Is Everything Better Than We Think?: Bjorn Lomborg - Jordan Peterson Podcast S4 E16

hello if you have found the ideas i discussed interesting and useful perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book beyond order 12 more rules for life available from penguin random house in print or audio format you could use the links we provide below or buy through amazon or at your local bookstore this new book beyond order provides what i hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful as well as being immediately implementable and practical beyond order can be read and understood on its own but also builds on the concepts that i developed in my previous books 12 rules for life and before that maps of meaning thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast so today i have the privilege of having as a guest dr bjorn lomberg who i've spoken with before on my podcast and who was recently on my daughter's podcast michaela peterson as well and uh i came across bjorn's work it's got to be six or seven years ago now when i was working for a u.n panel the canadian panel devoted to analyzing economic problems in a hypothetically sustainable manner it was for the secretarial secretary general's report on sustainable economic development which was i think put out in 2016. anyhow while i was working on that project i read a lot of books on the various environmental crises that apparently beset us dozens of books and of all the people i read i think dr lomberg dr lomberg's work was the most compelling and that was partly one of the things i realized when i was working for this un committee we were trying to write the narrative to restructure the narrative regarding what should be priorities for international consideration over the next 30 to 100 years and what i realized while working on that was that there were very few people in the world that were trained to think at that level um people just don't have the expertise to do that we don't have the methodology we don't know how to specify the problems and we don't know how to specify the solutions and we don't know how to rank order the problems in terms of their um let's say they're the degree to which they're crucial and we don't know how to rank order the solutions in terms of their appropriateness and the only person that i ran across who had developed a methodology for doing this which is of crucial importance to develop that methodology was bjorn and the think tank the copenhagen consensus center which we'll get him to talk about um and bjorn maybe you could elaborate let's see there's lots of problems we have lots of problems human beings have lots of problems some of them are familial some of them are uh civic at the city level say some of them are at the state level some of them are at the national level and a handful are at the international level and there's a good rule of thumb which is that we shouldn't solve family problems at the international level right you should work at the lowest possible level but some problems are international and at least you could make that case and you've been wrestling with this since um 19 the mid-1990s and you wrote a whole bunch of books the structure of solutions in the iterated prisoners dilemma i think was the first one the skeptical environmentalist which i think really established your reputation and your notoriety for that matter global crisis global solutions cool it uh rethink hiv how to spend 75 billion dollars to make the world a better place which i really liked i thought that was a great book like truly a great book rajasthan priorities bangladesh priorities haiti prioritizes and andhra pradesh prioritizes and your latest book which we'll talk about a fair bit today is false alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet and so well with that introduction i'm going to let you talk about your work for a bit hey thank you it's great to see you again jordan so look what i try to do and really i have a big organization uh uh well actually for a small organization but lots and lots of researchers that work hard on all these problems as simply as as you as you say we don't have infinite resources we can't do everything first so it's incredibly important that we have this conversation about saying if you are to spend an extra dollar or a rupee or whatever your currency is where can you spend that and do the most good first because as you also point out there are lots of problems and and and while we tend to think about them in the international arena of course most problems actually hit people on a very personal level it kills them and and so you know one of the things i i find slightly ironic uh as we've just come out of 2020 and everybody has been very very concerned about covet and rightly so it's a big challenge uh but at the same time of course every year about the same number of people die as i've died from covet last year every year the same number of people die from tuberculosis this is a very simple disease we've known about it it's probably killed about a billion people over the last 200 years so it's probably one of the biggest killers of humanity and we know how to fix it we fixed it in the rich world which is why we don't worry about it anymore but it's also very cheap to fix in the developing world but because it never gets any attention we don't talk very much about it we don't do very much about and that's why 1.6 million people every year die from tuberculosis and so my point simply is to say let's have a discussion about saying if you were to spend an extra dollar would you do the most good if you spent it on tuberculosis or in covet or on climate or on infrastructure or on the many many other solutions that are out there and and what we do is we simply work with lots of economists to take a look at what is the cost of a solution and how much good will that deliver not just in terms of economics that is how much better off will we be or how less worse off will we be but also how much better will we be off socially that's typically people not dying people not being sick people not having to pay their doctors not experiencing the loss of a loved one and also environmentally that's not so much relevant for for tuberculosis but of course when it comes to deforestation or loss of wetlands and the air pollution indoor air pollution and many of the other problems of the world also have an environmental component we try to add up all of those and so basically say how much will this cost how much good will it do when you incorporate all of these things and turn them into dollars and then you can basically say for every dollar you spend you do this much good of social benefit and then we simply ask if there are lots of solutions where you'll spend a dollar and maybe do a dollar and a half of good for the world that's nice but there are some solutions where you can spend a dollar and do hundreds of dollars of good shouldn't we focus on the hundreds of dollars first the place where you make much much more good for every resource you spend that's really the thinking it's not it's not rocket science but we just don't think about it very often it kind of is rocket science because one of the things you want to do when you send a rocket into space is make sure that it doesn't explode and what that means is that you have to pay unbelievable attention to the details i think it was an o-ring malfunction that brought down the challenger yeah so and so an o-ring was rocket science in that situation and what really struck me when i started to think about international problems was precisely this lack of methodology so i'm going to recapitulate the claims you just made so that the listeners are and viewers are very clear about like you make a number of assumptions and all of those assumptions are questionable but anyone who questions them bears the burden of coming up with a better set of assumptions and justifying them and so you know you can imagine someone objecting to your rather casual um acceptance of the idea that you can put a cost value on all of these problems you know anybody who might object to who might have some emotional objections even to something like the monetary system and to capitalism for example might be appalled at the idea that you could put a dollar value to human life essentially but in the absence of a better solution well that's exactly what i mean you have to have a better solution so your first claim is that we have limited resources okay so that seems reasonable we have limited time we have limited energy we have limited resources that are at our disposal as individuals and as states and so we can't devote an infinite amount of resources to every problem so that seems pretty much pretty much clear um if we're going to solve problems we might as well start with the ones that are the most serious so we've got to figure out how to define that then we want to concentrate on the serious problems that we can fix and then we want to concentrate on the serious problems that we can fix most effectively so that we have some resources left over to solve other problems okay so let's start with the problem set itself so for example in your book false alarm you talk about climate change and you uh uh you you're a supporter of the claim that there is going to be climate change of approximately the uh degree so to speak that the international climate commission projects and you also accept the claim that much of that is man-made and but then you situate climate change as a problem as a problem in a host of other problems so i'd like to know how you came up with the set of problems to begin with so so very clearly it's it's impossible to enumerate all the problems that we have uh but what we try to do is uh we've taken our starting point of the un's uh different definitions so for the uh the sdgs the last set of goals that the un has has uh has uh used the ones that are running from 2016 to 2030. these are sustainable development goals right so they've basically looked across a wide range of areas so talking about uh health obviously a big issue uh poverty obviously a big issue uh the the the issue of education the issue of being able to uh live securely that is without violence and in many different ways and they enumerate a lot of different other things uh clearly avoiding loss of biodiversity uh avoiding living on an uninhabitable planet like climate change many of these other things now i'm not saying that this is a perfect list that's it's made by a committee uh but it's probably one of the best ways that we can say humanity has tried to enumerate all the different challenges that we're uh that we're facing right so that's the political aspect of this is a consensus there's been somewhat of a consensus with regards to the set of problems even if not with regards to their prioritization and so absolutely the u.n has made itself open to some degree to to its constituent members to list whatever problems they see as pressing and those would include women's rights and diversity and oceanic management and well virtually every problem that you can think of that might have hit the headlines or been a target of media attention over the last say two or three decades and so again people might quibble with that list but then it's instrumental that they develop a better list and justify it so you start with the un list and and that's been derived as a consequence of lobbying pressure and political machination and all all those sorts of things and hypothetically that's good enough and then the next question is how to address these how to and i was very frustrated when i first encountered that list of of of goals because i thought well there is no possible way that these can all be addressed in the next 30 years with any degree of success it's just too complex we have to start somewhere the problem with that is that as soon as you say that you have to start somewhere then you take one need above all others and you say that those who lobbied for that particular need take priority and you need a justification for that that's that's something other than power struggle or political expediency or or uh you know even effective messaging you it might be nice to have a more hands-off objective method okay so then you you organized a team of economists fundamentally right why economists and not biologists say or so you definitely need all the knowledge from biologists especially when you're talking about things that impact the natural world you need to talk to epidemiologists when you're talking about diseases you need to talk to doctors also about diseases you need to talk to educational experts when you talk about education but the crucial bit that's connecting all of them is to talk about what are the resource needs that is basically how much money are we going to have to pay in order to get a solution when you talk about global warming or a solution for education or a solution for tuberculosis or covet or any other thing so what we're talking to is all those economists who do that so climate economist or education economist or health economist these are all guys who