 12 things the book actually details. So it basically says for very little money, we could do an amazing amount of good for the world.

So this is fixed tuberculosis, malaria, fixed primary education, make sure that people have ownership of their land, those kinds of things. That will help people in the poor part of the world immensely. it'll cost very little. We're talking about $35 billion a year. I don't think you have $35 billion. I certainly don't have it. But in the international context, very little money. And it will save 4.2 million lives each and every year. And it will make the world $1.1 trillion richer each and every year. It's simply some of the best things that we could possibly do. And that's why I'm saying we should do those best things first. But the implication, Bjorn, is that it's a rebuttal. It's a rebuttal to a posture, to a, to a position that has been taken up where we are not doing the best things first. Instead, we are doing what? So I think to a certain extent, we are focused on the things that have great PR or a lot of cute animals or, you know, a lot of crying babies. That sort of makes sense. I mean, you're in the TV business. That makes for good TV, right? But it's not the place. where we can actually do the most good. So, you know, you could sort of a little proverbially say we're so focused on fixing plastic stores in the ocean, which, look, I'm not in favor plastic stores in the ocean, but it's probably

not the first thing that we should be focused on. So we're focused on some things where we can spend lots of resources and do fairly little good instead of spending first money where it could do an immense amount of good. So I don't think it's so much that people are wrong. There are some places where we were wrong. but it's mostly that we just love to say yes to everything instead of being honest and saying if we can't do it all and we clearly can't then let's say yes to the smartest stuff first so that's an interesting perspective we do what is flashy we do what is immediate or right before our

eyes i've often thought this for example let's take up the plastic straw issue you know i've seen i've seen some of the research the united states is responsible for so little of the global oceanic plastic pollution and even inside of that how much of it is attributable to plastic straws is just infinitesimal and so me drinking a smoothie out of a paper straw which is torture which is horrendous is is more about that smoothie shop that restaurant or that customer asking for that paper straw it's more about their own sense of morality their own sense of virtue their own preening, peacocking in the mirror. And you can probably extrapolate that out, Bjorn, I think in a lot of these situations, what we're doing, it's always dangerous ground

to impugn others' motives, but what we're doing is less about affecting an actual outcome and more about making ourselves feel virtuous. And I think that's very true. And look, most people live within their own little bubble of things that matter to them. And That's great. But when we want to do good for the world, and we do, I mean, most people actually say they really do care about the world, then we should at least make sure that that money, that those efforts are really spent in a way that do the very most good. And so, you know, it's sort of weird that we don't hear about, you know, say, for instance, tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is, again, the world's leading infectious disease killer. For two years, it was out-competed by COVID. But now it's back where it's been for the last 10 years. This is the thing that kills about 1.4 million people each and every year.

You and I don't hear about it because it's not affecting us. Remember, back in the 1800s, about every fourth death in the U.S. and around the world was due to TB. But, you know, we fixed it. We found a solution. don't go to sanatoriums anymore. We know how to fix it. It's weird that we don't think about how we could fix that in the rest of the world. This is basically about getting people to take their medication. That's hard because you have to take it for half a year. And you have to find

all the extra people, the ones that cough, but never get to the doctor, never get diagnosed, never get treated, and then pass it on to 15 other people. It would cost about six and a half billion dollars. And then by the end of this decade, we would basically have not eradicated, but almost eradicated tuberculosis. Why aren't we doing that? Those would be one of the very best things we can do because it's not, you know, sexy or flashy. You talk about tuberculosis.

That's one of the 12, as you point out, things that you feel like are the best things that we should be doing first. You also talk about hunger. You talk about nutrition. Tell me about, first of all, that is flashy. That is of interest to people. I think there is a general consensus in the first world

that, you know, we're getting fat, and also less healthy at the same time. We're eating less nutritious food. I think there is, you have a willing audience. You have willing ears and willing eyeballs to hear about nutrition and hunger. Why is that not something then that's prioritized? It's one of the best things we can do first. Great.

I should just first say, I do feel that this is important, but it's not just me feeling it. It's actually some of the world's top economists who have been very cold-heartedly looking at how much will this cost and how much good will it deliver. So it's actually, you know, it's really grounded on a lot of economics that tells us this is some of the very best things you can do. But on the nutrition side, I'm probably, again, going to disappoint you a little bit because what we find is the typical thing that people will talk about when they talk about hunger, which is just let's distribute a lot of food, you know, especially to these really poor kids. Turns out to be very ineffective for two reasons, partly because it's very hard to distribute a lot of food and get it out reliably to the people who need it. And secondly, it's very open to corruption, which means that you will end up getting a lot more or a lot less delivered to the actual hungry kids for every dollar that you spend. So we are actually focusing on something, again, that's much more boring, but ends up being much more effective. One of them is to get essentially vitamin pills to pregnant women.

