How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place

by Bjørn Lomborg

In total, such an investment would help more than 100 million children start their lives without stunted growth or malnourishment. And comprehensive research now shows that such interventions would stay with them for life: Their bodies and muscles would grow faster, their cognitive abilities would improve, and they would pay more attention in school (and stay there longer). Studies show that, decades down the line, these children would be more productive, make more money, have fewer kids, and begin a virtuous circle of dramatic development.

For a similar amount, 300 million children could be dewormed in schools. By not sharing their food with intestinal parasites, they, too, would become more alert, stay in school longer, and grow up to be more productive adults—another cause that needs much more public attention.

Some will argue that it is impossible to put a value on a human life. Yet, refusing to put a value on human life does not help to save lives.

Another economic tool that informs this project is discounting, which allows us to balance our own needs against those of future generations,

Commercial projects typically discount at the rate of current or expected market interest rates.

Thus, Orazem considers three strategies that seem to offer the best evidence of success to date: nutrition supplements, offering information on returns to schooling, and conditional cash transfers for school attendance. All have been shown to succeed with benefits that exceed the costs.

Finally, Orazem argues that the most consistent evidence of success in recent years comes from making payments to underprivileged parents conditional on their children attending school.

Because of the long lag in economic recovery after a conflict, people will die for years after a conflict ends. In addition to the direct and legacy costs, there are spinoff costs such as the expense of looking after refugees displaced by one country’s internal strife.

According to Dunne’s analysis, conflict prevention is the most cost-effective solution. The causes of conflict are hugely varied and the roots of war are multifaceted, with important historical contexts. There are a number of factors that can be identified including colonial legacy, military governments and militaristic cultures, ethnicity and religion, unequal development, inequality and poverty, bad leadership, polity frailties and inadequacies, external influences, greed, and natural resources.

Very stringent emission-reduction targets such as the long-term goals of the European Union simply do not pass the benefit/cost test: They actually cause more damage than they prevent.

They show that adopting a “brute force” approach to reducing emissions with a carbon tax before green technology is actually ready to take over from fossil fuels could generate economic costs 10 times or more than widely published estimates of CO2 mitigation cost estimates.

Moreover, funding has gone mainly to subsidizing manufacture and deployment rather than to research.

They find that the most important impacts of global warming will be on agriculture and tourism, where nations will lose, on average, about one-half of one percent of GDP from each by mid-century. However, they point out that much of this damage will actually be avoided by people choosing for themselves to adapt to the change in their environment. Farmers will choose plants that thrive in the heat. New houses will be designed to deal with warmer temperatures.

Such high benefits reflect the fact that solar radiation management holds the potential of reducing the economic damages caused by both warming and costly CO2 reduction measures (such as carbon taxes).

Land scarcity arising from such a policy would likely force an increase in agricultural productivity.

2.5 billion people, lacks access to basic sanitation. More than one billion people must defecate out in the open rather than using the toilets that we take for granted in the developed world.

An estimated 200 million latrines and septic tanks are emptied manually, by a worker descending into the pit with a bucket and spade, and subsequently dumped or buried in the immediate environment, often reintroducing pathogens previously contained in the pit or tank.

The first of these is Community Led Total Sanitation, the name given to various forms of an approach that emphasizes behavior change, particularly making it the community’s responsibility to share in the creation of communities that are free from open defecation, particularly in rural areas.

Chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer are problems that we associate with rich countries, while infectious diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS are more commonly seen as the problems afflicting the poor. But 80 percent of global deaths from chronic diseases occur in low-income and middle-income countries. Cardiovascular disease in low- and middle-income countries killed more than twice as many people in 2001 as did AIDS, malaria, and TB combined.