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April 3, 2023 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

02:52:56

12 Rules for the Good of the Planet | Bjørn Lomborg | EP 345

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	You should accept yourself just the way you are.
	What does that say about who I should become?
	Is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way?
	So am I done or something?
	Get the hell up.
	Get your act together.
	Adopt some responsibility.
	Put your life together.
	Develop a vision.
	Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within.
	Be a force for good in the world and that'll be the adventure of your life.
	Especially for young people, they have a messianic urge that emerges in late adolescence and runs into early adulthood when they're trying to sort out their lives.
	They want a project and they want a vision that they can be involved in that does have some larger scale social significance.
	This seems to me to be an exciting vision.
	It's like, well, how about we don't have any...
	Direly poor people.
	And then we see how that goes.
	If you can improve the seed stock so that crops are more pesticide resistant, or more pest resistant, which you can do, then you can use less pesticide.
	You can increase the yield per acre so that uses less farmland.
	It's like, why wouldn't the greens be absolutely 100% on board with this as well if they could drop the zero-sum presupposition and the anti-extra mouse to feed idea?
	It's like, well, we serve women when they're the most vulnerable, and now we serve children when they're the most vulnerable, and there's no downside to that.
	There's just upside.
	So that sounds like a perfectly good advantage to me.
	And one of the things that we find doing these projects is that it's amazing, as you also pointed out, That we spend so much time focusing on some of these other things like, you know, plastic in the oceans and climate change and many other things.
	These are all worthy things, mind you.
	And a lot of people will argue that we should do them because they will help the world's poor.
	The problem is they'll help them very ineffectively.
	So for every dollar spent...
	They will only help them an infinitesimal part.
	Whereas if we spend that dollar on some of these projects that we're going to be talking about, you can have an enormous impact right here, right now.
	So again, it's not to say that we shouldn't do all the other wonderful things.
	I'm simply making the argument, we should probably do this first.
	Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms and on the Daily Wire Plus too.
	I'm here today.
	I'm pleased to be here today live, so that's also good, with Bjorn Lomborg, who runs a think tank called Copenhagen Consensus in Denmark.
	And Bjorn has done the most detailed and reliable analysis of spending prioritization, I would say, the There are a number of enterprises that are underway on the international front, but it's a chaotic mess of jumbled priority, and that's a big problem because it makes everything super expensive and inefficient, which might be a feature rather than a bug.
	And Bjorn and his team have spent Well, it's more than a decade now, damn near 20 years.
	Determining how to prioritize our approaches on the national and international front in relationship to the multitude of problems that beset us.
	It's important to stress multitude because we have a proclivity in the woke West to reduce the entire panoply of problems that confront us or opportunities, depending on how you look at it, to a single climate emergency and then to reduce that to a single cause, carbon, and then to assume that if we oppose carbon, we're now acting as the appropriate representatives of the Messiah on the planet.
	And none of that constitutes a Acceptable theology, let's say, let alone policy.
	So, I'm going to talk to Bjorn today about what he's been up to recently, but then we're going to walk through 12 projects that Bjorn and his team of economists, team of, it's a meta team of economists, because there's many teams working.
	What they believe, where we can do the most good for the least amount of money in the shortest period of time with the highest return.
	All of that.
	Multidimensional calculations.
	So, good to see you, Bjorn.
	Likewise.
	You've been at Stanford for a couple of weeks.
	What have you been doing there?
	So I'm a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
	And so I gave the first presentation of the project that you just described, which is basically a project that tries to say, look, we'd love to do everything in the world.
	And everybody sort of promises everything in the world.
	And we actually have it documented because the world has made 169 different targets, its priorities, they're called the Sustainable Development Goals, where we promised we're going to fix, as you mentioned, climate.
	But we're also going to, you know, fix world peace and we're going to get rid of corruption.
	We're going to make sure that everybody are well-educated and don't starve and get out of poverty and that we get more parks for handicapped people in urban areas and we recycle more and The list just goes on and on.
	And there's something almost comical about the total effect of that, because we're promising everything to everyone all the time.
	But of course, we're actually not delivering on those.
	We promised this from 2016 to 30.
	So this year, we're at halftime.
	We're at halftime of all the global promises.
	So remember, this is promises that every single nation in the world has signed up to.
	The US, Canada, pretty much everyone.
	I think Siri is the only one that hasn't done this yet.
	So we promised all this stuff.
	We're not delivering at all.
	And so what we're trying to say is, look, if we can't do it all, what should we do first?
	What are the smartest things?
	One of the things I worked on, one of the relatively early documents in the sustainable development goal world, that was the Secretary General's report on sustainable economic development.
	That was about 15 years ago.
	One of the things I found very peculiar about it, it's actually what tilted me over towards your work eventually, was that there were 200 goals.
	And I thought, that's a lot of goals.
	It's like, at some point you have so many goals that really what you're saying is, we're going to do everything at once.
	And that's a stupid plan.
	Because...
	Any number, any one of the goals is actually quite difficult to attain.
	You have to build a structure and systems that will move towards the goal, and you have to put the spending in place, and you have to evaluate the outcome.
	It's actually very difficult.
	You have to build the local apparatuses.
	So I asked the powers that be, why the hell there were 200 goals?
	And their answer was, well, each of the priorities has a constituency, and Somewhere, spread across countries or in a given country.
	And we don't want to offend anyone by rank ordering our priorities.
	And I thought, well, that's all well and good.
	Plus, the upside of that from a political perspective is that you get all the moral cachet of being concerned about everything that you would be concerned about if you were good.
	Without any of the responsibility for actually doing any of the difficult work and so you can go to COP26 or whatever the hell it is and posture on the world stage about your commitment to these wonderful goals and appeal to 200 different constituents and walk away while having agreed to spend a tremendous amount of money stupidly but shining at least in your own eyes and in the eyes of the press.
	So then I was looking around I thought well there must be someone somewhere sensible enough to understand that 200 goals is absurd And the only group that I could really find that had a method for rank ordering priorities was your team.
	And so do you want to explain exactly how you do that?
	And then we can progress with our discussion about what you think should be done?
	So you're absolutely right.
	Look, it's much easier for politicians to just promise everything to everyone because then they just seem like good guys and they don't actually make any decision.
	Of course they do in reality because every year you have a budget and you don't have infinite resources on your budget.
	So in your budget you actually show what it is that you really care for.
	And so it ends up being a few things that you focus on, but often without much concern about efficiency.
	So what we're trying to bring to the table is, in a sense, and that's what economists can do.
	We're basically helping, and I should just say I'm a pretend economist, I'm actually a political scientist, but I work with a lot of really, really smart economists.
	And they look at how much will it cost And how much good will it do?
	Remember, some things are very desirable, but really, really hard to do.
	So, you know, for instance, getting rid of corruption in general.
	I'll actually tell you we do have one good solution.
	But in general, corruption, huge problem.
	It costs about a trillion dollars a year or more for the world.
	But we don't know how to get rid of it.
	It's really hard to do because the systems that are needed to get rid of corruption are exactly the ones that are corrupt.
	Right.
	So it's really hard to do something about it.
	This has been a real problem as the former Soviet Union countries have tried to retool.
	Because even if you import Western structures, nobody trusts them because the corruption is so unbelievably widespread.
	The problem with corruption, of course, is that once it's instantiated, it manifests itself at every level of society.
	And so that's a good example of a low-resolution concept.
	Well, there's corruption.
	It's like, yeah.
	But now you've said very little by saying that, because the devil in that situation is definitely in the details.
	And so you might want to fight corruption, but that's not a plan.
	And so, yeah, and so we should also, so you set up teams of economists that would rank order the goals and then you averaged across the teams, which I also thought was brilliant methodologically, because you could argue that any given economist's analysis of both costs and benefits has a margin of error of some substantive amount, right?
	And because it's hard to assess and to forecast.
	But technically speaking, from the perspective of a social scientist, I would say that that's an unbeatable methodology, even though it's still going to produce a somewhat problematic end.
	Because you zoom in on where there's multidimensionally measured...
	Yeah.
	And at least in principle, you'd be ironing out the errors of any given team of economists.
	Hopefully, yes.
	Well, at least to the degree you can.
	Again, we're not trying to make the truth of the world, but we're just trying to make a much better resolution of what it is that we can do.
	So we try to identify what are things that we can actually do.
	Right, so they're practical.
	Works.
	And that we have good evidence for works at low cost with high benefits.
	And so what we're essentially doing is we provide, if you will, a menu for the world.
	So a menu typically comes with, you know, it tells you what you're going to get, how much you're going to get, a tiny pizza or a big pizza, and how much will it cost.
	And then, of course, you can make those decisions.
	So economists are not going to tell you, you should do this.
	Right.
	But basically, we're telling you, here is something that at very low cost can give you a lot of good food.
	How about that?
	So, on the same way, in the world order, we make a list of all the things, of all the things you'd like to do, where are really smart, or that is really, very effective policies that we know works that would help a lot of people at low cost.
	Yeah.
	Why don't we do that before we do the stuff that'll cost a lot but help very few people?
	Right.
	Well, we should talk a little bit about that as a fundamental presupposition, too, because there's a kind of utilitarianism there, which is that all things considered, in the absence of other compelling reasons, you should do what you can the most efficient way.
	Well, why?
	Well, because what efficiency means, because people might say, well, you know, some things are so important that it's worth spending the money on.
	It's like, yeah, but there's many things that are important.
	And unfortunately, when you spend, given that resources are not precisely infinite, when you spend money in one place, that means you're not spending it in another place.
	And so the...
	If you believe that you have 12 things to do that are good, or 169 things, you have to value efficiency from the moral perspective, because in principle, efficiency is precisely that which allows you to address more than you would have otherwise been able to manage.
	And otherwise, what, are you going to make an argument for inefficiency?
	Which is...
	It's weird, at least.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So this is...
	Well, I like this because it zeroed us in, your methodology.
	It also reduced a landscape of problems that was so diverse and disparate that there was no way anyone sensible could have possibly undertaken the enterprise.
	And then it's extraordinarily practical.
	And so...
	Also, the other thing that I found very striking was that in comparison to the amount of money we're already spending on all sorts of things, the amounts that your teams have been recommending are really rounding errors in the total cost.
	Let's say international, in the total world of international or national governance.
	But it's also demoralizing in some sense because you understand that we could do the 12 most important and efficient things and do a lot of good for a lot of people, especially the absolutely poor.
	And we could do that without really even noticing it.
	Noticing, yeah.
	Yeah, on the spending side.
	So that's incredibly optimistic, but the problem is that you've got to ask yourself, given that that's the case, what the hell have we been doing?
	Well, that's something we'll delve in today.
	So we're going to go through Bjorn's 12...
	Suggested projects and talk about their cost, but also about what they could do for people.
	And tell me if you think this is true.
	So imagine that there's a rule of thumb ethic that underlies the selection of these projects.
	We talked a little bit about efficiency, but I think the ethic is something like Well, if we could alleviate material poverty, absolute poverty, not relative poverty, but to start with, at least absolute poverty, enough for people to eat, make sure they have access to hygienic facilities, Make sure they're not inhaling indoor pollution to the point that they're dying.
	They're not starving.
	Their kids have some opportunity.
	There's some option for them to expand their temporal horizon across decades instead of focusing on the necessity for the next meal because that makes them impulsive, you might say, with regards to what they're willing to do on the environmental front.
	And so, at minimum, you're trying to raise the standard of living at the very bottom end.
	And you won't do that in a way that allows you to do that multiple ways.
	And that's kind of the overall ethical schema, I would say.
	I think it's what comes out of what we try to do.
	So we're basically saying, look...
	There's a lot of different things you can do in the world.
	As we know, there's 169 things.
	And, you know, there's literally thousands of different projects out there.
	We've tried to look at a lot of them and say, what do we have evidence for?
	And what are the costs?
	And so we've tried to estimate—and this is an impossible task, so we reasonably assume that we've covered the whole area—of saying, where can you get an enormous amount of good for every dollar or shilling or rupee spent?
	And what we find is, so we're looking at where can you spend a dollar and at least do $15 of good.
	This is a threshold that we've set, which basically means that all the things we're talking about are incredibly good things.