This is incredibly cheap. Also, there's nobody who'd want to steal those pills, right? There's no corruption opportunity there. But if you could get them much better micronutrients, essentially. And this is already rolled out pretty much everywhere that they get full of acid and iron. Then you just swap it out with a much more with a pill that has a lot more vitamins and essential minerals. And that means about two million kids won't be born prematurely. That means they will grow up and go to school and learn more.

We know that very well. And that means they'll be much more productive in their adult lives. So for every dollar spent there, you can do in the order of $24 of social good. That's fantastic. We should do that. The other bit, getting food to people, instead of trying to get food out to people, which turns out to be really hard, we should be investing in research and development into getting better yields in the future.

Because if you can essentially make a seed more effective, everyone will be buying those seeds and everybody will be using those seeds. You don't actually have to push it out. People, you know, especially farmers, will do that. So farmers will be producing more. That's great for farmers. Consumers will get cheaper food. And that means about a million, actually, 130 million people won't be starving.

So this is the long-term version of doing that. But of course, again, this is not as sex as just saying, oh, my God, I just saw some hungry kids on TV. We should send food to them tonight. Well, first of all, okay, a couple of quick responses to what you had to say. I'm glad you corrected me on what you feel versus what is grounded in evidence and economics because it's a verbal tick that people say that I often try to deprive of myself. I feel. I feel. I always try to say, I think. I'm not feeling my way through most of these issues. I'm thinking my way through most of these issues. And you have researched your way to your conclusion on these issues.

So I appreciate that correction. Secondarily, I don't know why you think I would be disappointed in that answer. But I'm not going to offer you affirmation or rebuttal. Instead, I just want to start this conversation that I don't know where it's going to go. Let's talk for a moment about the genetic modification of these seeds, the improved seeds with more, with a better yield that helps solve hunger and nutrition. We'll be right back with more of the Wilcane podcast. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget.

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Download and listen at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. So one of my favorite stories, Bjorn, is the story of Thomas Malthus. I've told it on numerous occasions. I've talked about it here on this podcast. Malthus believed that the world would go hungry, starvation, and we'd ultimately experience population decline. Malthus was quite obviously wrong. I mean, he's objectively, he was wrong. We see the numbers.

And why was he wrong? It's because he could not anticipate innovation. He couldn't anticipate the internal combustion engine. He couldn't anticipate synthetic fertilize. He couldn't anticipate genetic modification of wheat, of plants that increased yield. He couldn't anticipate all the things that came along over the next century. It was only one century that all that stuff happened that made the world's population explode. But while I've loved to tell that story, Bjorn, I've had this recent reexamination, at least, in terms of,

but on the other side of that, do we know what's happening with that food, with those seeds, with the yes, the increased yield, that at the same time, it seems that much of what we have produced is less bang for our buck in terms of nutrition. A lot of our food we have seen is lacking in a lot of the essentials that you would get out of an organically grown plant. I'm just wondering, you know, I don't doubt your solution's ability to help resolve some element of world hunger, but is there a cost, and it may be a down-the-line cost, that we're actually creating food that creates a less healthy life. Yes.

So there's a lot of questions in that, and I'm not qualified to answer all of them. Remember, again, I rely on a lot of these experts who have actually done the paper, all the papers that my book is based on. But there's a short and long answer. So the short answer is simply, if you make people better off, wealthier,

they can buy much better food. and that's basically what you do in the rich world you can buy much better food now a lot of people then decide to just buy a lot of you know fat salty crap food uh and you know look that's not healthy we should probably you know preface that but in some sense that's people's own choice you can have a long conversation about to what extent uh you should still do something about that we actually have some arguments that you possibly should reduce salt intake uh in in the poor part of the world by having all producers on board for that. And that could actually have some deliberate health benefits.