interface with all of the specific knowledge but they also study how much is this going to cost and how effective is this solution going to be so it's basically about saying what can you do about global warming or what can you do about covet remember no solution is going to fix all of the problem most solutions will fix part of the problem and so what we're saying is what will a realistically best sort of effort look like how much will it solve and how much will it cost and then we try to estimate what's the relative value that you provided to the world and as you started off saying that's a difficult task but it is crucial if we want to know that we're not just focused on the topics that have uh the most cute animals or the people who scream the loudest in the media but actually know what works a postmodern critic of your work might claim that it's um inerratically contaminated with the bias brought to it by the discipline that you chose to do this election and by the what would you what would you say by the unexamined political motivations of the participants those being the economist but you don't rely on the judgment of one economist you have a sequence of economists analyze these problems that's correct and then you aggregate across their findings i believe that's the method yes and again look it's impossible to imagine that anyone can do this entirely objectively so as you're pointing out clearly economists come with a certain way of looking at the world they typically start take the starting point of saying there's limited resources how much will the resources do here how what's the opportunity cost so typically for instance if you want to vaccinate uh children and third world countries it means that the moms will have to take off typically the whole day walk with their kid to this place where they're going to get vaccinated that has a significant cost for the family you need to incorporate that cost economists will tell you not taking that into account is a failure recognizing that's part of the cost of vaccination but of course it is only one way of looking at it i happen to think that it's a fairly convincing way and as again as as you point out at least you have to come up with another way of looking this if you want to uh criticize and say we should do something yeah well that can't be reiterated too many times is that it isn't good enough to point out the hypothetical flaws of this approach it's only good enough to put forward a viable alternative and i haven't seen a viable alternative no right now the way the world organizes its priorities is very much about who gets to set the agenda who have the cute examples the things that we care the most about the things that are easy to get into the media and so on and surely that's not necessarily the best way to decide how we spend trillions of dollars on the on on global issues so what we're simply trying to do is to give the world a sense of how much good can you actually do if you spend money really smartly on climate or if you spend it really smartly on education or if you spend it really smartly on all these other things and then we have a good sense of it look at the end of the day it's still going to be a political battle it's still going to be a discussion about what you know captivates people's attention there's a reason why we haven't talked about tuberculosis for about a hundred years but of course once a covet hits rich people and hits home we talk a lot more about infectious diseases i'm not saying it's wrong we should definitely talk about how we deal with covet but i think we should perhaps talk more about also how do we deal with tuberculosis uh not only because it doesn't uh affect rich people but because it affects a lot of people around the world so getting that conversation going getting a sense of the proportion of the problem getting a sense of what can we do what's the cost what is the total benefit in terms of making economies making people and making the planet or the environment better off what are the benefits there what are the cost and getting that balance is crucial okay now my sense is that you're tell me if i'm wrong but my sense is that you're often lumped in by people who have made climate change the center of their ideological universe you're often lumped in with uh climate change deniers of questionable motive and this is the the first question might be um do you think it's fair to do that and if not why not and if it's not fair why why does it happen so there's definitely a lot of people who just approach what i say and many others say oh it's just a deny he doesn't accept the reality of global warming and that's just simply false i think what has happened is that climate con the climate conversation has become so politicized that to many people it's just simply easier to uh uh to sort of uh uh what do you say just get rid of that an inconvenient argument by saying oh you're a denier and somehow being able to shut down the conversation exclusively by saying oh bjorn is a deny i'm not a denier i've very clearly been stating ever ever since my first book the skeptical environmentalist as you mentioned global warming is real it's man-made it is a problem i'm simply accepting what the u.n climate panel the ipc is telling us about global warming what i'm arguing is how much will a potential solution cost and how much good will that solution deliver to humanity so the real question here is are we spending lots of resources doing not very much good for climate when we could be spending those resources much better on climate that is doing much more to actually tackle the climate problem and of course also that we could spend those resources and do much much more for the whole world with its many many other problems those are two important questions i think and the reason why they matter so much is because in many ways uh you know if you're just going to talk very very rough numbers the world spends about 150 billion dollars on all the big problems in the world uh you know from peacekeeping forces uh to dealing with malaria and tuberculosis to uh hiv to education to uh gender equality to many many other problems but we spend in the order of 400 billion or more per year on climate change so if you look at the money that we spend on doing good in the world the vast amount of that money goes to climate change so if we get it wrong on climate we're really getting it wrong on how we tackle the world's big problems okay so i'm going to read something from the u.n climate panel that you quote in your book for most economic sectors the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers such as changes in population age income technology relative prices lifestyle regulation governance and many other aspects of socioeconomic development okay so that's the ipc c panel itself that pen those words now you'd never guess that i don't think by um you wouldn't infer that codicil if you only paid attention to the way that the climate change projections are covered by the media and so now we've got a a psychological question and i suppose this is partly a question of the problems of communication so it when you're trying to solve a problem you've got two problems one is to generate the solution the practical solution that might be analogous to producing a new technology but then you have the problem of communicating about that technology so that people purchase it so you have a production problem and a sales and marketing problem and you've you've got a production problem and a sales and marketing problem now you'd think that one of the things that you point out in the introduction for example is that the cost of climate change interventions often involve an increase in energy prices and that increase in energy price falls most heavily on the poor and you make a credible case a strong case i would say that much of the climate change intervention uh as currently conceptualized is going to further impoverish the poor and this may this really confuses me i would say because i don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that most of the motivation most of the efforts to put climate change at the forefront of modern consideration comes from the left you think that's reasonable yeah okay definitely what's happening okay then you'd also think that the primary concern of the left would be the absolute or the relative poverty of the most impoverished or relatively impoverished people so i can't understand why since you've continually made the case that climate change policy has con presently construed is differentially going to affect the poor that that doesn't attenuate the left's insistence that climate change is the predominant problem and now i have a hypothesis about that and my hypothesis i don't think it's particularly original and it could easily be wrong but i think that there's an intrinsic anti-capitalism that is uh contaminating the discussion about climate change and perhaps even the science and that the fundamental goal is to advance a criticism of free market capitalism by other means and climate change actually produces that outcome that practical outcome and if it happens to negatively affect the poor then that's an okay price to pay even though that's perverse because the whole reason for the criticism of capitalism to begin with hypothetically is because of desire to help out either the absolutely impoverished or the relatively impoverished so that leaves me with something like resentment as the only other motivation now you know i don't think any of that's necessarily right but i haven't been able to come up with a better hypothesis so you face tremendous opposition in your work and i don't understand why what's going on yeah it's a good question i i i tend to take people on their on on face value of what they uh of what they talk about i think there's a number of different things that are going on so a lot of people i i think i i meet a lot of uh really well-meaning uh uh very very concerned people on on climate change they basically believe uh that the world is ending unless we do something about global warming i mentioned in my book that a new survey across the world shows almost half the world's population believe that it's now likely that global warming will lead to the extinction of the human race that's a huge and absolutely unwarranted uh argument but you know if you believe this is the end of the world everything else moves off the the conversation if global warming is the end of the world if it's the sort of asteroid that hurtling towards earth we should just drop everything else and just you know send up bruce willis and and you know do something about that asteroid so the idea here is to recognize uh and i've heard sensible people say look there's gonna be poor people in 2030 we'll we'll help them then right now we need to help global warming that makes sense if this is the end of the world that we're trying to get rid of that's why one of the big points that i try to make in the book is to say that is not what the u.n climate panel is telling us actually as you just mentioned climate change is a problem but it's a fairly small one compared to most of the other things that we talk about we never talk about our pension problems but those are probably going to be much much bigger than climate change the other part so just to just to finish your your your your conversation about the poor i think that when we were not nearly as scared about global warming in some way you can you could argue that the reason why we've become so scared is because the media the selling argument of climate change has just been way too successful it's become the self-perpetuating machine that just takes any storm or anything that happens out there and say see global warming and make us all believe that the end is nigh but before that i think there was a real challenge in in the way especially the left was very worried about global warming but also worried about the world's poor and i think it was simply an oversight that we focus so much on global warming and so little on on on the world's poor and i think if you're going to be very rude about it you could possibly say it's also a little bit because we care about our own children so our own children we worry will grow up in a world where it's global warming and it's going to be terrible for them compared to the world's poor which are mostly not our kids it's someone else's kids uh typically in africa or in latin america or in or in southeast asia uh so in some sense this is really i'm gonna pick my kids over all the other uh uh unfortunate kids i think that was also a big driver and i try to argue both of these and get people to realize maybe that's not the right priority for our planet okay i do think that generally speaking it's best to take people at face value because uh to not do so means that you're not extending a hand of trust and it gets you into a terribly complex cognitive situation but uh but i would point out that you did question their motives at the end of that answer you know saying that perhaps people are more concerned with their own children