	Imagine if you could give a dollar to this one project and you could do at least $15.
	Well, we should also point out that's not an expense then, that's an investment.
	Well, it is an expense in the sense that, because if you've spent the dollar, you don't get $15 back.
	You get $15 of social benefits, typically in the poor world.
	You also mentioned that this is mostly for the world's poorer people, so we're looking at low and low-middle income countries.
	That's World Bank estimates, so it basically means that you live with less than, say, $13 per day, which is not very much.
	So this is a little more than half the world's population.
	So 4.1 billion people live in the low and low-middle-income countries.
	So that's everywhere from Malawi, a very, very poor country, to India, to Bangladesh, that's actually a fairly rich, lower-middle-income country.
	So what that tells you is, This is where the best investments are because that's where you can help the most people at very low cost.
	And they're the ones most in need.
	Absolutely.
	It'll cost a lot to make you a little better off, but it costs actually very, very little to make the world's poorest much better off.
	And so it also has this moral sense of that is how we should be prioritizing.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's the proper payment for privilege, you know, I would say, is once you have the economic wherewithal to be contemplating projects of the sort that we're describing, you also have the moral requirement to do that in a manner that's intelligent.
	And also, you might say, that would address the problems of the people in the most want first.
	Yes.
	And one of the things that we find doing these projects is that it's amazing, as you also pointed out, That we spend so much time focusing on some of these other things like, you know, plastic in the oceans and climate change and many other things.
	These are all worthy things, mind you, and a lot of people will argue that we should do them because they will help the world's poor.
	The problem is they'll help them very ineffectively, so for every dollar spent, They will only help them an infinitesimal part, whereas if we spend that dollar on some of these projects that we're going to be talking about, you can have an enormous impact right here, right now.
	So again, it's not to say that we shouldn't do all the other wonderful things.
	I'm simply making the argument, we should probably do this first.
	And so just to give you a sense of proportion, just to get a scale of this, the 12 solutions that we come up with, they will, in total cost, about—I'm giving you a rough estimate here because there's different ways to measure—it'll need about $35 billion a year.
	In funding, and that funding could come from rich people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates.
	It could come from our development agencies, USAID or GIZ or whatever.
	We're spending $175 billion in development aid every year, so surely we could afford $35 billion.
	This is, as you mentioned, a drop in the bucket.
	It really is a rounding error.
	If we spent that amount of money over this decade, We would every year save 4.2 million lives.
	This is 8% of everyone who dies in the world.
	We could avoid 8% of all death in this world.
	Of course, we won't do that indefinitely because people have to die, but we would postpone that.
	That would be an incredible boon for a lot of people and a lot of societies.
	And at the same time, we would generate economic benefits worth $1.1 trillion.
	Just to give you a sense of proportion of what that means, that means that we could almost make sure that every person in the poorer part of the world, so the 4.1 billion people that we talked about before, could get about $1 every day.
	Almost $1 every day, each person.
	So these projects that cost virtually nothing could save 8% of everyone who dies and get almost all people in the lower, in the poor half of the world, $1 a day.
	Okay, so I want to investigate something a little bit darker before we start our discussion about the projects per se.
	So one of the things that I see emerging on the...
	Chaotic and confused 169 goals front is an ethos that is also not precisely explicit, but that sort of lurks beneath the surface.
	And there are claims that go along with it.
	It might be that people who are listening think, well, this is all obvious.
	Obviously, we should spend money in the most efficient way.
	We should spend the least amount of money we have to spend.
	We should do it so that it does the most good.
	But...
	We should also understand that there are real resistances to this approach.
	And so one of the resistances that's implicit and sometimes explicit is the notion that, well, first of all, we're playing a zero-sum game in the world.
	So if some people are rich, other people have to be poor.
	There's not enough for everybody.
	And then, which I don't believe to be true at all, and economists generally don't buy as an argument.
	And then the next argument would be, well, let's say we could make poor people richer, But that's not sustainable because to support everybody in the world at the Western standard of living would take five Earths.
	I've heard that figure bandied about.
	And there are probably, you know, there are way too many people on the planet.
	In any case, there should only be 500 million or a Billion or maybe two billion if they lived, you know, in poverty.
	And so there's this notion that the planet is truly finite in some fundamental sense.
	There's definitely not enough for everyone.
	And there's no way that we can elevate the living standards of the poor because all that would mean is that we're going to use up all the available resources faster.
	So what do you think about...
	So first of all, on the serosome game, remember 200 years ago, we have good data for the last 200 years.
	200 years ago, almost every one of us We're poor.
	We're extremely poor.
	So we lived at less than what used to be called $1 a day.
	It was 95% of people.
	It was 90-95% of all people.
	This is a terrible world.
	There were a few people who were kings and dukes and those kinds of people.
	And then the rest of us were living in absolute poverty.
	We've pretty much eradicated most of that.
	Now it's only 10% that live less than a dollar a day.
	It's really $2.15 now.
	But, you know, so fundamentally, we can absolutely have a world that's much better, that's much richer, and one that's obviously much better for these people.
	Now, people are worried about, well, can we sustainably live on this planet?
	But what you have to remember is, this is not a question of whether we have the resources to it.
	Absolutely, we have the resources.
	When you hear this, five Earths, that is a very, very bad comparison.
	I get why they made it, but it basically assumes that because of climate change, it's almost entirely about climate change, because of climate change, which is a real problem, because we emit CO2, you have to plant forests.
	To soak up that extra amount of CO2. And if we all lived like Americans, then you would need five Earths.
	What they're really saying is you'd need five Earths of forest to plant.
	But that's the most inefficient way to get rid of CO2. A much smarter way would be to put up, I don't know, wind turbines and solar panels.
	You could also put up nuclear power plants.
	Well, yes, we could do that.
	We could have very, very little...
	So, actually, when you do the math, it turns out that this is just hokum.
	Yes, there is a problem.
	So, we will do well within one Earth, even if we were much richer, all of us, and even if there were more people, so, you know, about 10 billion people.
	Yes, there is problems with having 10 billion people, but having 10 billion rich people also means we can deal with most of these problems.
	So, the real problem is...
	If you're poor...
	That's the real pollution problem.
	Right, right.
	Or you pollute a lot.
	You cut down your forest to slash burn so you can grow some food for your kids.
	You'll have terrible indoor air pollution.
	You'll typically have very inefficient production.
	You will have all kinds of bad things.
	So what we really need, not just morally, to get people out of poverty and to get them to a good life, but also actually that's the only way we can get people to be so involved that they will want and they can afford.
	Right, right.
	Well, we should also, we also have to watch very carefully the terminology we use because when we start talking about making people rich, we need to really explain what that means.
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	When we go back 200 years and everybody's scrabbling around in the dirt, what that really means is that people's next meal is uncertain.
	And so is the sustainability of their shelter and the opportunities for them and their kids are extraordinarily limited.
	So when we're talking about wealth, we're not talking about, you know, cocaine and hookers in Vegas wealth.
	I was not talking about it, Alicia.
	Yeah, well, people, the thing is it brings up this specter of the 1920s spats-wearing capitalist who's like a complete libertine on his time off.
	And, you know, it's hyper-consumption wealth, but that's not what we're talking about at the low end of the world.
	We're talking about providing people with enough material security so that they can adopt a longer-term view...
	So that they can start to pay attention to what sort of planet their children and grandchildren might inhabit.
	And so that there's both reliable provision of food and shelter, basic healthcare, hygienic availability, and opportunity for their children.
	And so it's not exactly wealth we're after here.
	It's getting people away from zero.
	Absolutely.
	But also, the people who are watching this, but also everyone who's really worried about...
	That we're going to become these Libertines from the 1920s.
	Do they live like that?
	No, they don't.
	They live nice lives where they actually have heating in the winter and they have cooling in the summer.
	They have enough food.
	They don't have to worry about stuff.
	Their kids go to school.
	They have a nice life and they can go places and experience the world.
	Everyone obviously would like to have that same kind of life.
	And so this is not about absurd consumption or anything, but this is about actually being able to have a good life.
	Well, it's also, as you pointed out, it's also one of the things that struck me when I was doing my original research on this front 15 years ago was the overwhelming evidence, and Marian Tupi's group, HumanProgress.org, has done a nice job of delineating that, that There's actually a positive relationship between population growth above a certain level of standard of living, let's say, and more abundance.
	And what I've come to understand in the intervening time, and this is something that's very much worth taking apart too, is that we have this notion of natural resource.
	And that's always struck me as specious, eh?
	Because natural means it's sort of there at hand.
	The only real natural resource I can think of is air.
	Because all you have to do is breathe and it's there.
	But you still have to breathe, right?
	So there's still some effort involved.
	Okay, but when you start talking about even the next stage, which would be water, it's like, was water a natural resource?
	Well, Water is.
	Fresh water?
	Yeah, fresh water is a technological miracle, fundamentally.
	It takes a lot of industrial infrastructure and innovation to get fresh water to people.
	And of course, oil, petroleum, is barely a natural resource at all.
	I mean, we had petroleum forever.
	No one figured out what the hell to do with it until, what, about 1860?
	Something like that.
	And so now it's a natural resource, but that's only because smart people figured out how to use it.
	There's always this dynamic interplay between human ingenuity and governance structures and plenty.
	And one of the things I've really come to understand is that abundance depends on The integrity of the individual, the moral integrity of the individual, and the validity of the governance structure is far more than it does on natural resources.
	There's a zero-sum presumption in the natural resource discourse.
	That's just absolutely wrong.
	I mean, back in the early 1900s, for instance, iron is a big thing.
	We used to have just iron if it fell down as a meter, right?
	Right.
	Now pretty much everything we know is built with iron and steel.
	And back in 1900, Carnegie, the rich guy, worried immensely about the fact, because it's also important for military use, he worried that we were using up all the good iron and that there would be nothing left over for future generations.
	What were they going to do?
	How were they going to defend themselves?
	All that kind of stuff.
	But what he failed to remember is that when, sure, we use up the easily accessible and high-quality iron ore, so we have to dig deeper and we have to use worse iron ore.
	But we also have a lot more technology that makes it a lot easier to dig and utilize poor iron ore and get it out cheaper.
	That's what innovation means.
	So actually what's happened is that while we have used up the easily accessible iron ore, we have access to much, much more, much cheaper, much more effectively, and for all of humankind.
	And this is true for pretty much all resources.
	Well, there was a famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon.
	Ehrlich wrote the population bomb for everyone who's listening.
	He's still beating the same damn drum.
	Ehrlich and the Club of Rome types back in the 60s prognosticated that by the year 2000, there'd be mass starvation.
	And not only that, that the price of commodities would spike dramatically as scarcity, inevitable scarcity, kick in.
	So Ehrlich and the biological types who think his way think in Malthusian terms.
	And Malthus was an English thinker.
	He was a pastor, if I remember correctly, who posited that...
	All things being equal, natural populations would expand to the point where they started to overconsume the available local resources and then collapse.
	So that's like the yeast in a Petri dish model of humanity.
	And there's a couple of problems with that, is that it rarely works that way in the natural world because of checks and balances that emerge in ecosystems.
	But even more importantly...
	The idea that we are best modeled as yeast in a zero-sum Petri dish is, let's call it a bit presumptuous, if that.
	Alfred North Whitehead, great thinker, pointed out that the reason that human beings think is so that we can let our ideas die instead of us.
	And so what that means is that what human beings have done is replace biological death with You die when you do the same old stupid thing too many times.
	So you have to either die and then new organisms emerge that do something different, or you have to shift the way you do things, which is kind of a virtual death.
	And that's what thought and discourse allows, is we can stop doing stupid things and we can start doing more efficient things, and there doesn't seem to be any real upper limit to that.
	And I think the evidence for that is, well, first of all, Ehrlich had that famous bet with Julian Simon, who was an economist, who said, all right, you can pick the basket of commodities, and I'll bet you, this was in the 60s, that by the year 2000, you can pick the arbitrary date— That those commodities will be less expensive, not more.
	And that there won't be instances of mass starvation, except unless they're politically produced.