But fundamentally, this is about people making their own decision. For most people in the poor half of the world, they're struggling not with, oh, what should I spend my money on healthy food or crap food? It's more that they don't have money and they can get no food for their lack of money. And so there, it really is about getting cheap food. available to people. And that is about, you know, so you mentioned wheat. We had a huge sort of breakthrough in the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 70s. But this mostly helped the rich world in some of the upper middle-income countries. But many of the low-income countries, they still

use Casawa and sorghum and many other things that you and I don't normally eat. And we haven't done nearly as much research on it because there's not nearly as much money to be made in it because these are poor farmers. And so we're saying, And the same kind of research that we put in the first Green Revolution, we should now put into these less interesting food crops because they are typically consumed by poor people, but they will actually end up helping a lot of these people to become richer and also eventually end up consuming American products and all these other things that's good for you. But fundamentally also just because it's a good thing to do. Well, and I'm not offering a debate. I'm not offering a rebuttal necessarily,

but I'm not just talking about people making poor choices as they get richer. I'm not talking about people just choosing to buy the tockies chips instead of a fruit or a vegetable. I'm actually also talking about that stock of wheat or that apple containing fewer nutrients with the modification of seeds or fertilizers. We don't know why. I don't think we fully understand yet why the food that we produce today contains fewer nutrients than the food that we produced. It seems like a good half century ago. But I'm going to, unless you have a direct response at, I'm actually to use that as a launching pad to go into one of your solutions, which is education, one of your 12 things that we should address. And I'm going to, I'm going to do this, Bjorn, at the same background philosophical level, though, that we're talking about food.

I guess one of the things that I have some natural skepticism towards is any one-size-fits-all or any centralized solution to the world's problems. I generally think philosophically, not dogmatically, but instinctually, I think we arrive at solutions through trial and error, and we arrive at solutions through the natural beautiful chaos of man and his evolution and his innovation, largely through capitalist enterprises, success and failure, and then we find out what works. I do worry about one size, one centrally directed idea, pushing out all of the other potential trial and errors. And I'm using this now in terms of education. Education has become so homogenized, Bjorn. It's become so centralized. Everybody follows the German model. Everybody follows the same way of educating the public. And again, as maybe I am just a spoiled child of progress here in the United States of America. And I have the luxury of looking back on it, but maybe not maybe i'm actually the product of experience and i'm sitting here going man why do we all

go to school the same way learning the same things under the same model shouldn't we have like a bunch of different trial and error models out there so i'm a little skeptical of the idea that hey here's the best thing we can do and we should do it worldwide oh cool this is great and this is good conversation uh so look uh i totally take your point of saying that there could be a lot of of other ways. I guess in my sense, I'm being a lot less sort of revolutionary than you are. I'm simply saying, look, given the fact that we pretty much everywhere in the world have lots of kids in classes, shouldn't we try to make sure that they learn something when they're in these classes? So I'm just simply offering a fairly simple thing, but exactly, to your point, based on evidence.

So there's a lot of things we know don't work in education. So one of the great examples is Indonesia, about a decade ago, decided they were going to spend a lot more money on education, you know, with the great idea that then they would actually get their kids much better educated. So they have some of the lowest class sizes in the world. They more than double, they almost doubled the number of teachers. They doubled the teacher salaries in real terms. Of course, you know, that sounds all wonderful. Unfortunately, it was put out in.

different at different times in different regions. So you could actually do a sort of pseudo-controlled experiment on it. And there's a famous paper that's quoted enormously out there that is called double for nothing, which basically shows that, yes, they spent twice as much money. There was literally no impact on education. So it made the teachers much more happy, but it didn't actually make the educational outcomes better. So there's a lot of ways to spend money on education that don't work. The thing that we're advocating is there are some few ways that we do know have enormous impacts. And that would probably be a good idea to, you know, at least implement until we have this much better thing that you're, that you're hoping for and maybe, you know, is out

there. So what that shows is, you know, everywhere in the world, we have all the 12-year-olds in the same grade and all the 13-year-olds in the grade above and so on. And especially in the poor part of the world, that means that you have all, you know, imagine 50 kids in this grade, Some of them are far ahead of what the teacher is teaching. Many of them are far, far behind, and very few actually understand what's going on in the class. One of the ways that we know work is if you could teach each individual student at his or her own level. Now, that's impossible if you have 50 kids in a class. But what you can do is take each of these kids in one class for every day, put them in front of a tablet with educational software.