and willing to sacrifice the world's poor so to speak um in their prior time prioritization as a consequence of that um uh i looked at at the potential dark motivation of of a kind of lurking anti-capitalism another possibility perhaps is that a lot of the problems that you list are do fall into that into the same conceptual category as the world's poor the hypothetical person that you described said well there'll still be poor people in 2030 and we can worry about them and so you might say that you can't make poverty into an apocalyptic catastrophe plausibly and you can't even make tuberculosis into a cataclysmic uh problem or apocalyptic problem um plausibly we we know how that's going to go it's going to stay pretty much the same way that it is you know barring mutation and and but with climate change there's a there's a non-zero possibility of cataclysmic collapse um the the green the the greenland ice pack melts and slides into the ocean or the uh the gulf stream reverses or something like that and and and we get a situation where positive feedback loops spiral out of control and everything comes to a everything culminates in catastrophe it might be that we don't know how to deal with a problem that has a non-zero probability of being infinite and and and that is a good con that is a good theoretical conversation my take on that is is really twofold it's it's partly i think it's just simply a question of imagination everything when you run it out to 2100 has a nonzero probability of going really really wrong uh so one very good uh uh argument would be to say uh take hiv aids uh which laid bare much of uh sub-saharan africa if you imagine if we did nothing about hiv aids you could very easily imagine one or more states in africa collapsing over the 21st century throw in some bioterrorism and some geoengineering uh sorry some geo uh no some uh bioengineering and you know you can get a catastrophe you know that it drives up some terrorists who are gonna basically eradicate humanity you can come up with almost any kind of scenario that will end the world and clearly we also have many many other scenarios that we're not particularly worried about you know one would be north korea uh that seems a non-plausible outcome that they could uh end up uh ending the world if we don't do something about uh north korea i'm not sure what that something would be but the point here is to say that it's very clear we're saying yeah we're going to be a little worried about north korea but not very much okay so so are you are you criticizing my hypothesis or are you pointing so like because i i said that that climate change seems to slide pretty easily into an apocalyptic vision and i one interpretation of your criticism would be well um that's not valid it's not valid to make it apocalyptic like that because many other things can be made apocalyptic but do you think that it's plausible potentially that it is easier to do that with climate change or and i mean it's not clear why maybe it's because it also involves the non-human actors in the world and people feel additional guilt about that um so do we have a do we have a rule of thumb that's something like well when we're discussing practical moves forward we don't get to um extrapolate from the present apocalyptically and say that this problem is so severe that it requires an infinite amount of resources or it is it morally obligates us to devote an infinite number of resources to its solution we don't get to play that game that was exactly my point so uh there's there's been a wonderful discussion between uh a harvard professor uh who was arguing essentially that point that global warming might be infinitely bad so we should be spending infinitely of resources on it and a yale uh economics professor uh william nordhaus who got the nobel prize in climate economics and his point was exactly to say look there are infinity infinities everywhere else uh you know so uh you might have heard elon musk is worrying about the fact that ai robots will will take over uh will will possibly take over the world uh there's the possibility that uh nanotech will lead to gray goo taking over the entire world there's potential lurking catastrophes in everything we do you can't and that was nordhouse's point you can't just take one and say ah i'm gonna spend infinity over here because you should be spending infinity on pretty much everything else of course that doesn't actually compute and so what real people do all the time is we're faced with things that have a tiny probability of going really really badly we spend more resources on them we try to find more ways to tackle them smartly but we also recognize there's no way we're going to get rid of all apocalyptic problems we simply have to be smart about it and in my book i talk about how we should also be smart about climate change if you worry about the apocalyptic uh prosper prospects of global warming the only way to fix that is by investigating not doing but investigating geoengineering which is basically a way of being able to without climate policy be able to stabilize the planet's uh climate right and i don't i don't have the feeling that geo engineering solutions are going to be an easy sell even to people who are apocalyptically minded and maybe it's maybe it's because they envision geoengineering apocalypses as a cause and they and they do but what you also have to remember is a lot of people will tell you i believe global warming is the end of the world and certainly lots of kids are really really scared about this and i think we should come back to talk about how this is this is just simply not real but i often find it really surprising that if you really really really believe this could be the end of the world why is it you're not advocating the only technology that we know right now how to fix global warming with which is nuclear power uh why is it you're not just putting up nuclear power everywhere now i'm actually not arguing for that because economically nuclear power is not very advantageous but if you think this is the end of the world i wonder why it is that you would be arguing let's do the policies that haven't worked for the last 30 years let's put up solar panels wind turbines that cover a couple percent of the world's energy consumption and that may by 2040 cover maybe even four maybe even five percent of that energy consumption if you really worried about it you would be using the technologies that would actually work and the fact that you don't also kind of belies that even though you talk a lot about these these end of the world scenarios you don't quite believe them because you'd be a lot well you also focused on solutions you also make the point in the introduction that when you ask people by poll how concerned they are about global warming many there's many people like a majority of people if i remember correctly who are very concerned about global warming but if you ask them how much they would be willing to spend to ameliorate it i think the average american agreed to spend 24 dollars if i remember correctly from your book and so then that does the problem then is by pointing that out you belie your other claim which is that you want to take people at face value now you've got a real problem in that situation because you can take them at face value with regards to their explicit claims about what they what they're afraid of which is global warming but then equally explicitly they tell you they don't want to spend any money on it and so then you have to wonder well which of those two competing claims do you actually believe i would tend to go with the one that acts it hasn't saying that you're afraid of global warming has zero cost spending money on it has a cost obviously so the the thing is as soon as you put a cost to it then you find out that people don't appear to believe it they're not concerned so the question then is well what what does saying that they're concerned about by them and it it might be something like well this is again not a particularly original thought but it's moral virtue to advertise that i'm the sort of person who's intelligent enough to conceptualize global concerns and empathic and noble enough to be concerned by them and then you say well what are you doing about it and the answer is well i'm not doing anything and then you say well then i don't buy your claim but that's pretty rude and two people who get together who are both concerned about global warming aren't going to be criticizing each other's lack of diligent attention to the sacrifices they can just embrace one another and i'm not being entirely cynical about that i know why people advertise virtue and and people are relatively virtuous and so it's not such a terrible thing to advertise it but it does seem to interfere in this particular situation with practical movement forward now one of the things you drive home continually is that there are real costs to getting this wrong the costs are the money spent and what that money could have been spent on instead so maybe you could make a case for for everyone who's watching what what do you see as the proper set of priorities where do we where do we as a species get the most bang for the buck with regards to these international problems what are the top 10 things we should be concentrating on yeah so so absolutely just uh just to give you a sense of of the uh of the 24 dollars you were just talking about before that people are not willing to spend very much uh i think that's one of the reasons why for instance our carbon tax is so hard to do carbon tax is one of the smart solutions for climate change but it also very makes it very explicit that you're spending lots of money so instead what most people support is that we should be subsidizing green energy that we should be subsidizing uh electric cars that we should be doing a lot of other things that make you feel virtuous it doesn't feel like it costs all that much but it actually ends up costing huge amounts of resources so so while people saying they're not willing to spend very much their sentiment actually allows politics to end up spending huge amounts of money so this really matters so sorry you asked me what are the things we should be spending our resources and so that also means what are we sacrificing if we concentrate too much on um the moral virtue of driving a tesla for example which is a clear status symbol very expensive and not obviously related to ameliorating climate change what are we sacrificing so as long as we're driving this tesla because the government and that's typically almost everywhere in the world because the government has spent five or ten thousand dollars on subsidizing us in order to make us afford to drive this tesla that's ten thousand dollars that couldn't go to other things either in our own states our own nations where we obviously could have spent according to what the uh the uh political uh decision-making process would decide you know on better education and better care for our elderly on better covet uh uh care uh right now there are lots of other things that are demanding attention but what we tried to look at was where could you spend this globally and i'm going to talk about a few things because i uh you know i'm sure we can get back to more of them so one of the things that we talked about was free trade so free trade we know is one of the reasons why almost everyone has gotten rich the basic point is that instead of me trying to do everything i specialize i do one thing and then i have a baker bread my uh bake my bread i have a butcher uh do my meat if i'm not vegetarian and you know you do all these other things and you have all these specialists doing it having it on an international scale means even more opportunity to have smarter people do what they do best for everyone else and that's why we've gotten rich that's why china has lifted about what 700 million people out of absolute poverty over the last 30 years which is one of the biggest achievements in the world and it's impossible not to be very very impressive just simply on the humanity of that project and of course we should be doing more of that but unfortunately we have you know for a variety of reasons trump is obviously a big part of this but it's also it started way before trump uh the the resentment towards free trade the sense that this was wrong has not only meant that many people in the rich world has become less better off than they otherwise could have been but it's also meant that we have left a lot of people especially in africa and south south asia much less well-off we should be spending some of our resources on making sure that we get more free trade not less free trade how do we do that how do we do that effectively and the simple way that we do that unfortunately is by subsidizing of agriculture so one of the best most vested interests against free trade has turned out to be agriculture it's agriculture in the eu and the us japan many other places because they don't want to have that competition look from a private part of you i understand that if i was a farmer i wouldn't