	And of course, Simon famously collected in the year 2000, because what happened, even though Ehrlich picked the basket of commodities, was that the average price of the commodities had gone down, like...
	So substantially that Eric had to admit that he lost the bet.
	And that hasn't stopped happening, you know?
	I mean, I'm old enough now so that I can remember when everyone was concerned about overpopulation.
	And, you know, at that point in the 60s, we were still, human beings were still trying to get a grip on the fact that we were sort of now operating at a planetary level.
	And it wasn't obvious how much damage we might do, you know?
	There was reason for debate, at least.
	But...
	Now we have 8 billion people rather than the four we had in the year 2000, and the data is quite clear that as population has increased and governance structures improved, especially since the Soviet Union collapsed, that all that's happened fundamentally is we have more brain power and everyone's far better off than they were.
	We certainly have more technology, and that's basically what makes it possible for us to be more people and be better off and possibly actually leave with less environmental impact.
	So one of the things we have to realize is there is a real environmental issue.
	But fundamentally, yes, but you're only going to fix them If you stop people from worrying about where's my next meal going to come from, are my kids actually going to be well-educated, so on.
	So it's about making sure that we actually pull people out of poverty, put them on a path to prosperity, and then we will also fix a lot of the environmental problems.
	Well, that bromide...
	Think globally, act locally.
	That's a bromide that in some ways manifests itself on the motivational front for environmentalists.
	It's like, well, there's some truth in that, is what we're doing with this conceptual scheme is thinking globally.
	The global scheme is, well, how do we ameliorate absolute poverty?
	Well, what's so wonderful about that, and this is what struck me when I first reviewed the literature, was that if we concentrated on ameliorating absolute poverty, instead of making the planet worse, we would make the planet better by the standards of the radical environmentalists themselves.
	And I thought, oh, that's so cool!
	We could have our cake and eat it too, and so could everybody else.
	And you think, well, that's too good to be true.
	And so then you do the micro-analysis, which is what you've done, and you find out, well, not only could we do that, we should do it, and we could do it so cheaply that no one would even notice that we were doing it.
	It would just mean we'd stop spending money on some of the, well, possibly not even that.
	We could keep spending all the money we're spending stupidly and do this.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So let's delve into the details.
	So what we've done is basically look over all of the sustainable development goals and look at where are the really good buys.
	Where can you actually do a lot of good for little money?
	And so we've come up with these 12 things.
	So these are 12 different teams of economists who've looked at each one of these.
	They're the specialists, the best people in their area to look at How much would this cost?
	How much good would it do?
	And what would it mean that they're the best people?
	How did you identify them?
	And how would you justify your claim that you have the right people working on this?
	So I think the short answer is if you ask people in the area, are these some of the best people?
	They're obviously not.
	Yes, yes.
	They would all say, yeah, these are some of the best people.
	They're not the only people who could have done this, but they're some of the best people who are doing this, who have published widely in the period literature.
	They're all at the famous universities, and they are the ones who set the debate on how to do this.
	Okay, so there'd be a consensus on their expertise, even if they'd be replaceable to some degree.
	Oh, sure.
	And look, again, our point is not, so I'm going to tell you about these things and tell you for every dollar we spend, you'll do $48 of good.
	In this particular case, you'll do this much good.
	Of course, it's not likely to be $48 in real life.
	It might be $50.
	It might even be $60.
	$20 to $60.
	We don't care all that much.
	It's going to be a lot of good.
	But obviously, we try to make the best estimates that we can.
	And so, for instance, so let me just get started on one of these things.
	So let me take maternal and newborn health.
	So huge issue area.
	So every year, about 300,000 moms die in childbirth.
	About 2.4 million kids die in their first 28 days on this planet.
	Now, it's come down dramatically.
	It used to be much, much worse.
	So, maternal death used to be about 100 women who gave birth would die in childbirth.
	This was even true in rich countries some 200 years ago.
	Rich women had higher risk because they would go to a hospital and there they would be treated by this doctor.
	By filthy surgeons.
	By this doctor who just chopped off a leg somewhere else and then came in and helped.
	Called that corporal fever?
	Wasn't that it?
	Yes, corporal fever.
	It was one of the big things.
	Jesus, dismal.
	And this was one of the reasons why we caught on to, oh, wait, this might actually be something about they need to wash their hands, that kind of thing.
	That was Semmelweis, wasn't it?
	Yes, Semmelweis.
	Who was hounded into insanity by the people who objected to his germ theory.
	Yes, yes.
	And likewise, it used to be that almost a fifth of every child that was born died within the first 28 days.
	So now it's, yes, 20%.
	Now it's only 2%.
	So we're much better off.
	There's a lot of human misery embedded in that statistic.
	There's an incredible amount of human misery if you look back, which of course is why the world is a much better place, but we can make it even better.
	So every two minutes, so just this little conversation we've had here, one mom has died and nine children has died in the first 28 days of their lives.
	Yeah, why don't we do something about it?
	Turns out that it's incredibly cheap to do something about.
	How would you go about doing that?
	Well, fundamentally, it's about a very simple thing, namely make sure that more women come into giving institutional birth.
	Now the doctors actually wash their hands, so that's a good idea.
	And that means, especially when there are problems, They will have an opportunity to get that problem fixed.
	That means that if you have preeclampsia or eclampsia, that basically means that you get very high blood pressure.
	If you're a woman, just around your birth, you may very well go into seizure.
	You may actually die.
	And the doctors or the nurses there will be able to help you.
	So there's a whole range of things that the World Health Organization recommends.
	It's called Basic Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care.
	By friends, it's called BMONC. And so we're saying we should have BMOC and we should have family planning.
	It turns out that those two things by themselves could save an enormous amount both of kids and moms.
	So what does that mean?
	Does that mean the provision of more hospitals or does it mean the provision of units that specialize in maternal care?
	So it would have cost because you need to have more institutional facilities.
	These are not the hospitals that you're imagining.
	They're very, very cheap institutions, right?
	They would be basically buildings with some power, and you need some nurses.
	Not so many doctors.
	This is very, very low, fairly simple stuff.
	And then you need some very basic things.
	And I'll just give you one example.
	The World Health Organization has a whole list of things.
	But one thing, so when newborns come out in rich countries, about 85% of them will breathe right away, which of course is what they should be doing.
	10% won't, so that's why you need to dunk them in the back and get them going, and then they will actually do something.
	Sorry, I should just...
	That's very bad.
	No problem.
	So then you need to dunk them, but the last 5%, They don't start breathing themselves.
	You actually need to have a mask over them and give them— So, 5%.
	You need to have this little mask.
	You need to get them some— It's just a hand pump.
	Well, in the poor world, in the rich world, you have a more expensive machine that does this, right?
	But the fundamental point is you actually need to have some intervention.
	If you have that hand pump, so only about 50% of all hospitals in the poor world has that, it costs $65.
	It will save about 25 lives, along with the cost of the nurse.
	It'll possibly cost about $5 to save that.
	How many of those kids that don't breathe well suffer from anoxia and then are permanently crippled as well?
	There is a little risk, but it's actually a very small risk because you go from being fine to being crippled to die.
	And typically if you don't get...
	So basically it's a death sentence.
	It's a death sentence more.
	Otherwise you'd have to run and get the mask, but a little too late.
	So it's mostly just that these kids will die.
	But we can, for very little money, make sure that doesn't happen.
	What are the impediments to having, like, why is that being done already?
	That's a very good question.
	And this is true for all the 12 things that we're going to be talking about.
	It's basically because this is not top priority.
	So if you look, you know, and look, I'm going to be a little facetious, but only a little facetious.
	The people who rule a country, they're typically old men.
	What do they worry about?
	They worry about cancer.
	They worry about heart disease.
	That's the kind of thing that they worry about themselves.
	Women are not really, they're not a high-priority issue.
	Births are not a high-priority issue.
	Especially poor women.
	Except, especially...
	Because there's too many of them anyways.
	And also, if you think about it, I don't know if you've ever seen that in the Monty Python meaning of life.
	They have the machine that says...
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's wonderful.
	If you haven't seen it, you should definitely go see that.
	So it's basically doctors like expensive machines that are exciting and that they can talk about at conferences.
	This little hand pump that saves 25 lives Not exciting.
	We've seen one before.
	It is also very difficult for politicians to take credit for prevention.
	Exactly.
	Which is real.
	I mean, you can be cynical about that, but, you know, it's good to do good, but it's also good to reward those who are seen to be doing good.
	And when you prevent something, it just doesn't happen.
	And so you can't really take credit for it, right?
	You can't point to it and say...
	Well, I suppose with the kids that would be somewhat easier, but generally that's a problem on the prevention front, right?
	But you can't see it once it's happened, so you're absolutely right.
	But just to give you a sense of proportion, so we estimate this will cost about $4.9 billion a year.
	That's not nothing, but it's a very, very small, as we talked about, rounding error.
	A large part of this cost is actually women's time because we need to get them into hospitals.
	So they It'll take more of their time.
	So the real financial cost is about $2.8 billion.
	But the benefits are, and these are just mind-blowingly big, it means that we could avoid 161,000 women dying every year.
	161,000 women dying in childbirth.
	We could avoid 1.2 million kids dying every year.
	So that's all those fragmented families.
	That's all those kids who lose their mothers.
	It's not just 161,000 deaths.
	I mean, there's a cascade of terrible problems that emerge from that.
	So those are young women who are in the prime of their life, mostly speaking.
	A large number of them are going to have other kids, and so those kids are going to be left bereft of their mother.
	And, of course, then there's the family breakup that comes along with the fact that the young woman has died and the tremendous grief of the parents.
	I mean, so that's a cataclysmum.
	That's going to involve millions of people, not the mere 160,000.
	And that can all be prevented.
	So we're basically saying, for one dollar, you could develop, and this, of course, is where economists come across as crude, because we actually put a value of saving a human life.
	This is a very long conversation about how you do that, but we do that constantly in human societies.
	We decide whether we put in roundabout or not.
	A roundabout will save people, but it also costs money and also slows down traffic.
	So how much do we want to do that?
	We make those decisions all the time.
	Well, that's always that prioritization.
	Yes.
	And so we simply, you know, make that decision explicit and we take all the costs, all the benefits.
	It turns out for every dollar you spend, you will do $87 of social good in the developing world.
	Why aren't we doing this?
	This would be credibly cheap to do an amazing amount of good.
	That's just one, that's just the first thing So have projects of the sort that you envision that are precisely targeted to this problem, where have they begun to manifest themselves already?
	There must be countries that are walking down this road already.
	I know we have hospitals in the West, obviously, but I'm wondering specifically, After your team has highlighted the fact that this is a possibility and has this economic benefit, are there jurisdictions that have taken up the challenge?
	I haven't seen that strongly.
	I mean, so clearly, in most policy areas, they will say, oh, and we should also do good for women that give birth.
	They also vote, so you also want to make sure that they will vote for you.
	So it's also one of the things that you talk about.
	So we're just coming out with this research right now, so people still haven't heard about it, I think fundamentally what we're trying to do is to set the agenda so that people will actually see, oh, these 12 things are really, really good.
	I want to ask that of my politician if you live in the poor part of the world.
	I want to ask that of my development agency.
	I want to ask that of my rich position.
	Why aren't we doing this?
	To do this.
	So we're simply...
	I'm, you know, fundamentally, I'm a very optimistic person, but I don't expect that we're just sort of, you know, going to make the whole world right.
	What we tend to say is that we're simply putting forth these 12 amazing ideas, and hopefully by putting those out, we'll at least get, I don't know, Six of them?
	Done?
	And that would be an amazing opportunity.
	Well, and you've got to not be cynical.
	I mean, the fact is, it's not being a straightforward matter for people, all of us, to sort out the panoply of problems that confront us.
	And 169 goals isn't 10,000.
	It's already restricted to some degree.
	Restricting that further has all sorts of political and conceptual difficulties.
	And then It's also useful to understand that, you know, on the timescale that you and I would operate on, if it took 15 years to make any of this happen, that would seem like a long time, but 15 years is a drop in the ocean on any reasonable historical timescale.
	And so it's possible that these sorts of things could happen comparatively quickly by historical standards, even though they look like they're crawling along to us.