and this educational software will very quickly find out what is exactly your level and then teach you from there. What that turns out to do is it basically teaches these kids so much better that by the end of the year, they'll still go on having seven hours of boring learning that they learn almost nothing from, but one hour a day they'll be in front of this tablet. They will now learn three years of learning every one year or three years of what they take in normally to get to just do this in one year. That's a thing. phenomenal outcome. It doesn't mean that we've solved all problems in the world. Absolutely not. But it does mean that these kids will grow up, become much more productive. You know, so four, six percent more productive on average. And it simply means that they will generate, you know, for about $10 billion, if we do this across the lower half of the world, it will generate about $600 billion in benefits each and every year. So it's just simply a very simple way of doing a little rejicking, but not in the politically convenient way of let's give more money to teachers or let's build more schools or all these

other thing, more libraries, that kind of thing. But this particular little thing that we know very well documented works. You know, Bjorn, what I like about that is, I mean, in its most ideal form, education should be not highly, but almost completely individualized. You should have, I mean, the ideal teacher to student ratio is one to one in that, I don't think that's what classroom should look like. And I think there's plenty of evidence suggests there are classrooms where it's 50 to one that outperform to your point, eight to one classrooms. But ideally education be tailored to the individual, how we learn, what we are innately interested in, what we're skilled at, and anything that can help reduce or tailor.

Taylor is the better word. Rather than reduce, tailor education to the individual is interesting to me. One of the things I've appreciated about getting to know you a little bit, Bjorn, is your willingness to engage on things that, where we have, I don't even know actually our level of disagreement on various issues. And I'm not even going to lay out a case, but I'm looking at your 12 most things that have the biggest impact, a positive impact on the world. And, you know, for better or worse, Bjorn, that many of these things are things that I've, I've started to question in a way where I used to fully accept. And I just want your, we'll cover several of your things here in one question, but you point out highly skilled migration, more trade and

childhood immunizations as three of the 12, things where you could focus. And you know, in each and every one of those, Bjorn, and I'm open to personal criticism on all this, I have questioned those concepts in a way that I haven't in the past, meaning, okay, highly skilled migration. In theory, that's absolutely what you want. You want to attract the world's best, but what What does it do to your existing labor pool? What does it do to a country? If we're going to maintain the nation state, what does that do to people within the country and their potential prospects for employment? On free trade, I used to dogmatically be 100% in support of free trade. But same thing. It has some effect on your domestic labor pool that has shown a negative

pool on a class of people, quite honestly, in places like where I grew up in small town, Texas. And even on the immunization, childhood immunizations, well, I mean, clearly, clearly we can see the good. I don't feel like there's been a real open honesty on that issue of looking at potential downsides of shots around the world, right? And that's a conversation in the public conversation right now. I'm sure you're aware, Bjoren, has talked about this, right? A guy you're in partnership with Bill Gates, in some ways, you're in partnership with Bill Gates. has been on the opposite side of that debate of where RFK Jr. is. And I'm just going to leave that open to you. Those are three of your solutions. And I'd be really curious to hear your response as I have, I mean, I hope your response is, Will, you're falling into conspiracies because I don't find that compelling or persuasive. And I find that. I would never say that. I would undercuts those, the argument of those that think they are on a moral high ground. So I would just love your response as I migrate away from dogmatic acceptance of some of your solutions. Yes. So I think you also. So in some ways, pick the most potentially controversial.

So in tuberculosis, maternal newborn health, malaria, nutrition, education, those kinds of things we probably agree on. But let's just take those skilled migration, trade, and childhood immunization. And I think it's actually really well presented in the trade paper, which we're the first, as far as I can tell, we're the first academic paper. that actually tries to look at not only what are the benefits from trade, because economists love to say, oh, you know, we all get richer if we do what we're best at, which is the basic point, you know, from Adam Smith onwards, that trade is good for everyone because we, you know,

you get to produce. Yes. One thing that you're good at and I produce something else, I'm good at, and then we trade, and then we're both better off. Right. But the reality is, as you point out, you know, some places in Texas actually hurt from this. The Rust Belt in the U.S. is very obvious, a place that lost out. You know, if we start trading T-shirts in the rich world, we will lose all T-shirt factories,

and that will actually hurt the people who sowed T-shirts. And so there are real costs to free trade. And we're the first ones to actually try to model that. And what we find is that overall, as all economists would say, there's a huge benefit from trade, but there's also a significant cost. there are some people who are going to lose their jobs, so they're going to lose part of their income. They'll have to not see their wages grow as much.