want you know cheap uh uh cheap agriculture produce come in and essentially eradicate my business model so we need to recognize that we need to subsidize these people we probably also need to subsidize other people the people who would otherwise have lost their jobs so there's an enormous amount of money that needs to be spent i got confused um are you speaking about eradicating agricultural subsidies in the west or are you speaking about subsidizing agricultural uh productivity in third world countries or re i i i missed the i missed the mechanics there so sorry i'm talking about subsidizing the people who would otherwise block more free trade so this is basically subsidizing rich western farmers to make sure that they're okay with more right so if their livelihood is endangered by the necessity of allowing for competition on the agricultural market you just buy them out like you might do with fishermen who are over fishing the ocean yes exactly and this is not a potential this is not perfect by any means but it's a way to actually solve the problem of getting more of the stuff that will help humanity any idea what the ben what are the benefit is of that compared to the cost and is that calculable yes so we we made the estimate that for every dollar you spend on these subsidies you will help the world about 2 000 uh basically because you can generate an enormous amount of internal growth so we estimate that you could actually make every person in the developing world about a thousand dollar richer per person per year in 15 years that's it okay so wait we're going to slow down there because those are unbelievable those are unbelievably massive claims okay so you said to subsidize rich agricultural producers in the west to the tune of a dollar a year buys you a thousand dollars in increased revenue globally 2 000. it's a 2 000 to 1 return yes and this is basically because this is this is the world bank's uh dynamic uh trade models that show that once you get a society that's able to trade internationally and openly you also get enhanced growth within those countries so that means they by themselves get to be better so that and these would mostly be poor countries that would also be a lot of rich countries but these would mostly actually help the world's poor because they have the most catching up to do and they will then be much better off not only would that be better for them because if you're poor a thousand dollars is a lot better than if you're rich getting another thousand dollars but also because it will help them generate all the other things they would like to have education health uh resilience to global warming so the whole point here is to recognize that this is one of the things that are hard to have a discussion about there are very few people are advocating global uh free trade there are lots of people advocating against it but we need to recognize this is one of the things that have helped pull out most people of poverty that we know could do even more in the future and that we have a real opportunity to achieve so that well you don't have ice flow abandoned cuddly polar bears as as portraits of of the farmers that you're going to help abstractly in third world countries so you have a sales and marketing problem there and that's a real problem right um you know what it's interesting that the economic models don't take into account the difficulty of propagating the message you know you know what i mean is that because there is a sales and marketing problem there and it's not trivial and it might be that a dollar spent in agricultural subsidies to rich farmers in the west would produce that two thousand dollar return but the question might be how much money would you have to spend advertising that before people would believe it and that that's a cru it's a crucial question you know with a with the standard entrepreneurial product i don't think it's unreasonable to estimate that 65 to 95 of the cost is in sales and marketing you know five percent is production and that's a that's a great argument so in some sense you could argue what we try to do with the copenhagen consensus where we make these priority lists is just simply give you the raw data for what would academically be the smartest things to invest in but you're absolutely right there's no cute and cuddly uh you know selling points to free trade and and actually to most of our top outcomes so let me just give you a few of the other ones so the second best is family planning uh and probably also basic emergency care to women uh this will deliver about a hundred dollars back for every dollar that would also be extremely attractive to people on the left it should be attracted to everyone yeah yes because look remember right now about 400 000 mothers die in childbirth uh and about two million kids die in the first 28 days of their life here on earth and we know we could save many of these not all of them but many of these by simple measures uh you know for instance making sure that you don't get that the the pregnant women don't get uh high blood pressure pre-eclampsia and eclampsia which kills more than 100 000 women every year uh by by simple emergency measures when you come into a facility give birth and you have a problem if you have simple procedures to make sure that that problem can be dealt with often with fairly cheap uh you don't need more doctors you just need nurses or even assistant helpers you can do a lot of these things we know that you can do this for very low cost and then again if you have uh there's about 215 million people uh women who don't have access to prevention so family planning if you could get them family planning not all of them would use family planning all the time but it would mean that they would space their kids better they would be able to give more investment into each one of their kids that would get them better educated there would be a lot of knock-on effects but mostly this would mean that a lot of moms wouldn't die in childbirth and their children that they do give birth to would have better lives and again we estimate this would cost about three billion dollars a year but it would pay dividends both in terms of saving moms saving kids but also growing the economy because of what's known as the demographic dividend if you have slightly fewer kids you have more productivity because you have the same amount of capital but if you're kids that means you get to be faster richer that's essentially what china has done in a sort of boosted way by their one uh one child policy i'm not advocating that at all but it's a it's a it gives you a good sort of insight then there are lots of health things we talked about tuberculosis we could probably spend a dollar on tuberculosis and help people not die help people being better off help families not dealing with tragedies of losing their mom and dad it's typically uh you know people in their middle ages that die from tuberculosis every dollar spent would avoid about 43 dollars of social benefits uh sorry would generate 43 dollars of of social benefits if you look at childhood immunization uh we've we've stopped a lot of the really damaging uh uh childhood diseases so we've gone from a world where about 12 million children died just in 1980 uh to now only about five million children die every year below the age of five but clearly that's still way too many we could probably save a million children for a billion dollars a year just think about that we estimate that for for every dollar spent there you do about sixty dollars worth of good so again the whole point here is to recognize there are lots of lots of amazing things that you can do and i was letting my internal cynic uh respond to your arguments and trying to adopt the position of someone who might be critical of them i know that uh arguments for ameliorating the lot of the poor that were put forth in the sixties were often counter mended by the claims often of environmentalists that you don't want to help the poor because they'll breed more and that will just re lead to more of the kind of problems that you're trying to solve and so you know what the question might be why would someone object to saving a million children a year through immunization or i think you said two million children as a consequence of enhanced maternal care and i can imagine similar arguments like that being raised you know whether consciously or or implicitly um but those things should be made implicit so so let i would encourage people who are watching this or listening to this you know a lot of you have chopped up my um youtube videos into small videos and sometimes animated sections of them and otherwise distributed them bjorn just outlined four the four the top four investment strategies for a better planet and it might be useful to consider ways that that can be that that information can be distributed as widely as possible i mean bjorn's writing is books but those sell at how many books if you don't mind me asking how many copies of false alarm did you sell i think it's in the it's 10 15 000 thereabouts right so that's that's a good that's a good selling book from an academic book perspective but it's a drop in the bucket you know right i mean and that's not a criticism obviously what about total for your books so it's uh you know uh two three hundred thousand right right and so well a good youtube video will get a million views and if this was chopped up properly maybe it would get five or s you know five to ten million views so that would be good but we we don't wanna have you thought about allying yourself with an advertising firm so we we've talked to some of those uh there's been people uh come in asking how can we help can we help do some of this and and what i find is that when when it ends up partly uh these advertising firms uh sort of retract their offers when they start realizing this is really complicated that they that it's not just you know the the cute polar bear and the ice flow uh kind of argument um and i get that and part of it of course is also that unlike when you talk to someone who's just saying we should do more about this a good thing we should you know save more moms or we should do more about climate change we're the guys who actually say you should do this before this and that always antagonizes people i think it's the only intellectually honest argument because we have limited resources so we're simply saying do this first do this work don't do this first don't do this first i think that's important but that always creates a lot more antagonism and i think that's one of the reasons why this is a much harder argument uh to make and obviously my whole book on climate is very much from the you don't you don't have the problem of having to say no if you stay in the hypothetical you know that's another advantage to not actually trying to solve a problem when you're making a moral claim that you're concerned about it because you can be concerned about global warming in world poverty and and uh the lack of education of women and a host of other issues and never make a sacrifice in your concerns as long as you actually don't try to practically address those problems because then you're faced with the horrible necessity of prioritization and maybe that is part of what makes you unpopular to the to the degree that people are uh not so much resisting your message but critical of of your approach you force you force the recognition that that no has to be said in order to make progress forward and that that interferes with a utop with an imaginary utopian vision but it it and it and so that makes that makes romanticizing the venture much more difficult it doesn't seem impossible though i mean you could imagine a a heart rending and emotionally compelling video addressing the utility of restoring to health someone who was suffering from tuberculosis or preventing it in the first place i mean these things don't seem completely impossible you haven't found any marketing or advertising agency that's willing to partner with you in in in the sale of any of these ideas we've found lots of people who who love to jump on board and you know look there are lots of videos out there that that tells you how incredibly important it is to do something that tuberculosis and how important it is to do something about maternal health and and about immunization and about malaria and all these other things i i think it's much more a question of saying what is it that you overwhelmingly see when you see open you know your tv or you look at youtube and i think there's just a level difference in the amount of knowledge that you have about tuberculosis compared to the amount of knowledge that you have about covet certainly now and about climate change and these other things it's just simply a question of saying one of them or the the two last ones resonate much much clearer to most people and to a lot of uh interest organizations whereas the other one is sort of yeah of course i also think we should do some tuberculosis now back to what we were talking about before yeah so the climate the other the issue with regards