	Yeah.
	But this wouldn't take that long.
	It would take a couple of years.
	So this is really something that's doable very, very quickly.
	It would probably not be doable in one year, but it could be done in, say, five years.
	And do you think the man or woman power necessary to make this possible with regards to the training of nurses and doctors and so forth?
	Oh, absolutely.
	So there's plenty of nurses available for this.
	This is not a huge strain.
	We're talking about much less than 1% of the nurse force.
	So this is absolutely doable.
	And again, so the whole point here is this is something that our development agencies could do.
	This is something that, you know, Elon Musk or Bill Gates could help fund.
	I'm not saying that, you know, I'm not saying that they should.
	It could be crowdfunded for that matter.
	Yes, but, you know, we should get everybody involved in saying, look, let's spend these, you know, that was $2.8 billion, but, you know, the total bill of all the 12 is $35 billion.
	Still a very, very low amount compared to pretty much everything else.
	And do you think you guys have detailed out, so I was just, this is just flashing through my mind as we were talking, imagine that you had a donor that came up with the amount of money that was necessary to make this a possibility.
	Do you think it would be possible, do you know which levers to pull?
	Which, and strings to pull to make this actually happen in reality?
	Like, has it been detailed out at the level of plan?
	So, it's almost been done at that level.
	So, first of all, I'm not going to get the money.
	We're not, I'm an academic in that sense.
	We've mapped out – so in this particular case, you would engage with – obviously, you would start with some of the big countries, India, Nigeria, those kinds of places that have lots of women that would benefit from getting more B-Monk, that would benefit from getting more of these opportunities, and you would engage with the governments and say, look – You could probably do this at this cost.
	We'll give you this much money.
	Then you'll build these facilities.
	You've got this many women in.
	You'd set up those kinds of contracts with standards, and you'd see if they could actually work.
	And some of these governments will somewhat fail.
	Yeah.
	What we do is we take realistic costs.
	So we're actually assuming some sort of failure, you know, reasonable failure.
	But some governments will just turn out to be unreliable and then probably not do that there.
	But yes, you could do that and you could do most of this.
	And obviously, I'd love to help.
	But this is, I'm not a guy that goes out and makes sure that we can build hospitals.
	But I would love to help with, there's a lot of people who know how to do it.
	Right.
	Okay, so you talked about provision of respiratory emergency technology.
	What other services have to be delivered to pregnant and birthing mothers and new infants?
	So it's about medication, so you can deal with, as I mentioned, eclampsia and preeclampsia.
	It's about kangaroo care, so it's about getting...
	It's a very, very simple thing.
	You just need to know that you need to do it.
	So you need to dry up the baby and put it on the mother's skin.
	We know that that actually makes the baby much less likely to be sick and possibly also Stunned it later on.
	Yeah, so it'll just simply thrive more.
	Placenta care.
	There's a lot of other things.
	And again, I'm not a doctor, so I read these and my eyes slightly glaze over.
	But it's a lot of simple things that nurses know how to do.
	And it's a lot of the technological opportunities.
	So it's very much about you need a cesarean, for instance, that you can actually have the expertise available.
	That's why we need them in the institution rather than giving birth at home.
	So these are very, very simple things.
	Very cheap and incredible benefit.
	So that's just the first one.
	Okay, so that's number one.
	Another 11 things to talk about.
	So let me take another thing which we talked about with nutrition.
	So nutrition, obviously- And is this number two?
	This is actually two and three.
	Oh, this is two and three.
	Because there are two different ways to deal with this.
	Obviously, for people who are actually hungry, so there's about 769 million people who are hungry right now.
	Which is a lot of people, but a much smaller proportion of people than there once was.
	Absolutely.
	So back in 1928, so almost 100 years ago, the League of Nations estimated that at least two-thirds of humanity was permanently starving.
	Two-thirds.
	More than two-thirds.
	So that'd be five billion people now.
	Well, yeah, so, yeah, more than, yeah, that's probably right.
	So it's an outstanding number of people.
	Now it's 10%.
	That's still way too high, and we want to do something better.
	It's a lot better than 66%, though.
	It's a lot better, yes.
	So we have come a long way, but there's still much to do.
	So there are two ways to do this.
	One is, and I'm going to tell you about that one first, this is the long-term view.
	This is basically about how do we make agriculture better?
	So agriculture produce all the food and basically the The way that you make development happen is that we stop all working on farms.
	You know, remember in rich countries, one or two percent of all of us make all the food.
	Isn't that amazing?
	I'm so happy that they're out there doing that for me because I'm not a farmer.
	I wouldn't know how to do that.
	Even though we're trying to do everything we can to stop them at the moment.
	Yes.
	But, you know, fundamentally, the smart thing is that we have a few percent of people doing all the farming and then everybody else does something else productive.
	That's how we got rich.
	And, you know, Malawi, it's still about 80% of the population that are farmers, of the working population.
	So what do you think about the objections?
	There's romantic objections on that front, constantly, that it would be better to keep the local landholder on his farm and that there's something wrong with both industrialization and urbanization and the cities are blight on the landscape.
	I mean, what do you make of the romantic arguments of that sort?
	I think it's wonderful that people are now so rich that they can decide that they want to go out and live their life as farmers again.
	I think that's wonderful and fine and people are absolutely welcome to do that.
	But we also know that most people won't do it.
	Most people actually prefer to just have other people produce their food for them.
	And so this is the opportunity of an industrialized society that we actually have a very efficient society where people are so rich they can afford to go back in time, if you will.
	That's fine, but most of us are not going to do that.
	And they're only doing that in a false way anyways, in some real sense.
	Sure, sure.
	Because the entire industrial landscape is around them to sustain them in that effort.
	And yes, so there's this wonderful guy who tried to do everything for himself, and it turns out that's really, really hard.
	He spent about a year making a toaster It's really, really hard to do, you know, just simple stuff.
	And it was terrible.
	I saw a picture of it.
	It was, you know, like, oh my God.
	This is not how we do things.
	We do things by specializing.
	You know, you do one thing, I do one thing.
	You know, we're all better off by being specialized.
	We'll get to that part of the solution as well.
	But fundamentally, how do we make agriculture produce more?
	Well, there's a lot of things.
	You could get better irrigation.
	You could get better, more fertilizer.
	You could get people better educated.
	It turns out that that's very hard, and they're not very well-functioning.
	So, for instance, irrigation, it's very expensive, so it'll probably deliver a couple of dollars back on the dollar.
	It's not a bad idea, but they don't work all that well.
	There's one thing, though, that works incredibly well.
	Making seeds better.
	Because even if you don't have good access to markets or to irrigation or you have corruption, all that kind of stuff, if this seed comes and it produces more food when you plant it, it sort of comes out automatically.
	Or if it's more drought-resistant or more salt-resistant.
	So remember, this was the first Green Revolution back in the 1960s and 70s.
	This was Norman Borlaug, who later got a Nobel Prize for basic...
	And deserved it.
	Totally deserved it.
	He is one of the few people on the planet who can put in a CV, he saved a A billion people's lives.
	How amazing is that to be able to put on your CV? And, you know, I just think it's so amazing.
	He basically made, you know, we had these long variants of wheat and corn and rice that would grow very long and then have a few seeds up here.
	What he basically found was if you make it grow lower, it uses less of its energy on the stock, and so there will be more stuff on the, I'm not sure, the kernels, right?
	So there will be more food on them.
	The ratio of kernel to stock.
	You can see I'm not a farmer, right?
	So, you know, fundamentally what that did was it made food much more available.
	This is what saved India and many other places around the world.
	But most of this was focused on rich world food.
	So, you know, wheat and corn or maize and rice.
	We still need to focus a lot more on all the other local things that you and I probably never eat, maybe haven't even heard of, yams, sorghum, these kinds of things.
	So we'd find the 10 or 15 base food stocks, whatever they are, and then aim at something like a 10% improvement or a 15% improvement.
	Exactly.
	And we know we can do that.
	How do we know that?
	So SCIAR, the research groups that actually did the first Green Revolution, constantly do this, but they do this with fairly little money, and so little money translates into little efficiency gain.
	We know that if you spend more money, we have lots of research doing that.
	Again, we work with some of the best researchers in the area who've documented in the past how much money do you put through, and then how much more gain do you get in agricultural output.
	So how about the argument, well, if we fed more mouths more efficiently, all that would happen is that we'd have many more mouths to feed in the future.
	People will make that argument, but really what happens, and we see this, of course this requires us to see development in all kinds of other areas.
	But, you know, so women need to get more education.
	They actually decide, I'd rather have an education than a lot of kids.
	If women have more opportunity to do businesses, they'll do business rather than have a lot of kids.
	And we do this in a lot of different ways.
	If my kids survive more, I don't need to have as many.
	Right, right.
	So what we really see is we start, oh, I don't have to work as hard on the farm.
	I can start my business on the side.
	Eventually I'll sell my farm.
	Some people will start doing the farming and others will go to the city.
	This is how you get development.
	Yeah, well, one of the rules seems to be that as you increase the degree to which people feel long-term security, and this is especially true for women, you increase the amount of effort they will put in per child and you decrease the total number.
	number of children.
	That could in itself become a problem at some point, but at least it is a rejoinder to the people who think, well, if you put more agar in the Petri dish, you're just going to get the yeast proliferating faster.
	And That isn't what seems to happen at all.
	And it's also the case, and everyone listening should know this, is that all the reasonable estimates for human population indicate that we're going to peak out at somewhere between 9 billion and 10.
	And then God only knows what will happen after that, or even if we last that long.
	But it's clear, at least it's clear to me, and I think it's clear to you, that We can sustain 9 billion people on the planet indefinitely if we had a clue.
	And so the notion that we're going to multiply ourselves up to something like 100 billion and just eat the planet right to the bedrock is...
	There's no evidence whatsoever that that's going to occur.
	And plenty of evidence to the contrary.
	Yes.
	So...
	Yeah, so fundamentally, this absolutely just means that we can stop having kids being really malnourished, that we can stop having as much hunger on the planet, and that we can start having people being better off.
	So what this would actually mean, and this is what the model shows, is that we, on average, would avoid about 133 million people being hungry.
	So this doesn't fix everything.
	Right, so that's about 25% of the people who are starving.
	Yeah, it's a little less than that, but obviously that would be coming down because people get richer, but it's about 15-20%.
	But, and this is the main part of the benefit, it will mean that farmers can produce more food Which is great for farmers.
	They will actually get more money.
	But it also means the price for each of one of these foods go down, which matters a lot more.
	They can use less land.
	Yes.
	Or eventually will use less land.
	Per unit of food.
	Oh, absolutely.
	And what that means is that People who live in the cities will have to pay less for their food.
	That means they can buy more food so they can actually feed their kids, and eventually they can also spend more money on education and all the other things that matter.
	So if you look at that whole cost, so what we're estimating is the cost is about $5.5 billion a year.
	And that would be primarily to research enterprises?
	This would totally be for research enterprises, so it would be For the SCIAR institutions.
	And that is what?
	These are the international organizations that have been around since the first Green Revolution that are basically consisting a lot of plant researchers.
	I'm not quite sure exactly what their terminology are.
	Are they agronomists?
	Probably.
	And they're the guys who do all the different kinds of seed varieties.
	Can they be more salt resistant, more drought resistant?
	More vitamin A in rice.
	All that kind of stuff.
	And then we would be giving it to national research organizations so they are better clued into what specifically does this particular nation do?
	So we start making that a priority like we've made investigation into climate change a priority.
	We say, well, no, we're going to shift We're going to shift the moral spotlight onto food development, and the reason for that is to ameliorate absolute poverty, and there's nothing in that but benefit, economic and otherwise, and it's not expensive.
	And look, we don't even need to do a lot of spotlight.
	This is $5.5 billion a year.
	This is a rounding area in pretty much everything we talk about.
	So that's 50 cents for everybody on the planet per year.
	About approximately.
	So it's, well, it's, yeah, 75 cents or something like that, yeah.
	Anyway, so it's very, very little money, and it really means that you would get $184 billion in benefits, both for producers, for the farmers, and for the consumers, for the city dwellers.
	So it's about 30, 30, 40 to 1.
