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Started reading
May 11, 2022
The single most important investment, according to the panel, would be to step up the fight against malnutrition.
the benefits are 35 times higher than the costs—even
higher crop productivity would mean less deforestation.
When it comes to the issue of climate change, the experts recommend spending a small amount—roughly $1 billion—to investigate the feasibility of cooling the planet through geoengineering options.
decisions frequently do not take fully into account a comprehensive economic view of the effects, benefits, and costs of solving one problem instead of another.
society is presented with a menu of choices, but with very little information on their costs and benefits. The Copenhagen Consensus process aims to put prices and sizes on the menu, making choice easier and more informed.
Often, explicit prioritization is ignored altogether by policymakers.
a laundry list of noble causes with no consideration given to relative costs or benefits.
We can improve education in poor countries by showing parents the importance of schooling.
worst educational outcomes occur in the nations that rank among the most poorly governed.
there is very weak knowledge about which inputs actually generate quality schooling outcomes,
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.
Provision of nutrient supplements and anti-parasitic medicines is very inexpensive: In Kenya the cost of deworming a child can be as low as $3.50, with benefits 20 to 50 times higher.
Many kids and parents, especially in rural areas, are simply unaware of the long-term benefits that may come from a better education.
the most consistent evidence of success in recent years comes from making payments to underprivileged parents conditional on their children attending school.
the climate for all of these interventions is worse where the positive returns are depressed by poor government institutions. Therefore, the best places to try these interventions are countries that protect individual economic and political freedoms.
And it’s more important than ever that we try to prevent it in the first place.
Prophetic regarding the Russian Ukraine war? I wonder if the west is somewhat complicit in their lack of attempts at prevention by dialog and negotiation.
Without peace and stability, there are impediments to solving every other challenge that we look at
Armed conflict is a major global problem that disproportionately affects the world’s poorest.
Because of the long lag in economic recovery after a conflict, people will die for years after a conflict ends.
three obvious points at which we can try to reduce the devastating impact of conflict: preventing it in the first place, intervening to end it when it occurs, and helping to reconstruct a post-conflict area.
The opposit of the west's approach to Russia Ukraine.
conflict prevention has a benefit/cost ratio of at least 11.
The existence of drugs, criminal gangs, and violence in South American countries such as Colombia in the present day, for example, can be traced back to the ending of an armed conflict without true peace being achieved.
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.
low tax of about $1.80 on each ton of carbon would generate benefits (of avoided climate damage) worth between $1.50 and $9.
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.
The real challenge of global warming, therefore, lies in tackling its impact on developing nations.
there is a need to persuade international donors to start investing more systematically in disaster risk reduction before a disaster strikes, rather than focusing almost exclusively on post-disaster assistance, as they do today.
the way that we often approach decisions, with short-term costs in mind rather than long-term benefits, can get in the way of policy-makers making the change in approach that they need to.
“High-fertility” countries today account for about 38 percent of the 78 million people that are added annually to the world population, despite the fact that they are home to only 18 percent of the population. After 2060, the world’s population is projected to grow exclusively as a result of population growth in today’s high-fertility countries.
That upwards of one-quarter of women want to limit their fertility but are not using any contraception points to a real need for greater emphasis on this area.
An astonishing one-third of the world population, 2.5 billion people, lacks access to basic sanitation.
development agencies overemphasize safe-water projects and underinvest in sanitation.
improved immunization saves more lives per year than would be saved by global peace.
vaccines to prevent diarrhea.
Why vaccines for diarrhea? Clean water, sanitation, and nutrition are the main issues, no?