to the climate is that the weather affects everyone all the time if you're going to talk about some if you're going to talk to someone and you don't really know what to talk about you'll make small talk about the weather and so it's an immediate day-to-day concern in a way that even infectious disease isn't or wasn't before kovid and so maybe that's another reason that the the climate issue has been has occupied the the the space for apocalyptic attention if there is a too hot summer or an extraordinarily hot summer you have an explanation for it and it's something that affects you while it's happening or a too cold winter day or too much wind or too much rain or you know any of the extreme weather events that can manifest themselves so there's an immediacy to weather that seems to be associated perhaps with the with the emotional resonance of climate change that's also perhaps working against these rational arguments well there's certainly something so we have research that shows that when it's hot people believe more in global warming than when it's cold so there definitely is these kinds of very very simple uh uh uh connections on the other hand if you think about it when you talk about global warming it's going to be let's say 4 degrees centigrade hotter in 100 years that's actually really hard to imagine that most people would get very worked up about and that's of course also what you saw for the la first 20 years or so of global warming what has happened is that shift from the focus on the uh the basic outcomes of global warming to these catastrophic outcomes so that every time you see a storm every time you see a heat wave every time you see any kind of change in weather people will often say see global warming and there the problem is that that leads you to believe this could be the end of the world right and and and that's what i think and that's universal explanatory rubric and hard to so it buys you explanations for weather alterations and it buys you moral virtue it buys you a sense that you understand the most impor important problems in the world and it occupies that apocalyptic space another reason that climate change might have become such a concern because you know people have always believed in the apocalypse and that's because things can go cataclysmically wrong and and maybe we have a we have a need for a cultural representation of that and before global warming we had this the cold war and the and the battle between the united states or the west more broadly speaking in the soviet union that was a pretty plausible apocalypse and of course it did garner much more attention or maybe an amount of attention that's equal to the attention that global warming attracts now so that doesn't solve the the sales and marketing problem um it just highlights its its difficulty can can i ask you i noticed you have these prioritizes books bangladesh priorities haiti prioritizes andhra pradesh prioritizes now you've opened up your economic team to use by states correct yes can you tell us a little bit about that that's another that's something else that's extremely practical and i'd like to know how you do it and what the effect is does it work yes yes so so uh one of the things we found uh so we did a prioritization of the sustainable development goals for the un that we talked about in the beginning uh and and what's what's sort of very noticeable is if you talk about what should the world do everybody thinks that's intellectually interesting but nobody feels like they live in the world you know they well we're canada we're the us or denmark or whatever and so you feel like i want something that's actually relevant for my political conversation and so one of the things we wanted to do we we also did this in latin america uh with the inter-american development bank and we found you know these are some of the best things to do in latin america and then you know obviously argentina would say yeah that's probably true in mexico but not here we're special and and likewise brazil would say yeah that's true in argentina but not here so you know the const you could constantly get the sense of it's true somewhere else but not here and that's why we wanted to have this conversation specifically for nations so we've done this for bangladesh we've done this for two states in india pradesh and rajasthan we've done it in haiti we've just completed this in ghana and africa and we're right now working with malawi that must be ridiculously exciting and interesting i mean it's such a combination of rich intellectual possibility because these problems are so compelling and and the the potential excitement of actually operating in the real world yes it is very exciting it's also at times very frustrating as you i'm sure you could imagine uh so so uh what happens is everybody thinks that this is a great idea in principle but of course everyone worries also what if my favorite things turn out to be not a very good investment that's suddenly gonna you know make it much harder for me to get money for next from next year's budget so there's this right there's this sense of do we want this to be too successful on the other hand the finance ministry often loves this approach because they're the ones who get inundated from all ministries and saying we need more money for this project we need more money for that project and of course politicians also need projects that sell essentially buy some votes and so clearly they're also very ambivalent about this on the one hand they want to do as much good as they can for their country on the other hand often the best political promises are the ones that are not very effective they're the ones that you can sell because they sound good but don't actually work very well uh you can put off endlessly and still promise that you're going to deliver or or just deliver and do it really badly so in india for instance uh one of the things that i've turned out to be incredibly good vote for winners is to give uh uh forgiveness for loans for small for smallhold farmers uh you can imagine how that you know if if i'm a farmer i've put myself in almost uh impossible debt there's a politician who promises he's going to forget that that sounds great but of course the problem with that argument is that partly they often don't pay but what happens is it actually ends up shifting loaning from the very poorest to the not so poor farmers typically to the rather rich farmers because the lenders don't want to see the politicians ending up saying no we're not gonna uh uh uh keep your your loans on uh on the books so you end up spending huge amounts of money encouraging bad loans and then not helping the the poor when they need it further on that's a lose-lose-lose outcome and one of the things we tried to point out was don't do that i'm sure we weren't very successful because it's an incredibly successful political strategy but it becomes a little harder to do and likewise some of the things that we found were incredibly effective becomes a little easier to do so for instance for for bangladesh we found and again this is not this is not dramatic news but it's just a really really good approach to uh to basically put your procurement online uh so from many states in the developing countries uh procurement makes up about one-third to two-thirds of their budgets uh so everything from pencils to roads but obviously roads are much much more expensive so it's typically infrastructure projects they're dramatically uh corrupt because they lend themselves to be very corrupt and one of the things we find is if you put these online it becomes a little harder to rig the auctions so in bangladesh for instance you have to hand in a sealed envelope with your bid to a specific government office and what not surprisingly happened was they put up goons outside that office so the people who shouldn't come in with a cheap bid just couldn't physically come in if you put it online you can get bids from further afar it's harder to manipulate you can still manipulate but it gets harder to do so so what we found was we we took four percent of bangladesh spending put it online and actually found you get higher quality you get it much cheaper that means you have to spend less money you get more for your government tax dollars or taxes as in in bangladesh and that saves bangladesh about 700 million dollars a year right so but there's something else that's very hard to romanticize you know oh it's absolutely impossible and and and again remember this is simply a question of saying we look across a wide range of things that you could do in bangladesh some of these things got picked up by politicians because they save the money obviously the finance minister wants to save 700 million dollars some of these things have really really good long-term growth potentials like for instance getting digitized you're getting your land digitized some of these are very obvious things like uh tuberculosis but many of them also don't happen just simply because they're not the right set of things to do right now so again our point is not that we somehow magically make bangladesh right that would also be impossible to imagine and and look you shouldn't have you know economists prioritizing the world you should have economists informing the electorate in bangladesh how do you want to run your country but we help make slightly better some of the proposals help spend slightly less money really badly and overall that means you end up in a place where you're better off yeah it doesn't make a good t-shirt slogan no does it it doesn't spend your money slightly less badly with bjorn long there you go yeah no it's a real problem you know i've been talking i talked about this a little bit with douglas murray just a week or so ago um about the about the rise of extremism um it's a continual problem but the polarization of the right and the left that seems to be occurring at an ever escalating rate particularly in the u.s but i would say in the west more broadly um we talked about the collapse of grand narratives you know the right the centrists on the right and the centrists on the left don't seem to have anything to offer now except something like incremental and gradualist improvement and they might quibble about how that could be accomplished with the right wingers taking one viewpoint in the left winger's taking another whereas the radicals have a much more romantic cell and so since the right and the left the moderates can't come up with a a narrative even one of progress that's i think you know back say in the post-war period post-world war ii people were still poor enough broadly speaking so that you could sell them the vision of a a wealthier future for them and their kids and there was enough gap between where they were and that hypothetical future for it to be motivating but now you know you might be able to tell your your your uh electorate that well we could make things 20 better over the next 10 years and that's true and it's good but it's not punchy and that's a big problem and i've been struggling i also talked to mac um to matt ridley you know and he's he's a guy i think who thinks like you um you know he's fundamentally optimistic in his view and he thinks things are getting better and that we could continue to make them better and that we should continue to make them better but all of this incremental gradualism this optimistic incremental gradualism has the same problem which is it's difficult to get excited about it and i don't know i've racked my brains trying to figure out how that might be how that problem might be addressed but i can't say that i've come up with any solutions that seem useful or credible i don't i'd like you to comment on that i'm sure you've thought about it i i think you're absolutely right it's it is much much harder to make the argument look we're going to muddle through it's going to be a little bit better this is a little bit smarter please do this rather than these very grand narratives and i think that's exactly what i try to make with global warming the grand narrative and global warming is this is the end of the world we've got to throw everything in the kitchen sink at this and the reality is no this is a problem you know we estimate that by the end of the century this will cost us about four percent of gdp so maybe one or two years of growth that's a problem not by any reasonable means the end of the world and that's why you need to be careful not to end up spending lots lots more to tackle part of this problem but the reality of course is if we go down the route of these very alluring but incorrect arguments this is the end of the world you know let's spend everything on climate change what really could happen is two things we end up spending lots of our resources on things that are not very productive and won't leave us very well off that will cut maybe half or a fuller maybe one and a half percent of gdp growth from our growth rate that could be potentially dramatically damaging in 10 20 30 years once we're a lot less richer a lot less better off because remember one of the things that keeps