	So you'd get 33.
	$33 back on every dollar.
	And you'd save 133 million people from hunger.
	How is that not one of our top priorities?
	Well, that's a good question.
	How is it not?
	And I think it's simply because it's kind of boring.
	It doesn't come across as one of those heroic things that just say...
	Why not?
	It should.
	Well, it's strange, eh?
	Because obviously some of it's ignorance, right?
	You have to...
	Zero in on the right priorities, and then you have to do the economic analysis.
	And not many people have done that, and so some of it is that we just didn't know.
	And maybe that's, God only knows how much of it that is.
	It might be a lot.
	And it's also possible that We also haven't solved the marketing problem, right?
	Because, you know, one of the things I've learned in the repeated businesses that I've established, and this was hard-won knowledge, was that the good idea and the product are like 5% of the problem.
	The communication about the good idea and the product is like 95% of the problem.
	And part of the reason for that, you might be cynical about that and say, well, that's all sales and marketing.
	It's like, no, it's communication because...
	Especially if your idea is new and radical, people don't even know it exists.
	And how the hell are people going to purchase it if they don't know about it?
	And so, I guess part of what we've been working on too is, well, exactly how do you go about marketing this and how do you make it an adventure?
	And the adventure is something like, well, you know...
	Especially for young people, they have a messianic urge that emerges in late adolescence and runs into early adulthood when they're trying to sort out their lives.
	They want a project and they want a vision that they can be involved in that does have some larger scale social significance.
	This seems to me to be an exciting vision.
	It's like, well, how about we don't have any...
	Direly poor people.
	And then we see how that goes.
	And obviously that means, well, we need to make sure that babies don't die when they're born and neither do their mothers.
	And then once they're born, well, how about we provide them with some food?
	And if we can do that in a way...
	This is also a way of getting rid of the resistances.
	It's like, well, if you can improve the seed stock so that crops are more pesticide-resistant, or more pest-resistant, which you can do, then you can use less pesticide.
	You can increase the yield per acre, and so that uses less farmland.
	It's like, why wouldn't the greens be absolutely 100% on board with this as well if they could drop the zero-sum presupposition and, you know, the anti-extra mouse-to-feed idea?
	It's like, well, we serve women when they're the most vulnerable, and now we serve children when they're the most vulnerable, and there's no downside to that.
	There's just upside.
	So that sounds like a perfectly good adventure to me.
	And I think that is exactly, that's also what I'm trying to do here on this podcast, that we're actually trying to get people enthusiastic about it.
	I'm also writing about this in 35 papers around the world, and I'm writing a book about this.
	So I'm trying to get that exact excitement.
	It doesn't mean we shouldn't also focus on other problems.
	But simply, we're saying, why don't we do this first?
	And what's the book that you just referred to?
	So the book will be called Best Things First.
	Best Things First, yeah.
	So it's about these 12 amazing ideas that can basically fix a lot of problems, that can make the life much better for the world's poorest, and it can also fix our global problems.
	When does that come out, do you think?
	Sustainable development goals.
	So in the next month and a half.
	Okay, okay.
	And so it's the end of February right now, so it'll be like mid-April?
	Mid-April.
	Mid-April, something like that.
	So everybody can, best things first, you guys can keep an eye out for that.
	But, you know, I'll make sure that I mention it continually too.
	Brilliant.
	Yeah, yeah.
	The other thing for nutrition, so obviously it's great to say we're going to make much better food for you guys in 20 years.
	But if you're hungry right now, it kind of doesn't help, right?
	So we're also looking at how you actually get food right now.
	So the sort of tendency is to say, well, we should just hand out food.
	It turns out that that's very prone to corruption.
	It's fairly expensive.
	It's hard to decide who should actually get...
	It's hard on the local farmers?
	Yes.
	If you hand it out for free, it actually...
	It generates a lot of negative feedbacks for farmers.
	So what we're looking at are the effective ways.
	So one effective way, or probably the most effective way, is by realizing that the most important years when you need food are the first, what they call, the first thousand days.
	So the nine months in the mom and the first two years.
	Because that's where your brain is being developed.
	That's basically where the tracks for the rest of your life is being laid.
	Right.
	And so right now, almost everyone in the world, almost all pregnant moms, get folic acid and iron.
	That's good because that actually avoids anemia and some birth defects.
	But we could do much more.
	So what we're investigating, this is the World Health Organization's recommendation, but there's another one that's underway that shows that you could actually replace this pill With another pill that has a lot more vitamins, so basically vitamin A and B1, B2, B6, B12, and on and on.
	So 13 more things.
	What that would do, it would cost very little.
	It's already being produced, so it's basically switching out one pill for the other, and it would cost very little, but it would mean that the mom would be less likely to give birth either with low birth weight or early birth, both of which have negative consequences down the Cascading expenses and decrease in eventual productivity.
	Exactly.
	And likewise, calcium, those are big tablets.
	They're more costly.
	And we're not giving to most pregnant moms.
	We should.
	And that would also save a lot of children from being born with low birth weight.
	It turns out that if you do this, you could probably do about $30 back in the dollar for about $300 million.
	Then at the same time, we're also investigating there's a way to give more food to kids at low cost, which is if you tell moms That it's a great idea to feed your child well.
	You'd imagine that most moms would know this, but actually, they lack the knowledge of how you feed them well.
	We see a lot of kids that, even in well-placed families, that are still not well-fed.
	And how would you define well-fed in this context?
	So it's a question of saying that you have high stunting rates.
	So that's one way of measuring that you're not as tall as you should be compared to your age.
	It's one of the best, simplest ways of measuring.
	We know that if you're stunted, there's a good chance that you're also going to get less developed and hence you'll be less productive in your life.
	Yeah, well, if you're stunted, because brain development is so complex and so energy and resource expensive compared to the rest of physiological tissue, that if you're stunted, In the broad sense, you're also going to be stunted neurologically.
	And even small decrements in cognitive ability, which is directly related to neurological integrity, have walloping effects on long-term productivity.
	You might think, well, productivity isn't everything.
	It's like, well, First of all, that's debatable.
	And second of all, okay, perhaps it's not spiritual development, although it probably is.
	But all things considered, why wouldn't you want people to be more efficient in the use of their labor rather than less efficient?
	And it also shows the limits of what it means to be an economist, because we're only looking at it the way of saying, okay, so you become smarter, that means you become more productive, that means you get a higher income.
	Right.
	We look at that higher income.
	But clearly, you being smarter is probably something that also means that you will have a better life in so many other ways.
	Well, that's actually clearer.
	The relationship between well-being and cognitive power is pretty positive.
	Well, not merely...
	Not least because if you have higher general cognitive ability, you tend just to be more successful at everything you do.
	And the reason for that fundamentally is because you can process more units of information per unit of time.
	And so obviously that's better because it's tied into the very definition of better.
	Yes, and at least, again, most of the people that we're debating with, most of the people who are watching this podcast...
	Would probably not want to say, oh, I'd actually think it would be better if you were less.
	Right, if you're a little more stunted.
	Shorter people have a smaller carbon footprint.
	Anyway, so we estimate this will cost about $1.4 billion in total, all these things we just talked about, and it'll generate benefits about $35 billion a year.
	And so when you're educating women, what are you telling them exactly?
	So you're basically, you have a...
	Community health worker that comes out, visit the woman.
	So she has a lot of people in the same neighborhood.
	She'll come out, visit the woman for half an hour, go through what is it that you feed your child.
	Maybe you should feed it less of the, oh, are you giving sugar all this early?
	No, that's not a good idea.
	You should do more of this.
	So it's just basic.
	It's very, very basic stuff.
	And then she comes and visits nine times.
	And we've estimated what's the cost of that.
	And this is based on a lot of different studies that have shown that you actually get less stunning when you do more of this teaching.
	Now, the women also have to pay for the food because you're assuming that they have that extra capacity, but the food is still incorporated in the cost of our calculation.
	But the beautiful thing is we don't actually have to pay for the food.
	We only have to pay for the education of it.
	So we don't have to worry about...
	So, well, because that's by design, you could have one where you also hand out the food, but that becomes much harder and you get more corruption.
	But if you just do the education, you get less benefits, but you get much less cost and much less corruption.
	So I'm simply saying, So it's partly a redistribution of available resources at the micro level.
	It's only a redistribution.
	It's simply telling, especially the moms, you can feed your kid better.
	That will be great for your kid.
	And the moms will respond partly by saying, okay, I'm going to spend a little less at the cinema and give them a little more food.
	I'm joking.
	I don't know what they're going to do with.
	But fundamentally, that means at very low cost, but we are incorporating the cost that she's now spending on the food for a child, but she does it very much more effectively than we could ever have done.
	So you're really looking at interventions that are as minimal as possible, that produce the fewest Cascading negative consequences and that leverage.
	We're not looking at the cheapest ones, but we're looking for the most effective ones, right?
	So that will often be things that cost fairly little, that have very little corruption potential and inefficient potential.
	For instance, if you hand out food, so I saw this when I visited with the food minister in India.
	You know, it's politically very advantageous to say, I'm going to give out food.
	But everybody kind of know by now that what that actually means is you're going to give someone a lot of money to buy some food and hand it out to the poor.
	They're going to take a lot of the money.
	They're going to use some of it for food.
	Yeah.
	And then they'll buy the worst food that you could possibly get.
	So you end up with these incredibly almost unedible biscuits that unless you're really, really hungry, you're just not going to eat it.
	Right, right.
	So there's a lot of loss in this.
	Whereas, of course, if you just tell the woman, you should feed your kid better and you should possibly give him- And this is what it means.
	Yes.
	Then you're more likely to actually have the woman make sure she actually buys this, but she buys it cheaply and she feeds her- Right, and you leave that decision-making power in her hands, too, which is also appropriate.
	If you're looking at, what, efficient use of distributed resources.
	It's not so top-down that way.
	Exactly.
	Right.
	So those are the first three.
	Okay, yeah.
	The first three solutions.
	So let me just move on to the fourth.
	And as you also realize, these are very, very disparate.
	Disparate?
	Disparate.
	It sounds like desperate to me, but that's not what it is, right?
	Desperate things, because there are a lot of different ways that we can make better use of resources.
	So we talked about corruption before.
	In general, we don't really know well how to fix corruption, but there is one way that we found that you can dramatically reduce corruption.
	So this is the thing that's called e-procurement, electronic procurement.
	Sounds incredibly boring, but when you think about it, The biggest spending in most countries is actually on procurement.
	So you buy anything from pens to roads, and roads obviously being much more expensive.
	Procurement essentially is large-scale purchasing.
	Purchasing from governments.
	So in developing countries and poor countries, the poorest half of the world, it's about half of the government budget that's spent on purchasing big stuff.
	Yeah.
	And it's obviously hugely corrupt.
	Right.
	So one of the ways that you can avoid some of that corruption is by basically putting these bids up on what is essentially eBay.
	Right.
	You make a website for this, and we've known this for a long time for a lot of different countries, that if you do that, it becomes harder to be corrupt.
	There'll still be some corruption, but you get less corrupt.
	You actually get higher quality because more people hear about it.
	And you get lower prices.
	And that's, of course, what really means that you can get more for your money in a government.
	And have there been places that have implemented this?
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	So we work with Bangladesh, who's done it.
	Ukraine has done it.
	It actually helped Ukraine in a totally different way when the war broke out because it's very, very quick.
	They could actually start asking for other resources through the e-procurement system very, very quickly, and obviously they need a lot more.
	War-related.
	So you put out like a statement of request and then you invite submissions?
	Invite local businesses to bid on this.
	So in Bangladesh, it used to be that, you know, you would put this request up in some official publication and then you'd have to come in with a sealed envelope in a particular government office for this bid.
	But the guys in this local area had already, you know, they already decided you're going to get that bid.
	Yeah, yeah.
	You get nepotism under the circumstances, certainly, or dynasty.
	They actually put up goons outside the office so you couldn't physically come in with your bid.
	And that's how they got a lot of extra money.
	With an e-procurement system, that becomes much, much harder.
	Sure, you can still do that.
	But we know, and we've done the testing, we know that it actually, on average, reduces prices by 6.75%.
