How To Save the World ... Efficiently

A Short Review of Best Things First by Bjorn Lomborg

To ‘make the world a better place’ is a noble but utterly unactionable sentiment without getting very specific about what is going to get done and how.

The United Nations (UN), one of those entities with enough funding and clout to get things done, made a set of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) in 2015 to make the world a better place. Unfortunately, as this book points out, the SDGs have 169 targets across 17 themes. As the saying goes, if you chase two rabbits at once you catch neither of them. They are also spending enormous quantities to chase these goals which are all falling far short of projected goals.

While the UN is made up of a large number of actors, coordinated action requires far fewer targets to be effective. With this in mind, the Copenhagen Consensus Center led by Bjorn Lomborg, has compiled the “doable dozen” by means of 12 academic research publications which are made more accessible to the lay public in this book.

Their guiding philosophy in this research was simple and potent: 1) do the most impactful things for the world’s poorest, that are also 2) the most benefit-cost efficient things. In short, these twelve idea are the ‘best bang for your buck.’

It has become clear that we are spending a lot of bucks but sorely lack the bang. (See this Twitter exchange between Elon Musk and the head of the UN Food Agency from 2021).

With all this in mind, Lomborg’s team of economists set out to identify the goals with at least $15 of social good for each $1 spent. The average ratio of the following twelve ideas is an astounding 52:1. Without further ado —

1. Squash Tuberculosis

2. Improve Education

   1. i.e. by teaching at the right level, using structured pedagogy, and supplementing classroom learning with cost-effective tablets with learning software

3. Maternal and Newborn Health

   1. i.e. providing neonatal resuscitation handpumps to prevent 2 million infant deaths

4. Agricultural R&D

5. Squash Malaria

6. E-Procurement to reduce corruption

   1. massive sums of money are siphoned off by corrupt government officials because government procurement of goods is done without transparent electronically accessible records

7. Nutrition

   1. i.e. by swapping out the iron and folic acid pills already being distributed for pills with even more micronutrients, and small-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements (SQ-LNS) for young children

8. Tobacco tax, alcohol tax, and salt consumption reduction

9. Childhood Vaccination

10. More trade

11. Permitting more highly-skilled migration

12. Land Tenure Security

    1. when farmers do not know whether or not they own the land they are on, they tend to be less productive and less likely to invest in improving the land and thereby its crop yield

For more detailed policy suggestions I refer you to the book, or research linked above.

To sum up a lot of research and math:

“For about $35 billion per year, we can save 4.2 million lives annually, and we can make the poorer half of the world more than a trillion dollars better off each and every year.”

Pausing on those numbers for a moment:

“Saving 4.2 million lives in 2024 is equivalent to stopping one 747 jumbo jet full of passengers from crashing once an hour every day for an entire year.”

Can we afford $35 billion a year? Yes. We already devote trillions to low-carbon energy, military, and education annually. Lomborg also points out that we spend $147 billion annually on pet food, and since 2020 annual cosmetic spending alone has increased by $39 billion.

So why are we not already focusing on these? Lomborg writes about his experience proposing these solutions to UN ambassadors:

“Every ambassador I met told me that the research was very useful and agreed that, ideally, the world would focus more on the most efficient policies. However, the ambassadors quietly explained to me that their job wasn’t really to find the best policy investments for the world. They were there to highlight their government’s particular policy focus, which was often ideas that played well at home, regardless of how efficient (or not) they were at solving global problems.”

In other words, the rich parts of the world (that’s you and me) do not push for squashing Tuberculosis because it no longer kills us, though it still silently kills millions of the world’s poorest. What our political constituencies think are the most pressing problems of our day are really just ‘first-world problems’ that can only be entertained in a luxurious world where TB no longer kills, and infant asphyxiation due to lack of a $75 hand pump is a thing of the past.

This book’s thesis, then, is simple: By focusing on the world’s poorest, we can and should do better — and we can do it for less.