societies peaceful is that we all have a future to look forward to that's going to be much better once we start realizing we're entering into a stable state where if you are better off it's because i'm less well-off we will get much much more antagonism so i think it's realistic to say if we follow down those alluring roads we might actually end up leaving our future of our grandkids much less better off not just in the economic sense but also just simply in a wildly sort of rioting kind of way that everybody will be at each other's throat that's one part of it but the other part is to remember we're right now talking about how the west or the rich part of the world thinks about this problem most people in the rich world actually think the the future is going to be a lot worse off which is one of the reasons why global warming fits into that whole pattern i think it's wrong that's also what the model said that it's even what the human climate panel says but that's how people feel the other three quarters of the world which are china india latin america africa they actually believe that their world is going to be much better in 10 20 30 years they have this future belief that you were just talking about uh from uh from out of the second world war they are not going to say yeah we're going to do strong climate uh policy and become poor they want to mostly become middle-income countries and maybe even rich countries eventually they will want to do this so what will happen is both that we're leaving ourselves in the rich world to become much more infighting and much less well-off than we otherwise would be and that we're actually seeing the other three quarters of the world just simply running uh uh you know possibly even ahead of us but certainly uh running ahead without looking at the same kind of problems that we are okay so do you think do you think you could make this case so what you basically outlined there is a hypothesis that ill-spent money will have dramatic consequences i think i can make that argument but i also feel a little uncomfortable i'm i'm just the guy who wants to tell you you can spend a little smarter here you can spend a little more dumb here i think there's something there's something i think that's a little sort of ugly in in saying all right everybody else is making up their own uh uh uh doomsday scenarios so let me make up uh another one here because i think fundamentally doomsday scenarios is what got us into these fair look fair enough but you you were trying to address the problem of of compounding returns right so bad economic decisions or poor economic decisions compound with time and so is it reasonable to point out when we're talking about risk i talked with matt ridley about this and i've thought about it a fair bit as well and i think the data support the proposition that making poor people richer is an extremely intelligent environmental move for a variety of reasons i mean the first is perhaps that once you get people above a certain level of income they can start buying fuels that are cleaner than the fuels they learn they use now um dung and wood and that kind of thing but also that as people move up the economic hierarchy they have time to be concerned about things that are more abstract like what the environment is going to be like for their children which they're not going to be or or when they go on holiday for example you know or even where they live as as they have some options to choose where to live and so it it could be you know we often construe the relationship between the economy and the environment as a zero-sum game right and the biologists in particular broadly speaking have the political biologists have a proclivity to do that that as the economy grows we sacrifice the environment to it but it could be the case that we get the best environmental bang for the buck by making the poor rich as fast as we possibly can around the world and and if we make poor economic decisions because we're catastrophizing a certain kind of environmental calamity we're inviting we're actually increasing the risk of of environmental degradation in in the medium and the long term do you think that's reasonable yes absolutely so in a number of different ways so i i think it's funny how we don't recognize how terrible it is to be poor if you're poor you're vulnerable in all kinds of ways you're very clearly incredibly vulnerable to global warming so you know uh if you remember there was a big hurricane hitting high on the philippines and back in 2013 it was made a big deal out of uh as global warming it hit this very very poor city who you know where most of their city uh uh citizens live on the corrugated roof not surprisingly having a hurricane five is terrible when you live under a corrugated roof the best way to help these people obviously would be to lift them out of poverty what actually is we can see back in in the early part of last century a similar hurricane hit and eradicate about half the city this time it was only about a 20th of the city so much much better because the city was much richer but if we focused on making them even richer they would be much better off just simply from the point of view of being more protected from hurricanes so you know fundamentally there's something weird about us saying all those poor people in the philippines we should help them by not driving our car today what no you should help them by becoming rich becoming part of the integrated global economy making sure that their kids would be better better educated not die from easily curable infectious diseases and so on so not only would it be better environmentally but it would obviously also be better for them educationally for them health wise and all these other things it would simply generate much much better lives in the philip in the philippines but as you also pointed out as you get richer you're actually cleaner and almost always you don't use dung and cardboard and wood to cook inside but also you stop cutting down forest you move to the city instead you become a web designer or something else that very very little related to actually clearing out forest land you do a lot of things in cities that are much more ecologically sustainable and of course in the long run you will actually also say i would like to make sure that we have better regulations so we have less air pollution so we have many of the other things that drive environmental benefits so absolutely by getting people out of poverty we fix most environmental problems but and this is the important but yeah we don't fix global warming as you get richer you just simply emit more and more co2 because these guys will then start flying around the world they'll start you know consuming a lot more meat they'll be doing a lot of other things because they're richer that's wonderful for them but it will mean higher emissions of co2 so we do need to have a conversation about how we're going to fix that problem okay so why don't you lead us down that path okay well let me let me comment a bit on what you just said and then let's go down that pathway okay so to swallow what you just said and to believe it you you there's a set of beliefs that you have to have already in place you have to believe that the current economic system isn't fatally flawed and basically works or at least works better than any hypothetical alternatives that have been tried or that we can dream up so it basically works and works means as it runs it tends to lift people out of absolute poverty there's still a maintenance of relative poverty but absolute poverty tends to disappear and there seems to be really good evidence for that especially across well since the industrial revolution but it's really taken off in the last 30 years maybe non-coincidentally with the demise of communism which was a competing you know a competing economic theory and and produced all sorts of bad economic decisions in any case you have to buy the hypothesis that the current system works and that extending it is going to be better and so you don't get to um adopt revolutionary a stance of revolutionary criticism of the western capitalist hierarchy so that's a big sacrifice if if you if you're if your thinking is oriented in that direction now i don't know really what to make of that because you'd think the evidence that the poor has been lifted out of poverty at an unbelievable like an astonishing rate since the year 2000 not just in china but but all over the world would be essentially irrefutable evidence that the current system and works and then if you look at china after they adopted free market policies compared to before they adopted free market policies there's absolutely no comparison with regard to growth and so it isn't obvious to me how if you were truly concerned with the poor you'd be able to deny the sorts of propositions that you put forward i don't understand that maybe it's partly because people just don't know how much better things have gone in the last 20 years and why you know because it has been difficult news to bring forward and and it's difficult to market um if i can just uh yes yes uh so one of the things i think people don't recognize if you look at it at a graph of the last 200 years 200 years ago almost everyone in the world were absolutely poor in the sense of less less than a dollar a day yeah 95 of humanity was below that level and we've just seen a dramatic decline as you mentioned we're now down below 10 even despite of covet which a lot of people have pointed out have actually uh uh made more poor people uh we've gone from seven up to about nine percent and so we've delayed the uh the the benefit for a couple years that's terrible and i would rather not have had that happen but it doesn't change the long-term trajectory that's amazingly downwards in the sense that we have many many fewer people that are poor uh one one of my favorite guys for uh who runs the uh our world and data uh website uh he points out that every year for the last 25 years the headline of every newspaper around the world could have been over the last 24 hours 138 000 people have lifted been lifted out of poverty 138 000 people every day for the last 25 years but of course it's not news because it happened every day it was not you know some oh this day it happened we don't get these good news and i think we need to get them in order to be able to understand the magnitude of what we're talking about well you know the problem with accepting that good news or a problem with it is that it pretty much eradicates the romantic rebel you know because it all of a sudden makes it very difficult for you to be cool to find something cool to stand up against and to resist you know you have a benevolent relatively benevolent society that's getting incrementally better it's not a villain that you can heroically resist and that's that is i'm not being cynical about that that is actually a problem because resisting um um arbitrary authority is a good story and and it served people well for a very long time and if you don't have that to catalyze your identity you have to search for something perhaps equally grand and that's difficult especially when you also don't have to go out and contend with the brute force of mother nature to anywhere near the degree that you once had to but but if you look at it there's plenty of other things you could stand up to and that was what we were talking to instead of being the romantic hero that stands up against society why aren't you the romantic hero that stands up against tuberculosis or the one that stand up against maternal death or the one that stands up for free trade are the ones that stand up for all these other things where we know for very little money we can make a tremendous benefit so so again i i get why it's not it's a hard question man i mean i think it might have something to do also with the inability to utilize your resentment you know if you're resentful about things and you oppose the capitalist state you can easily identify an enemy but if you stand up against tuberculosis like obviously tuberculosis is bad it doesn't make you look good by comparison all right so you mentioned you do promote co2 emission amelioration strategies in false alarm and you did just point out that although we should be striving to make the poor around the world as much less poor as we possibly can as quickly as we can so everyone wins including us um just like henry ford won when he paid his workers enough to buy his cars the cars they made um they are going to increase their rate of carbon dioxide emission and for some people that would be enough reason to scrap the whole enrichment process but you have some strategies that you think are wise to ameliorate the problems that would be associated with that yes so i i talk about five different solutions in the book so the first one is a carbon tax uh any economist would say you know look you have a problem you emit co2 but you don't actually take it into consideration because it's free to men so that's how we think about the polluter pays you put a price on carbon in principle you should do