	And because this is such a lot of money and because this is very, very cheap.
	So we estimate the total cost.
	So that's a 3% improvement in the budgets in the poor countries overall.
	And the finance minister in Bangladesh loved it because it was basically free money for him.
	And so we estimate about 30 countries still need to do this, and they could do it for the annual cost.
	So there's a lot of phasing costs, but they're very, very cheap.
	You need to educate hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats.
	But again, that's fairly cheap, and you need to sustain this all the way through.
	It'll cost about $72 million, so virtually nothing per year.
	The benefit is that they will be about $10 million.
	Right, well, and you...
	So how do you calculate the knock-on benefits of actually effectively distributing money instead of to criminals to the people who can actually do the work?
	Because you can imagine there's got to be a multiplier effect of that, too.
	Because you want to set up your society so that the financial rewards are delivered to the people who actually produce real goods, right?
	Yeah.
	We had a...
	We had a whole conversation about that.
	We decided not to include that, so this is an underestimate, if anything.
	Because clearly, if you have more money, you could actually build more schools, or you could get better hospitals, and that would have its own knock-on effect.
	But in some sense, that's an unreasonable extra way.
	This is already so good, you don't need to make it more fantastic.
	It simply delivers an enormous amount of benefit at very low cost.
	Again, this is one of the things we should be doing.
	So we've covered early childhood and birth intervention.
	We've covered nutrition.
	We've covered corruption reduction.
	And now...
	And agricultural research.
	Yes, agricultural research and reform.
	Yes, exactly.
	And now we're going to switch to topic five, which is education.
	Education, yes.
	So look, we spent the last couple decades getting all kids into schools.
	And that's great because then they have a chance to learn.
	But unfortunately, many places in the world, kids learn almost nothing.
	And so just getting them into school is not enough.
	You actually need to learn in there.
	And that's the next problem.
	The learning crisis, as they call it, is basically that a large part of the world's Kids, primary school students, don't learn anything.
	And so that means they don't become literate, for example.
	What are the basic measures?
	The point is we're very focused on literacy.
	And it actually turns out that we're teaching almost everyone to read a word.
	But they cannot string these words together and actually make a sentence.
	So I'll give you one example.
	So they can't get to the point of meaning.
	Exactly.
	So, you know, we have PISA studies in rich countries that sort of showcase how much do you learn.
	But in poor countries, we don't have that.
	But there's some parts of it where you've actually asked the same kind of questions in a lot of different countries, and they show very, very poor results.
	So let me just give you one sort of reading experience.
	They have to read the following sentence.
	Vijay has a red hat, a blue shirt, and yellow socks.
	What color is the hat?
	Right.
	It's red, by the way.
	But it turns out 80% of all kids in the developing world at 10 years old can't.
	I answered this question.
	Now, is the initial sentence there with the question, or do they have to read it?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's there.
	So they don't know how to refer back to the sentence together.
	I'm not sure they actually know.
	So they know that there's red in there somewhere, but there's also blue, and they also read yellow.
	So there's no sense of...
	They didn't understand the sentence.
	It's a basic comprehension test.
	So we've learned basic literacy, but we don't have actual comprehension.
	And it's the same thing in math.
	You ask people questions like, two people, there are six pieces of cheese.
	There's two people.
	How do you divide it equally between the two people?
	And, you know, about 80% again.
	You establish a communist state and then each gets zero pieces of cheats.
	No, I don't think we're that far away.
	Okay.
	So, fundamentally, the problem here is that we're just simply really bad at teaching these kids.
	So, how do you solve this?
	Well, we know some ways that don't work.
	It's not about building more schools.
	Now, building more schools, get more kids into these schools, which is nice, but they don't actually learn anything more.
	If you, for instance, increase the teacher pay, it turns out, so Indonesia did this back in 2005.
	They doubled the spending on schools, and most of that went to teachers.
	They hired a lot more teachers.
	They have one of the world's lowest class ratios.
	But fundamentally, they gave teachers a lot more pay.
	And because it was staggered across the different regions, we can actually do an experiment on this and see, did it have any impact on learning?
	It turned out it had none.
	There was zero impact on increasing the pay of teachers.
	Now, it made the teachers much more happy, which, of course, could also be a political consideration.
	But surely the outcome of spending money on education should be that you get higher learning.
	And none of that happened.
	It's a very famous paper.
	It's called Double for Nothing.
	And so, fundamentally, we know how not to do this.
	Also, reducing class sizes, which a lot of people talk about.
	Yes, it does help a little bit, but at very high cost.
	So, here's some really, really effective ways that you could do this instead.
	So, there's two different ways.
	One is...
	That you focus on making the teacher better.
	The second one is you focus on making the kid better at learning.
	The first one, how do you make the teacher better?
	Remember, a lot of these teachers are not very well educated.
	They're, you know, they're possibly not very enthusiastic either.
	They don't quite know how to do this.
	If you give them better pedagogy, so this is, this is Very, very well established through a lot of countries.
	Kenya is taking this to all their schools right now.
	It's basically about making semi-scripted lesson plans for each one of the classes that the teacher's gonna go through.
	So you go for three days before the year starts.
	You learn this.
	You sort of get all the teachers excited.
	They meet some of the other teachers from the area.
	Then you get them these structured teacher plans.
	You get them a text message every week.
	This week you're going to teach this, this, and this.
	Sort of get them enthusiastic.
	You have some people come out.
	So you're teaching the teachers while they're teaching the kids.
	And you have some people come out and look at them and give them feedback.
	Not in the sense of we're going to fire you because you're not very good, but this is how you could do it better.
	They come back a couple of times during the year for some extra learning together with some of the other teachers.
	This all has costs, but it's very cheap.
	So it turns out this will cost about $9 per child per year.
	Remember, the average spend is about $350 per kid to schools and all these other things.
	It's a trivial fraction.
	It's a very, very small fraction.
	This means that you actually can see the kids learn much, much more.
	For every year they go to school, instead of just learning one year of school, one normal year of school, they almost learn two years of school.
	You almost double the learning For a 3% improvement in increment cost.
	Yes.
	This is a great investment.
	We find that has a...
	Well, it makes sense from a behavioral perspective.
	I had this book I used on my kids when they were little called How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.
	And it was produced by behavioral psychologists.
	And basically what they do is provide 10-minute scripted lessons.
	So all you have to do is sit down and read the words.
	Everything's laid out.
	And so it makes it extremely simple for the parent to do because the parent can do it even under conditions of exhaustion.
	And it only takes 10 minutes of attention on the part of the child.
	And in three months you get...
	You don't only get word recognition literacy, you get the ability for the child to start to comprehend at the phrase and sentence level, which is, by the way, when spontaneous enjoyment of reading kicks in, right?
	Because the automatization of letter and word recognition is effortful.
	And that's even true up to the level of the phrase.
	But as soon as you can get a phrase at a glance, then it starts to become entertaining rather than effortful.
	Enjoyable, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's hard threshold to hit, though, right?
	Yes.
	So, now you said, well, if you use these behavioral methods and train teachers who are very untrained about exactly what to do, you can imagine as well, that's much more positive for them too, because the classroom isn't chaotic and unstructured.
	And one of the joys of being a teacher, and there are many things about being a teacher that aren't joyful, is to actually see that what you're doing has some positive effect.
	Yeah.
	So teachers are a little ambivalent about this because also they feel like it removes some of their autonomy.
	Yeah, but you can worry about that once they're experts.
	Oh, absolutely.
	So I get that.
	So again, we're not saying that if you spend this money, everything will be perfect.
	We're saying it'll be better, and we know how much better on average because we've already done these.
	Well, twice as good is pretty good.
	Exactly.
	Twice as good.
	And the other way is to remember that the kids are struggling, mostly.
	So almost everywhere in the world, we put all the 12-year-olds in the same grade.
	We put all the 11-year-olds in the same grade.
	And...
	That somewhat works in red countries because everybody has been going to school and have enough food and we're paying attention.
	But in poor country, these kids are all over the place.
	So some of them are struggling and have no idea what's going on.
	Some of them are incredibly bored and way ahead and don't really bother about the teacher.
	What is a teacher going to do when you have this vast amount?
	You're going to try to sort of hit the middle and you're going to fail with most of these kids?
	One way that we know works really well is to teach at the right level.
	That's the zone of proximal development.
	Exactly.
	So you say, if you're in a sixth grade, there's a few that are sixth grade, there's a lot that are fourth grade, and there's even some that are first grade.
	If you imagine you actually teach each one at their right level, they will learn a lot more.
	Now, you can do that in two ways.
	One is that you actually split them out into these grades.
	That's socially a little hard because you put 12-year-olds together with six-year-olds and you sort of point out, "He's not that smart," kind of thing.
	And it takes more teachers to do that.
	You do that one hour a day.
	They do that in Pratham, for instance, in India.
	And it works, and we know it works.
	So again, it costs about $21 per kid, and it delivers about the same as what we talked about with the structured teacher plans.
	It delivers about two years of learning for every one year you go to school.
	This is just one hour a day.
	So again, fantastic improvement.
	So that's about $40.
	That's probably the only hour that they actually learn.
	Very likely.
	But again, for social benefits, it's probably a really bad idea to imagine having the 12-year-old and 6-year-old together all the time.
	And that's why it's just one hour a day.
	At least that's how the studies have been made.
	You get that stigma.
	Yes, yes.
	That's what we're basing it on.
	Another way to do it, which I like more, who am I to know, is to do this with technology.
	So you basically do this with tablets.
	So you buy a bunch of tablets, and the kids will, one hour a day, go and sit down with the tablet, and the tablet very quickly learns who you are.
	You obviously log into that particular one.
	You have a program that teaches them either mathematics or the local language, and it will be in the local language.
	And it very quickly finds out, oh, you're at that level, so I'm going to start teaching you at this level.
	It is one of the most enjoyable hours of the day for the kids.
	I'm sure it is, man.
	That zone of proximal development defines enjoyment.
	Enjoyment, technically, you get a dopamine kick From anything that is associated with positive emotion.
	And what dopamine does is indicate that you're moving at the proper rate towards a desired goal.
	That's the actual signal.
	And then that feels rewarding, but it also, the dopamine actually strengthens the circuits that are co-activated with those events.
	So if you put the kid in the zone of proximal development, where they're on the incremental edge of learning, not only do they feel good about it, but the neural circuits that are operating at that time grow more effectively.
	So yeah, so that's all.
	There's nothing about that that isn't good.
	No, no, exactly.
	And again, this is fairly cheap.
	It's $31.
	Now, this is more expensive.
	You have to buy the tablets.
	Given that you just need one hour a day, a lot of different students are going to be using the same tablet.
	You need to have a place you can lock them in so they don't disappear.
	Still, some of them will disappear also because of corruption.
	You probably also need some solar panels because these are places that don't have electricity to recharge them.
	So every day they get recharged.
	All of that is included in those costs.
	The benefit is that this will actually give almost three years of learning for every one year in school.
	And that's an hour a day.
	This is just one hour a day.
	So basically, if you spend eight hours a day, seven hours, you learn virtually nothing like you normally did.
	And then one hour, you learn almost all of it.
	Isn't that amazing that we can do that?
	Computers are unbelievably good when they're used properly at finding that zone of proximal development.
	And for necessities like basic automatization, say of letter recognition, computers are unbeatable because they can do repeated mass practice in a way that would drive any adult stark raving mad.
	Because you could get a kid who can't see the difference between Ds and Bs, for example, you could just have them practice that 500 times You know, for 15 minutes a day for a week, and they'd have the letter recognition down.
	You'd never get that in the standard classroom.
	Not probably in the entire educational lifetime of the child.
	So yeah, that's very cool.
	That's all a possibility.
	And one of the crucial bits here is that the cost is still, you still have the teacher, so the teacher will be sitting in the room helping oversee this.
	Actually, they very rarely need them, but you need to make sure that the teachers don't think The computers are going to take over their job.
	Right, right.
	And that's incredibly important, otherwise you're not going to have the teachers play along, and then you won't be able to do this.
	Well, it doesn't have to be the case that the computers are going to replace their job, and shouldn't be the case.