And that's what we've seen in, for instance, the Rust Bell. This is mostly impactful in the rich world. So we actually tried to model how much does it cost? What are the losses versus what are the gains? We did sort of very arbitrarily. We said, what's the benefit and cost of 5%? more trade. What it turns out is that there is a significant cost, especially for rich countries. So in rich countries like the U.S., you gain, let's say, about, I think it's $8 trillion,

but you lose about $1 trillion as well. So that's a significant cost. Now, remember, it still means, you know, there's much more benefit than their cost, but it means we need to be very honest about the fact that trade actually has cost. You need to be able to be able to, to go in and support the people who are going to lose their jobs with redeployment. You have to re-educate them, make sure that they get other good opportunity and be up and frank about the fact that they will actually have real cost. These are overall great for America, but they will have cost. But what we also need to recognize is, and that's what amazing with what we find is

for the poor part of the world, which is what we're trying to basically help, trade is almost inevitably good. So their benefits are 96 times as high as their cost. In some ways, that's because they're not going to lose out in the T-shirts. They're going to win on the T-shirts. And again, if what we actually want to do is to make the world a better place, surely our first priority should be for the world's really poorest. So with trade, you can actually do something that's pretty darn good for the U.S.,

but there's a significant cost, a significant downside. So you get seven to one, but you can still certainly compensate all of these if you're politically honest about it. But for the poor part of this world, it's just simply a slam dunk. And the fact that we have almost stopped talking about free trade is one of the ways to make sure that the world gets rich or is a terrible loss because it's a loss for the U.S. You're losing out in the $8 trillion for the one trillion, but it's a terrible, terrible loss for the rest of the world, which, you know, if you look at China, but also Vietnam and many other countries have lifted a huge amounts of their proportions of populations out of poverty because they could open up for trade.

And the same thing goes for childhood immunization and skilled migration. They're real costs, and we ought to be open about it. And we're actually are in the papers. But we're also trying to say the benefits vastly outweigh the costs. And certainly for a child immunization, yes, there are a cost, but mostly the costs are in that you actually need to get this. out to the kids, you need to, their moms need to take their, you know, for these childhood immunizations, measles, that kind of stuff. We know that that's just a good thing to do. But it's also for, you know,

rotoviruses, which is one of leading causes of death from, from diarrhea in the developing world. We know how to vaccinate that and make it much, much less a problem. We should do that. I love your answer. I truly do, Bjorn, and I don't know how much time we have left, but I'm going to use your answer to take us into our last subject matter. here together. It's going to be a big one, but we can do it together. And that is this. I find you a very honest arbiter. I find you as someone who is truly trying to find solutions and attempting to do this on an evidence-based model of doing what we should all be doing, and we do intuitively do in our everyday lives, which is do a cost-benefit analysis on a potential solution.

Here's my question for you, okay? And I'm going to apply this to two subjects. We can do them separately or together. The key, the key to your solutions is whether or not you have accurately assessed both the cost and the benefit. And on two issues, I'm going to suggest not that you have hubris, but that we as human beings have a ton of hubris on assessing cost and benefit. I'm going to do COVID vaccinations for one. I'm going to do it with your your sometimes partner um bill gates and that is what was clearly illustrated through that entire issue is the cost and the benefit of that solution was massively missed it was massively misunderstood you still have me borg no i'm i've lost you sorry my phone went off and then uh

i saw that yes and then uh i lost my headphone just hang on one sec this i'm very sorry about this This is not how it should be, but you know how technology is sometimes. That's okay. And it's because I have these smartphones that decide to go over to my phone when it, when it, You have you got me now? I can hear you, yes. Okay. Is the last thing we're going to go to this last bit?

I can hear myself coming back to you. Is your audio coming? Well, I'm just going to, I'm just going to put on an other set of headphones and hopefully that will work. Just hang on one sec. And then, you know, with any, with any luck, we should be able to make this work. for some odd reason like okay now i got it yes okay now i hear you yes yeah that sounds good okay all right here we go i don't even know that was such a big question i was asking

all right let me see i'm sorry about that all right let me see here's what i was doing okay biorne i'm complimenting you i love this conversation i love the answer that you've just given me about cost benefit analysis i find you biorne in all of the limit times we've had conversations and the time we have met face to face, I find you such an honest arbiter who is genuinely looking for solutions to the world's problems and is attempting to do so through an evidence-based model, that you are doing your best to accurately assess cost benefit of your solutions. And that's what we all do. That's how we live our lives. We go about our lives on a daily basis, buying cars, choosing food, making decisions on a cost-benefit analysis.