this across the world you should do it so that it slowly rises with time it's the most efficient way to deal with it there's two things we need to recognize with it one is it turns out to be very very hard because it makes it very explicit to people that tackling global warming is actually costly secondly we know that politicians are just really really bad at doing something for a long time very consistently across all areas what politicians typically end up doing is they'll put it on some things so you know in many places in europe for instance you have enormously high taxes on cars and you have enormously low uh taxes on people who are good at uh lobbying their governments for their particular interest so you know greenhouse gardeners uh uh greenhouse uh growers don't have to pay uh the the carbon tax because that would make it really hard for them to grow their you know tomatoes or whatever and and you can see how this happens across a wide range of areas so that's one part of the problem the other part is even if you do this really really well it'll only solve a smaller part of the problem so you should do this we should focus on on a carbon tax but we should also be realistic this is not what's going to fix climate change this will fix a smaller part of climate change so it's part of the solution but it's not the most important part the second part and that's where i think we actually have the biggest opportunity is innovation uh so if you talk to matt ridley this is certainly also his uh his ballpark but it's basically recognizing that most things that we've solved in this world are about innovation so you rarely get people to to solve a problem by saying i'm sorry could you please not do all that cool stuff that you like could you please stop feeling good about all of that that really works out as a political strategy unfortunately that's typically what we say could you please not fly not eat meat not do all these things could you please have it a little hotter in the summer and a little cooler in the winter that's really really hard to sell to most people what you need is innovation and let me just give you an example uh back in the 1950s los angeles was one of the most polluted places on the planet because there are lots and lots of cars and they have the special sort of geographical notion that just leaves all of the pollution inside this little basin of los angeles it was terrible uh to live there in many ways uh and obviously the simple answer is to tell tell people most of this came from cars so the simple answer would be to say stop driving your car of course if you've ever met someone from los angeles you know that that's not a solution that's actually viable to them well there aren't even any sidewalks no it's not you know really viable for anyone in any city what did solve the problem was the innovation of the catalytic converter this little thing that cost money you put on the exhaust pipe and then basically you have much much cleaner cars that made it possible for people to keep their cars drive a lot and have much much cleaner air in los angeles now i'm not saying everything is perfect in los angeles and there's still air pollution problems but it made it a lot better for very little money that's the way that we need to solve global warming if we could innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels and this green energy could be nuclear it could be fusion energy it could be solar or wind with batteries it could be lots and other uh possible solutions if we could innovate one or a few of these solutions down below fossil fuels everyone would switch you wouldn't need sort of a you know paris accord where you have to twist everybody's arm let me ask you about that for a minute so it's not a straightforward matter to set up governmental policy to to to uh to support innovation i mean innovation is a very abstract idea and i've seen much evidence of failure at the governmental level here in canada when when governments have set out to foster entrepreneurship and to seed you know the development of high-tech industry for example generally it's a cataclysmic failure i mean obviously it's self-evident in some sense that a good idea is good because it solves a complicated problem and the more good ideas we have the better but do you think that it's like it seems on the face of it unless you dig down into the details it seems like hand waving obviously we should have better ideas to solve our problems but you what do you think constitute concrete realistic evidence-based solutions to the problem of fostering innovation do you think it's actually possible to set up policy that does that yes so the short answer is yes and and and the reason is that what what what's lacking is mostly long-term investment so investment that will only generate the solutions in 20 30 40 years remember uh this is why we invest a lot of money in health care of uh basic research that then eventually becomes research that you know for instance pharmaceuticals can make into products that they can make money off of there's always a uh too little investment societally in things that you can't monetize right away so it's very hard to invest in things that you can't monetize right away yes if i make an innovation that then in 20 years say will help us generate this enormously beneficial breakthrough unfortunately i won't get any money because my patent has run out that's why most companies will not be investing in these long-term development what happens is that you then have a darth of investment into these terms these sorts of long-term uh innovations unless you have the public invest in them and i'll get back to how we do that smartly okay but we do that in medical research for many reasons you know people recognize this is part of the place where we need to you know produce lots of professors lots of medical noble alerts and then you know eventually the pharmaceuticals will take over and actually make products out of this that's a great setup we don't do this in energy for a variety of reasons it is one of the places where we spend very very little money partly because it doesn't feel like you're solving global warming because you're not solving it right now you're only solving it in you know 20 or 40 years that feels like you didn't really care but the reality is this is the only way that we're going to get these sorts of long-term breakthroughs now one reason why politicians often screw this up is because they are not willing to invest in these long-term investments they'll say we want a you know a silicon valley in canada in three years um yeah that makes sense if you need to get reelected in four but you can't do that and and so you shouldn't be trying to do this in a very short term way another way is that you end up giving this away to companies uh and companies of course are just going to spend it on the product that they were going to do next year anyway uh but hey thanks for the money so the the point here is you need to do this carefully in a way that will generate long-term uh innovation this is not easy you are going to waste a lot of money but we know that governments around the world has done this in a variety of different ways uh we know for instance the you know the internet the uh uh the transistor uh the uh uh fracking in the us there's a number of places where you have been successful and all we have to do is to spend lots of money and and i'd love to talk more about specifically how we should set this up how we should evaluate and we should be careful about it but fundamentally we should do this in a way that we say we want to generate a lot of knowledge that we believe in the long run can deliver benefits that'll actually help companies produce energy that will be viable but we are not going to try and do this for the next three or five years so we've got to stop that panic mode and start this long-term thinking we do have realistic uh knowledge about both that we're investing very little compared to typical typically almost all other areas and that more investment here would make it more plausible that we would faster get cheaper green energy so okay so in canada there's a medical research council and a social sciences research council in natural sciences and engineering research council that might be a bit dated that information but essentially that's how it's been set up but there isn't an energy innovation research council and you know we i'm thinking that way because i'm an academic and i've seen these granting agencies i've seen how they work and they're set up to provide funds for basic research and and something like that doesn't exist so what's why why aren't we funding research into energy into into the generation of cheap and and clean energy what what what's what's going away every year we want to spend it on solar panels that makes us feel like we're doing something right now the the the surprising thing is in 2015 when all countries signed the paris uh climate agreement on the sidelines of that event obama and 20 other global leaders bill gates and lots of billionaires actually signed another agreement that i'm happy to say we were a tiny part of pushing which was we're going to double our investment into green energy research and development so all countries both promised the thing that you heard about namely we're going to cut our carbon emissions but they also promised to double their green energy investment in five years so in 2020 they did quite a bit of the cutting carbon emissions they did nothing of the increased spending in green energy r d and i think fundamentally because it doesn't feel like a solution it doesn't feel like something urchin it feels like something you can do next year it feels like something that's nice to have but this you know putting up the solar panel is urgent and we need to do it the reality is the over worry about global warming that we have because we're you know we have this existential feel that this could be the end of the world surprisingly also not only is wrong but it also leads us down the wrong path namely the path where we say let's do anything that just makes it look like we're doing something next year rather than actually laying the groundwork for fixing this problem now obviously and some people will say well we should have done this 20 years ago and yes that would be wonderful we should have done that but we didn't you know it's sort of too late to do something about what we should have done 20 years ago but we can do something about what we're going to spend our money on in 2021. and if you look for instance on biden's proposal to fix climate change he's he's thinking about spending two trillion dollars you'll probably not get to spend all that money on a vast array of things many of which are not going to be very effective but he's also saying he wants to dramatically increase actually i think probably too much but certainly a very very large amount of increase in american spending on r d this is what he should be focusing on but i do worry that he's going to end up having much more success with all his other much less effective proposals simply because they are more glamorous all right so um you don't seem to be an admirer of the paris accords and so my sense of your argument is that the proposals that are part of that accord are extremely expensive and they're not cost effective especially when viewed in this larger framework that encompasses a whole host of problems instead of focusing just on climate change and so maybe if if you don't mind you could summarize your could you lay out your critique of the paris accords for for us yes so so two things the paris agreement is really just an extension of what we've been trying for the last 30 years and failed to do the last 30 years namely let's try to do something that's really hard that cost a lot of money that will have a little bit of impact in a hundred years and try and see if we can't get everybody to do it not surprisingly that's a really really hard thing to get and to do what and to do what exactly so so basically get canada get the us get denmark get everybody else to cut their carbon emissions which privately for them is going to be costly they have to reduce their use of cheap energy and use a little bit more expensive energy sometimes less reliable energy basically it puts us a slight slower damper on their economic growth that's always going to be hard that's always going to be unpopular you're basically asking people could you please pay some more and use a little bit less that's that's a hard sell not surprisingly you do a little bit of it you typically don't do a lot of it you don't live up to all of your promises but even if you do so let's just take the paris agreement even if everyone did everything they promised to 2030 that would cut as much co2 that if you run it through a climate model it would cut temperatures by point zero two five degrees centigrade by the end of the century so literally nothing we wouldn't compare measure magnitude of increase so it's about four degrees uh of uh temperature rise we've already seen one so about