	It just means that they're The teacher should be available to help solve the problems that the kids are encountering while they're engaged in the learning.
	Exactly.
	And so, overall, so Malawi, for instance, a country that we worked in where we pointed this out as a very, very good intervention, is now actually setting up this for the entire primary school system.
	Oh, cool.
	So, again, these are things that we can do.
	We estimate...
	So there's about 467 million kids in primary school today in the poor half of the world.
	We're estimating what would it cost to get 90% of them one of these three things that we talked about.
	We don't know whether they interact.
	We don't know whether you can actually double up.
	You can both have a tablet and have teacher plans.
	We don't know whether that works.
	Well, there's no reason to assume that it would top out.
	Like, I doubt if it's additive.
	And it would be lovely if it was multiplicative.
	But, like, if you look at the effects of programs like Head Start, for example, you don't get that multiplicative effect.
	But I think you could reasonably assume some near-linear effect.
	So we're simply making the very simple assumption of saying we don't know what different countries and different schools would do, so we're simply assuming you do one-third of each of these three things, which is a rough approximation just simply to get a sense of how much good would this do.
	It turns out that this would do $65 of good for every dollar spent, so we would spend about $9.8 billion per year over this decade, and the benefits would come only We only look at the productivity benefits that these kids would become smarter and hence get higher salaries.
	That means that they would help produce more economic growth in their long-term future, worth about $800 or $2,000 per kid, depending on which property we're talking about.
	So basically about $600 billion a year.
	This is by itself almost half of the total economic benefit that we're talking about.
	This is also, you know, this is education.
	We're making everyone get about 4% more over their lifetime in productivity.
	That's an incredible achievement.
	And again, this is a very small part, as we talk about.
	It's very likely that once you get started on this, you're going to do more of these things.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, you imagine how many of the undiscovered geniuses in the world whose potential you would unlock.
	I mean, you get one genius like Norman Borlaug and the entire planet's different.
	And so...
	And that's one of the advantages of all these extra mouths to feed, is that, you know, one of 10,000 of those people is going to be one person in 10,000, and we could definitely use more of those.
	Definitely, definitely.
	We'll be right back.
	First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series, Exodus.
	The Hebrews created history as we know it.
	Mario plays You don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost.
	You will pay the piper.
	It's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom even if that pulls you into the desert.
	And we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine.
	The highest ethical spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny.
	Yes, exactly!
	I want villains to get punished.
	But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price?
	- That's such a Christian question. - Okay, so that's number five.
	What's number six?
	Number six, let's look at malaria.
	So malaria is a big problem in the world.
	It used to be incredibly deadly across the world.
	So we have this idea of malaria being a tropical disease and typically one that happens in Africa, which is absolutely true today.
	But it used to be everywhere.
	Boston was malarial.
	Washington was malarial.
	I think it was too damn cold in Canada for malaria to really thrive.
	But in the U.S., 36 of the U.S. states were endemic in malaria.
	We had malaria in Finland and Archangel in Russia.
	It was huge in Moscow during the Second World War.
	It was pretty much everywhere.
	So we estimate about one-tenth of all death In 1900, it was because of malaria.
	Mosquitoes happen to be the worst enemy of mankind.
	Isn't that something?
	Mosquitoes are really, really bad.
	I mean, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because they transferred the malaria parasite.
	What happened?
	And this is true for a lot of development, was we got rich and we got medication.
	So when you get rich, you start draining the swamps.
	That's what England did.
	And, you know, mosquitoes live in swamps.
	So that actually reduced the amount of mosquitoes.
	You also get better nourished.
	And that means that when you get malaria, you don't have as bad of a reaction.
	You don't get as sick.
	You can also afford more protection.
	So you'll build a house with screens, for instance.
	Then you don't get malaria.
	And then you can afford the medication.
	So back in the 1600s, we found quinine.
	The bark from a tree in Peru.
	That's in tonic for anybody who's interested.
	Yes, that's exactly right.
	That's what makes it bitter.
	Yes, and actually that was what people were drinking in India.
	Gin and tonic.
	Gin and tonic.
	At least that was the justification for it.
	And the Spanish got incredibly rich on this, and they actually kept it on wraps for a very long time, so only very rich people.
	Spaniards, man.
	Well, eventually the Dutch found a way to smuggle some of those seeds out and they grew in Indonesia and then, you know, we got a lot more quinine.
	Eventually the parasite got resistant to quinine.
	That also happened to the Artificial production of it that we then turn on.
	Now we have artemisinin and we're starting to see the same kind of thing happening.
	So getting drugs is obviously important, but it's not the only part of the solution.
	So basically we eradicated this in most of the rich world.
	There's virtually no malaria in the rich world.
	It used to be huge in India, for instance.
	There's virtually no malaria there either.
	And that's over how many decades in India?
	So this is over the last century, basically, that we got rid of it.
	That's amazing.
	Because you got rich, because you have medication, but, and this is crucial, we also have much nicer mosquitoes and mosquito and malaria parasites.
	Our mosquitoes like to bite livestock as well.
	And that matters because what you need for transmission of malaria is that I have malaria, the mosquito bites me, and then it flies over and bites you.
	Right, right.
	But if there's a nice cow right next to you, it might bite the cow and then there's no transmission.
	So if you have a lot of livestock and you have more livestock as you get richer… So we need to breed cows that are more delicious to mosquitoes.
	Exactly.
	But the problem, and this is why we have almost all malaria in Africa, is that the mosquitoes are in Africa only like to bite humans.
	So they have much more intense transmission of malaria.
	And what basically happened in all kinds of other places of the world was we disrupted part of the transmission and you really just need to disrupt it enough that it's only the female mosquito, right?
	That the female mosquito typically don't get to bite two people.
	So it doesn't get to bite one that has it and then transfer it to someone else.
	But it dies after one and a half of those for a number of different reasons.
	We just need to get to that.
	But in Africa, they bite so many times before they die that even if you disrupt part of the transmission, it doesn't help.
	They are also badly set up because the parasite is more deadly in Africa than anywhere else.
	It's just, you know, bad luck of the draw.
	That's why you have almost all of the malaria in Africa now.
	It's 95%.
	It's actually just in four countries, half of it.
	So about 600,000 people die every year.
	More than half of them die in Nigeria, in Tanzania, in Niger, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
	So it's a very, very limited problem to sub-Saharan Africa.
	And what we then look at is, you know, obviously you need to have medication, and we do have medication across the world, but the most important part is to get mosquito nets.
	We know that that's a very cheap way of dramatically reducing.
	And that reduces the person-to-person biting of the mosquitoes.
	So these are insecticide-treated mosquito nets, so they work in two ways.
	You sleep under them, and so they have this physical barrier that prevents the mosquito to come in, And also, when it sits on these, and it often will do, it'll actually die from the pesticide.
	And those two things can actually disrupt malaria.
	So we estimate, if you increase this...
	So remember, all of these nets are being distributed.
	We distribute more than 200 or 300 million nets every year.
	All of these nets need to be distributed.
	We're assuming, what would happen if we increase that by 10%?
	Yeah.
	That will have a cost, yes, but it'll also have a huge benefit because you'll actually be able to see about a reduction of half, come 2030, of the number of people that get infected with malaria.
	So we could actually reduce this by half over the decade.
	That would be about 200,000 people that we could save every year.
	If we could do that, it would also save much more on the hospitalization cost.
	And remember, this would also be about 240 million cases of malaria.
	So most people get malaria, they don't die.
	They just get really, really sick.
	And then it recurs too, eh?
	A lot of them, so there's not that many people.
	Many of the people will get it several times, and that means that they will be less productive.
	They can't go to work.
	We actually estimate the benefit would also be about $10 billion, both in preserved healthcare costs, that's more than just the net would cost, and in productivity costs.
	The total cost is $1.1 billion.
	So again, it's the cheapest thing.
	And that's a 10% increase in the number of nets that are distributed.
	Yes.
	So for every dollar spent, you do $48 of good.
	An amazing return.
	So even if you just look at the...
	The save the malarial parasite environmentalists haven't come after you on that front, eh?
	No, I think most people...
	Feel that, yes, mosquitoes and malaria parasites are something that we could just have in a zoo.
	We could have fewer of them, please.
	Yes, yes, certainly.
	Okay, it's good to have a consensus on that.
	Yes, yeah.
	So, fundamentally, we could do an amazing amount of good, and you could actually, just by looking at the savings, You would get more savings in the healthcare sector than the extra bed nets would cost.
	Why are we not doing it?
	Because it's two different pots of money.
	Right, right.
	Weird structural impediments, eh?
	And it comes a couple of years later.
	So, you know, this is the kind of thing.
	Again, imagine if, you know, I don't know, Elon Musk was to say, I am going to spend $1.1 billion a year.
	Elon, are you listening?
	Yeah.
	And then we could save 200,000 lives every year.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I think that's an amazing achievement.
	And again, It'd be fun to set up some crowdfunding projects for some of these things, you know, because it'd be interesting.
	I was thinking about taxation the other night and taxation is, well, people take your money and then they do with it what they want.
	And you might say, well, we have to have taxes.
	And I really wonder, I wonder if you put forward a sufficiently attractive proposal and ask people if they would be willing to donate, if you could raise enough money to do these sorts of things without compulsion.
	You know, if the story was set up right, this isn't tremendously expensive.
	And besides, you wouldn't have to raise all the money to start doing it.
	And so, well, so that's something very, very much worth thinking through.
	Okay, so that's number six, right?
	Malaria.
	Anything else on the malarial front?
	No.
	Okay, what's number seven?
	So, chronic diseases, or what's known as non-communicable diseases.
	So, you know, In days of past, almost everyone died from infectious disease.
	Chronic disease is actually only something you die of if you don't die from infectious disease anymore, right?
	It's something you die of when you get old, mostly.
	And so it's something we should actually be happy about.
	Most of the world now dies from chronic disease, not from… That's the definition of human progress.
	It is.
	Later death.
	So if you think about it, we're very worried about the fact that more and more people were dying from cancer, more and more people were dying from heart disease, cardiovascular disease, in the world.
	And we thought, oh my god, there must be something in the environment and stuff like that.
	We're just living long enough to have it.
	Yes, exactly.
	We've stopped dying from infectious disease.
	And this is even true in the low- and low-middle-income countries now.
	We're seeing that people live longer and longer, and now they will die from chronic disease.
	So we need to start having a conversation about, can we do something about that?
	So we work with one of the big teams from John Hopkins University, who've actually done all of these studies and all of these things.
	And so they gave us a very, very long list of the stuff that you can do, and some of them are really, really cost-effective.
	I'm just going to tell you about two of them, because there's a lot of them, and most of them are fairly small.
	One of them is that a lot of people live with heart failure, so it kills about probably 350,000 people a year that we could avoid from heart failure.
	It's basically the fact that your heart is tired, and it can't pump enough.
	And it causes you exhaustion.
	You get out of breath.
	And eventually, it means that you limit your movements.
	You don't become as productive.
	You have a bad life.
	And one of the simple ways you can do something about that is give people diuretics.
	So basically, pee more.
	They get rid of some of their water.
	It means that there's less that the heart has to pump out to.
	And so it's simply a very cheap way.
	of making sure that people can live longer.
	Now, they will still die eventually from this, but on average we can save about 350,000 people every year And they will live about six years longer.
	This is very different from malaria, which is very much about young kids.
	This is mostly older people that you can help.
	So that's one way it has a benefit-cost ratio of 41.
	The other thing, and this has become very prevalent in all of the rich world, is tackling people's high blood pressure.
	So the biggest killer in the world is cardiovascular disease.
	So basically heart disease and stuff that's related to the blood vessels.
	And much of this is due to high blood pressure.
	We have very, very cheap medication.
	A lot of people in the rich world are in heart medication, sorry, are in blood pressure, hypertension medication.
	I am.
	And you know, it has some cost.
	You need to screen people.
	You need to have the doctor decide which pills you're gonna get.
	You need to go back and check whether they work once or twice a year.
	And obviously you can do some of this cheaper, so we're looking a lot on replacing the doctor with nurses and that kind of stuff.
	And you also need to decide what kind of drugs you need.