The key, the key for you, Bjorn, and anyone who adopts your solutions is this. Have you accurately assessed both the cost and the benefit? And so I will ask you two subject matters. We can deal with them separately here through the context of that being my question. On one hand, again, to address one of your sometimes partners, Bill Gates, who was a big advocate, for example, on the COVID-19 vaccinations. I think we have pretty good evidence that that was not an accurate assessment. of the cost and the benefit of that vaccination. The benefit was constantly overstated and the cost, how many you would need, which how many

number of boosters, even the downsides, vaccine injury, constantly misassessed on the cost side of the equation. And so it gives people skepticism on some of these types, not your in particular solutions, but the idea that we have these solutions on cost benefit. And the other, and you and I have skirted this conversation with each other from time to time, is on the topic of climate change. And that is another one where constantly, Bjorn, I don't know that we've had the conversation, but the cost has been misassessed. The projections have been wrong. The projections of the world's temperatures from the IPCC have been off.

And the benefits of capturing carbon and limiting carbon emissions have been overstated. So the point I'm getting at, and we can address those two subjects, is the entire. Our entire conversation and your book is resting on, did you come together with an accurate cost-benefit analysis? Yes. And so the short answer to that question is yes. Okay, we're done. But also, I think in some sense, this is exactly the problem that we identified at the beginning of our talk, that people end up focusing a lot on the stuff that they hear. very clearly, we don't have a discussion about cost and benefits in many different public settings, climate being one of them.

So clearly, climate is a problem. Climate is something we should be concerned about, but we should also ask, what's the cost and what's the benefit? And we don't. Look, the only person to get the Nobel Prize in climate economics, William Nordhaus, he's made estimates of how much is the cost and how much is the benefit of doing something about climate change. And he finds, if you do it really, really well, you can probably get a benefit cost ratio of, say, two. In our book, we only take into consideration things that are

more than 15, that gives you $15 back in every dollar. So if you do it really well, you can do some good in climate change. If you do it badly, which unfortunately is how much climate policy is done, you can easily end up losing money. So you're absolutely right. And I would argue this is exactly an argument for the book. We need to have this openly stated. And that goes to the other point, your point on COVID. This is not my area of expertise. I'm going to dodge your question a little bit. But I think it was very clear that we didn't have a discussion about what are the cost and what are the benefits. And let me give you one example, when a lot of place around the world, it was decided we were going to shut down schools. This has very clear long-term cost. The

World Bank estimates this is going to cost the fact that most kids lost out on average about nine months of learning is going to cost the world $1.4 trillion each and every year from 2040 because these kids have not learned as much and so when they come out, they will be less productive. That's just a terrible outcome. Now, was it valuable? Was it so valuable that losing $1.4 trillion was worth it during COVID? My honest answer, and it seems to me that That's very, very obvious. No, it wasn't. Had we had that conversation, we should have said, right, there are some benefits to closing down school, but it's vastly exaggerated for vastly smaller than the cost of closing down schools. We actually did that analysis for India, for Ghana and for

Uganda, and we tried to recommend these countries to open up their schools. We're somewhat lucky with that. So we do have evidence for those three countries. It was probably true for all countries as well. So clearly we should have had that conversation on cost and benefits. We didn't and we're now paying the price. And so in some sense, I think that's exactly the argument. We need to have that discussion. It's really hard with these big, big and very emotionally strong arguments like climate and COVID. But at least what I've tried to do with best things versus in this slightly less divisive atmosphere of how do you do the best things for the world. Yeah. We should probably do tuberculosis, maternal and newborn health, and these kinds of things. Very cheap solutions,

enormous benefits. Why don't we do that? And here's what you've laid out. Twelve issues, as you point out, I have focused on some of the more controversial or flashy issues, but it is important to note you offer up solutions for tuberculosis, education, maternal and newborn health, agricultural R&D, malaria, reducing corruption, nutrition, chronic diseases, Childhood immunization, trade, and highly skilled migration, as well as land tenure security. It is an honest assessment, I believe, of someone who's looking for solutions by doing the best things first, the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest and our global SDG promises by Bjorn Lomborg. I always enjoy our conversations.

I appreciate the back and forth. I appreciate the time you gave me, and I look forward to doing this again, Bjorn. Absolutely, let's do that. It's great to talk to you. It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes. We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do.

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