three three degrees more so this would be a trivial part of reduction now it would be a reduction it would mean we would have less problems because global warming is a problem so we estimate there would be benefits but there would also be huge cost because you'd actually have to pay for this so if you look at how much you're gonna pay which is in the order of one to two trillion us dollars per year in 2030 for every dollar spent you will avoid climate damages across the centuries worth about 11 cents that's a very poor way of spending money paying a dollar and actually achieving 11 cents you could just have paid out the dollar and and done you know almost 10 times as much good in the world so the reality here is the paris agreement is a really well intentioned agreement but it will fail just like all the other agreements so you know rio kyoto and all the other national policies that we've done it'll mostly fail but even if it succeeded it would be a very expensive way of achieving very little and this of course is the big problem of the climate conversation that because we're so worried we've decided yeah we're not going to spend all that much money on all these other problems in the world tuberculosis all this other stuff but we are going to spend one to two trillion dollars remember it's not going to bring us to the poor house but it's a lot of money it's one to two percent of global gdp on something that will basically not bias any measurable impact in a hundred years that's a bad deal that's why we need to do better okay well that's a that's a good place to sum up i would say if unless you think there's something particularly important that we didn't cover i would have liked to have heard perhaps more description of you know you listed out the top four things or the top five things that we could be investing in where there's a huge bang for the buck but people can get that directly from your website or your book so yes and we've i've shown you this before but we have a whole folder i'm sure you can put that up uh where you can actually see all the different uh investments here and you can see that again yes yes so so um i've been talking with bjorn lomberg today the author of false alarm and we've been talking about global governance i would say sustainable global governance with an emphasis on two things and one would be economic growth which means alleviation of absolute poverty for those who are poorest and some incremented wealth hypothetically for the rest of us which seems on the face of it to be a good thing especially at the lower ends of the distribution and uh discussing also how that might be done in the most appropriate ecological manner keeping in mind the host of other problems that have to be solved and dr lomberg has developed a methodology for assessing and rank ordering the problems that we face at an international level and as well at a national level um i'm gonna interrupt my summary for one thing how what's been what's been your experience with regards to your success in those countries where you've gone in and done this prioritization what's been the practical consequence of that so we've very clearly so we're an organization look at how effective are you so obviously we should be looking at how effective are we yes in what we do also you know i'm i'm using my life in this i'd like to know that actually has an impact uh so yes we are effective uh so what we found as in these countries will change some of those policies and will change them somewhat towards being smarter not by any means the whole way or anything sure but towards better spending and because most nation states spends billions of dollars on making lives for their own citizens better if they just change a little bit of their increased spending as they get richer over the years that will have a much much bigger impact so it should give you a sense of proportion the whole project that we do costs about two and a half million dollars and we probably have impacts in the uh you know we change hundreds of millions of dollars possibly billions of dollars in spending and each one of those dollars will have impacts in the order of somewhere between five and up to 20 or 30 dollars more well off okay so that's that's great you know because what that actually indicates is that a rationally designed program aimed at incremental gradual improvement actually works extraordinarily well it isn't revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination but as a strategy it pays off extraordinarily handsomely i wish i for many reasons that i hadn't been so ill for the last while because i was going to lobby hard for the utilization of your team here in ontario and and in canada and i suppose that could still happen in the future hypothetically but i'm very very pleased to hear that the consequences have been positive and also that you had the fortitude and methodological integrity to include an evaluation of your own process in your evaluation process there's a rule for social science intervention which is almost never followed which is don't intervene without assessing the outcome of your intervention it's a mistake it's it's an ethical error and can have terrible practical consequences okay so so back to the summary so bjorn's team has rank ordered and prioritized a whole set of global concerns they've also started to work at the state level the country level instead of the international level as we just discussed that's also paid off um and all of this lays out a lovely pathway i would say for people who for people to inform themselves about those issues that they could adopt as salient to themselves politically and ideologically to provide some meaning for their life some practical meaning and to actually further the development further positive development in a whole host of areas and so if you're interested in that as the viewer listener then i'd highly recommend bjorn's books and but more importantly his approach and and some intelligent investigation as to the methods of that approach and the consequences and so um more power to you as far as i'm concerned um that's for sure and i'm was very pleased as always to talk with you is there anything else that you'd like to tell people before so if if you wouldn't mind i'd i'd love to just uh because i i i tried to go through the five things that you can do so i'm just gonna really quickly uh mention the last three is that okay yes and then i'd i'd love to also make one more point about my book but you know so we talked about a carbon tax and innovation innovation is crucial uh you should also focus on adaptation uh it's sort of an uh uh naughty word in much of the conversation in global warming but very clearly adaptation is going to be one of the big ways that we're going to fix many of the problems it's going to happen to a large extent simply because people do that if you're a farmer you're going to plant later or earlier depending on the the climate changes and eventually you might plant something else you should also look at geoengineering we talked about that very briefly but basically the idea of saying if there were to be a really catastrophic impact geoengineering is basically a way of making sure that you can restore the temperature of the earth very quickly at fairly low cost we should not just go ahead with it but we should certainly be thinking about it and and that's all i'm going to say about this right now the last bit and we also talked extensively about that is to make sure that prosperity is also a big solution to climate change most of the things that you're impacted with you're impacted with because you're poor if you're really poor everything hits you hard but climate hits you hard as well if you're rich you're much much less impacted and so very clearly the question is do we want to help bangladesh a little bit by cutting carbon emissions and basically then leaving them poor but hey at least sea levels rose this much less by the end of the century or would we rather make sure that we actually leave bangladesh much richer which means that they'll be much better able to handle hurricanes that they'll be much better able to handle sea level rise and so on there's a very strong basis of evidence that shows that prosperity is actually much better for most countries not just because it's wonderful in all kinds of other ways you can avoid your kids dying and make get them better education and all these other things but also for climate so those were the five points and innovation is by far the most important thing i just want to say one last thing about you know because my book is very much we've talked a lot about all the big problems in the world the reason why i talk about global warming is because it is the one thing that i that i experience most people actually talking about all the time is this existential threat this is the big thing that we should all be concerned about certainly a lot of people the u.n uh secretary general many others are telling us this is the top priority for humanity because if this is going to eradicate all of us surely this should be the thing that we focus on i think that that makes intellectual sense if it was true but that's not what the un climate panel is telling us it's not what the science is telling us it tells us this is a problem by no means the end of the world and that is not only important because you can't really get to all the other things we were talking about unless you stop believing this is the end of the world if this is the end of the world you are going to set everything else aside but also of course it's the only way that you can actually get a better life uh you know when you see all these kids uh being really worried about am i gonna have a future when i grow up uh people believing literally that humanity is going to end that must be terrible now if it was true we should be telling people but it's not true and therefore being able to relieve yourself from that scare is also really really valuable on a personal level so this book was written not just to make sure that you can get rid of the scare but also that you can start realizing this is a problem among many others now let's think about how do we prioritize and and that's what i'm i'm hoping this conversation will help us so in a sense you could say the false alarm book is a stepping stone to be able to have that you know more general conversation namely what is it that the world should be prioritizing if we're not scared withless about global warming but actually sees it see it as it is a problem among many problems great well that's a really good place to end so um thanks very much and i hope we get a million people to watch this and another 500 thousand to listen to it we'll see how it goes so thanks very much for talking to me today bjorn it was a pleasure uh listening to you i always learn a lot reading your books listening to you and and uh it's been a it's been well it's very nice to come across sources of realistic hope you know and that's what your books provide they provide sources of realistic hope man those are in short supply so um even though there's lots of reasons to be hopeful and perhaps the supply shouldn't be so short but it's nice to be able to maintain critical intelligence and not to have to descend into a well of pessimism as a consequence yes it's wonderful to talk to you and it's always you give me a lot of different uh perspectives on what we're doing which is just as valuable you know you're sort of you're stuck in your little uh uh way of thinking about this and it's wonderful to sort of be able to say oh yeah yeah there are all these other perspectives and all these ways that you also need to to have that conversation that's great so it's always wonderful to talk to you thank you you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 387,587

Rating: 4.9015918 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: vDNSnMTem98

Length: 114min 20sec (6860 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/letsgocrazy]

This episode was recorded on January 21, 2021. Dr. Bjorn Lomborg and I discuss a variety of topics in the realm of climate change and worldwide problems. We examine the claims made in his latest book False Alarm. Throughout the episode we touch on sustainable development goals, prioritizing problems for the world, achieving the highest return on investment, the apocalypse lens we apply to many global issues, making the poor richer, innovation, adaptation, selling and marketing solutions, and much more. Dr. Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish author and President of the think tank, Copenhagen Consensus Center. Bjorn champions a path to solving world problems through the use of economic research to determine where to spend our resources based on the return on investment and severity of the impending issue. Dr. Lomborg's more notable books include False Alarm and How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place.

[u/edubya15]

Bookmarked

[u/jessewest84]

I got all fucked off when he started talking free trade.

I'll have to go back and take another listen.