Best Things First

by Bjørn Lomborg

In the early 1600s, tuberculosis infections began to spread rapidly in England and over the next centuries throughout Western Europe. Ever-growing cities provided fertile ground for person-to-person, airborne spread. Almost every Western European was eventually infected. Incredibly, for more than a century, about one-in-four deaths were due to tuberculosis — a sustained death toll that was much higher than even the worst one-year death rates from Covid. We see the impact in Figure 4.1, where tuberculosis in London topped out around 1750, killing almost 1% of the population each year — a curve other major European cities followed. For comparison, the total death rate in London today from all causes combined is about 0.6%.

For one hour a day, the students sit down, each with their tablet. The tablet contains software in the native language, and it can quickly assess the level of the student and start teaching right at that level. Since the software will be used by millions, it can be made to administer a best-practice education that delivers very efficient and engaging instruction. Several such software packages exist, and they are easy and cheap to translate into other languages.

The other lower-tech solution to teaching at the right level is simply to have schools shuffle classes for one hour each day so that all students go to the class that is at their actual level. Sometimes, this requires more teachers, depending on the school; it also requires more testing, and it will sometimes lead to awkward social interactions with children of very different ages in the same class. This approach has also been widely tested, and while it results in less additional learning than with the use of tablets, it is also cheaper. In total, one year of this approach delivers the learning equivalent to two years of normal schooling.

In total, tobacco causes about 550,000 deaths in the USA each year. Worldwide, it kills 8.7 million people annually, mostly claiming the lives of smokers but also 1.3 million people who simply inhaled the smoke secondhand. In low-income countries, tobacco kills half a million people, and in lower-middle-income countries, it causes 2.6 million annual deaths. The research paper finds two very effective ways to reduce the death toll from smoking. One is through a simple tobacco tax. The other is tobacco regulation, which can include bans on advertising and smoking in public places. Both produce excellent benefits for their costs.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was great enthusiasm globally to allow China into the World Trade Organization, with the expectation that it would become the factory for the world. Chinese workers would be enriched, and everyone else would benefit from cheaper products. Indeed, based on some measures, this move did work: It drove incredible economies of scale and allowed consumers everywhere to buy cheap and often fairly well-made products from huge box stores, stretching our budgets further and improving our welfare. It is estimated that middle-class Americans, on average, gained 29% of their purchasing power from foreign trade. In other words, the average middle-class American could buy nearly one-third more for each dollar because the USA traded. The effect is even more significant — 62% — for the poorest tenth of American consumers.

While rich Americans or Europeans may like to believe their countries’ dramatically higher wages are somehow justified by a more efficient or better-educated workforce, the overwhelming economic evidence shows that this is not the case. A large part of the difference is simply a “place premium”: Workers are paid more in rich countries because they live in highly productive societies where they are relatively scarce and, therefore, can negotiate a higher wage. One way to see that is to compare the wages of McDonald’s workers, who, by design, do identical work across the world and yet are paid in the USA 16 times what they are in India. A 2020 Oxford study shows that there is nothing intrinsic about the abilities of domestic-born versus foreign workers. Comparing the wage of Nigerians working in Nigeria with the wages of similar people born and educated in Nigeria but now working in the USA also shows a 16-fold wage difference.