	Some of them are very cheap, some of them are not quite as cheap.
	If you do the whole math, you can probably save, again, about almost a million people Every year at a benefit cost of about $16,000.
	So again, a very good investment.
	You can do a lot of good for these things.
	But, and there's more, as Steve Jobs used to say.
	There's also looking at some of these things that kill us the most.
	So that would be tobacco, alcohol, trans fat, and salt.
	We know these things are bad for you.
	Some of these things are hard to do something about, but some of them are very easy to do.
	To do something about.
	So, for instance, tobacco.
	Yeah.
	You can just simply put in World Health Organization estimate we should have a tax that make them four times as expensive cigarettes as the production cost.
	Yeah.
	That's sort of a target.
	Yeah, well, I'm not much for top-down government intervention, but the fact that since I've been young...
	Smoking has just about disappeared in Canada, and I just can't see that as anything but a fundamental social good.
	So what we look at is, the cost of doing that is negligible.
	It's just a changing of some laws, and you need a little bit of enforcement.
	But the real cost is the fact that there's a lot of smokers who will now not be able to smoke.
	And they will have, you know, they're losing a benefit.
	They clearly like to be able to smoke.
	But that benefit is...
	Vastly outweighed by both the health benefits that they will get, but also, as you pointed out, All the younger generations who won't take up smoking because it's so damn expensive.
	So fundamentally what we find is that having a tobacco tax generates a benefit of about 105.
	So a really, really good investment.
	And again, it can save about a couple hundred thousand people from dying.
	Likewise with alcohol.
	Alcohol has all kinds of bad effects.
	Now, people clearly like it, so you also need to take that into account.
	It's the cause of and solution to all the world's problems, according to Homer Simpson.
	There you go.
	But it creates a lot of accidents.
	It creates a lot of violence.
	Deep rape.
	And you also get people who commit suicide because of this.
	It has a lot of diseases.
	And a little bit like secondhand smoking, it also negatively affects a lot of other people because it leads to spousal abuse and child abuse.
	Contributed to cancer, especially with smoking.
	Yeah, so there are lots of reasons why we want to regulate it.
	Again, you can both regulate it through advertising, so you can't advertise in certain shows and that kind of stuff, and also through just simply higher taxation.
	Those things, we estimate, in total, if you add up all of this, will cost about $4.4 billion.
	But it'll save one and a half million lives every year.
	Again, this is just one of those things.
	It'll generate benefits of $23 back on every dollar.
	It's not the very, very best thing, but this is still an amazing return.
	It's an amazing return.
	This is one of the things we should be doing.
	I mean, people are happy when they can invest their money and get a 1 in 20 return.
	This is a 23 to 1 return.
	That's 400 times better.
	And yeah, and it's not at the top of your list.
	All right, number eight.
	So, land tenure security.
	This is something that most people have no sense of.
	If you buy an apartment or a house in the rich world, you own it.
	Yeah, strangely enough.
	Yes, that's really, really nice.
	It means when you put in a new kitchen, you know, it'll be nice for you and eventually it'll increase the sales value.
	Yeah.
	Now, in most developing countries, you don't know if you own stuff.
	Yeah.
	Because there's really bad registration.
	Yeah.
	Hernando DeSantis or Hernando...
	Fernando de Soto.
	De Soto, yeah, yeah.
	He laid that out very nicely about 20 years ago, right?
	Exactly.
	He points out.
	And I'm starting to talk about owning a house or an apartment because that's what we understand in the rich world.
	But of course, for the vast majority of people in the poor part of the world, it's about owning your land.
	Yes, exactly.
	The place where you're going to be farming.
	You don't know if you own this.
	You have...
	Really bad, cadastral surveys, and you have, you know, these different scripts, typically in different parts of the government, that tells you, maybe you own it, maybe this other guy owns it, and there's a lot of uncertainty.
	No clear title.
	Yes.
	Yeah, well, the thing is, there is no difference between ownership and title, right?
	You own something insofar as no one else can stake a claim to it.
	And so if the title is unclear, because you kind of think of ownership as something like physical presence.
	It's not that.
	It's undisputed.
	It's undisputed sovereignty over that territory.
	And a lot of that has to do with the conceptual web.
	The paperwork has to be done properly.
	The titles have to be transferred.
	I know DeSoto was so interesting.
	He took out his teams of economists.
	into the field, into these tent cities, you know, these burials, essentially, because so many people had migrated into cities.
	And all these people who were in these tent cities, squatters, so to speak, had land.
	But, of course, the boundaries weren't set, and they didn't have title, and so they couldn't raise a mortgage.
	So one of the things DeSoto did, because almost all the people that they were studying had dogs, and the dogs knew where the boundaries were, because dogs know those sorts of things, and they negotiate with other dogs about it quite intensely, and other people.
	And so one of the things they used to demarcate territory, to start the process of title registration going, because...
	Thing is, if you're squatting on a piece of land in an urban area, you're actually not poor.
	You just can't capitalize on what you own just.
	And many, many people start their small business by getting a second loan on their property, and so you can start to capitalize on what you own.
	Can't do that without title.
	No, exactly.
	So what we're looking at is that most places in the developing world lack cadastral surveys.
	And cadastral is?
	It's basically that you have a list of everything, of all land in your nation, and who does that belong to.
	So unless you have that list, you can't write the names in front of them.
	You can't tax effectively then either.
	Neither that.
	But mostly, you just don't know who owns what.
	So you need to have these surveys done.
	They're called cadastro surveys.
	You also need to have effective registration, which is somewhat expensive.
	What happens when you do this?
	And you're absolutely right.
	One of the things, and that was Fernando de Soto, he basically said, this means that there's a lot of dead capital.
	Yes, yes.
	Frozen capital.
	Yeah, he was talking about $10 trillion that the poor can't use as collateral for making a loan that could actually help them start a business.
	And they're also not motivated to do improvements on their property because there's no evidence that they'll only improve it.
	If you don't know if you own the land, you're likely to not plant something that'll only give fruit in, say, five or ten years because you don't know if you're gonna own it.
	You're not gonna take out all the stones because that'll only really be a benefit in the next 30 years.
	So you're not going to improve it as much.
	You'll improve it somewhat, but just not nearly as much.
	And of course, if you don't know if you own the house in the city, so about a fifth of all people in the developing world believe that over the next five years they'll be evicted from where they live right now.
	That must be a terrible thing to have hanging over your head.
	And it certainly affects your decisions.
	Unbelievably demoralizing.
	Exactly.
	And anxiety-provoking.
	So what we're trying to do is to basically set up the system so that it's more secure.
	And what you do is then you have the surveys.
	You start working with all these different people who might have claims.
	Remember, once you start this process of saying, who actually owns this bit of land?
	You will get a lot of dissatisfaction because people will say, no, I own it.
	No, I own it.
	And then you need some sort of conflict resolution.
	Some of it can be dealt on the local level.
	You'll also need a lot more court ability.
	Access to courts.
	Access to courts.
	So in many developing countries, it's already taking up a third or half of all civil legislation.
	Litigation.
	Litigation.
	That is land litigation.
	And this will balloon, certainly, in the first couple of years that you do this.
	The benefits...
	So, those are real costs.
	But the benefits will be...
	That you will be able to have much more productive land.
	So what we're finding is, on agricultural side, you will basically have 15% higher productivity.
	That's an amazing opportunity for people in the land area.
	Now, this will also be fairly expensive, so we estimate the benefit-cost ratio is about 18%.
	For cities, because it costs less, there's less land to document, there's many more people in there, and the values are typically higher there.
	It simply means, and we know this from a lot of studies, it simply means that your house or your apartment becomes a lot more worth.
	Right.
	Simply because you now know that you own it.
	People are willing to pay more for it, so it's about 25%.
	Any uncertainty about ownership will reduce the value of any given piece of property to almost zero.
	Yes.
	So the total cost is about $2.2 billion a year, and the benefit is about $49 billion in increased productivity in agriculture and increased value in cities.
	Right, and as you pointed out, you're going to have a substantial increase in people's feeling of security as well.
	Well, not just feeling of security, actual security, because they're not likely to be evicted in the same way.
	But of course, economists would tend to say, That's exactly what's reflected in the price.
	Sure, sure.
	And so we would tend to say we've said that.
	But absolutely, you're right, that it probably means a lot more that you are actually able to start doing all kinds of other things.
	Yeah, well, you'll take risks.
	Because, well, one of the things that stops people from taking risks is the degree of risk they're already exposed to.
	Because people can tolerate a certain amount of uncertainty.
	But...
	And also, remember, we're just looking at what we know works.
	So we know that there's good evidence that if you know you own the land, you will be 15% more productive.
	But chances are, you'll also take out a second loan, you'll start a little business, you'll do all these other things that'll actually make your whole life much, much better.
	So all of the stuff that I'm telling you now is probably...
	Very conservative.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's another thing I really like about your approach is that you don't go out into the derivative end of economic projection, right?
	You're staying fairly close to the direct consequences.
	And also, you know, look, these are so good things.
	We don't need to exaggerate them.
	And also, and I think this is important for the whole project you asked me early on, you know, why should we believe this?
	You know, yes, these are people from some really, really good universities and so on, but it's also because...
	We don't have a stake in any of this.
	Honestly, I don't care what is the best outcomes.
	I'm just looking at it and saying, all right, this was what came out of it.
	It could have been other things.
	I'm not an advocate for any one of these things, except for the fact that the evidence shows us this is an incredibly good deal.
	Well, you can tell that as well.
	And so another one of the things I liked about your approach is that There's no axe being ground, and the evidence for that is, well, there's no bias in terms of the selection of the domains that you're attempting to make progress on.
	I mean, land surveys and the provision of prenatal and natal care to women aren't in the same bin.
	And so there's no implicit or explicit agenda happening here except the ones we already laid out, which is something like most amount of good done for the least privileged people at the lowest possible cost.
	You have to accept that as a reasonable framework to begin with, and you can debate about that.
	But once having done that, I do think you end up with the kind of outcomes that you've been describing.
	So we're going to move on to, I believe it's issue number nine now.
	I'm hoping you keep going.
	I do believe it's issue number nine.
	And so what are we confronting on that front?
	So trade.
	Trade is one of those things that a lot of economists tell you are really, really good.
	It's an obvious thing if you think about it.
	We talked about making your own toaster before.
	If you have to do everything yourself, you're really bad at all of them and you don't get a lot.
	Make your own computer chip.
	Yes, that's not a good idea.
	And so what we have basically achieved is one of the reasons why we're so rich is that everyone does what they do best.
	That's nations and individuals and companies.
	And then we trade among each other.
	So I do...
	Tiny bit, hopefully pretty well, and then I get everyone else to do, you know, my Mountain Dew and all the other important things in my life.
	And that's how we all work, and that's great.
	That really makes us all much more effective.
	We should have a lot of training.
	It's also a way of addressing inequality, you know, in some fundamental sense, because if we set up a landscape Where each person can operate at their highest level of expertise.
	Well, that's a pretty good deal for them.
	And it means that the largest and most diverse possible number of people can play the game successfully.
	And it's an interesting way of looking at inequality.
	Because you might think, well, everyone should contribute the same thing.
	But that's...
	This is a way of doing that at a meta level.
	It's like, no, you should be encouraged to contribute where you can contribute best, even by your own standards, where you have real expertise.
	And it's a very rare person you find.
	I have a lot of very, very impaired people in my clinical practice, you know, who are having a struggle in the broader economic market.
	It's almost impossible to find someone who doesn't have something that they can offer that's of real practical utility on some dimension.
	And then a free trade landscape opens up all these different niches so that people can occupy them regardless of their underlying skills and talents, let's say.
	So...
	I would tend to agree with you.
	I think we should recognize the fact that when trade opened up and we got industrialization in the rich world, it was basically we took off and the rest of the world didn't.
	That's one of the reasons why we've had a very, very unequal world for quite a while.
	Now, what's happening is that a lot of the poorer world is catching up.
	And that actually means that inequality has dramatically dropped at least since 2000.
	A large part of that, of course, is There's China also, some of it is India.
	And that's bringing up the border, man.
	Absolutely.
	So this is good, but there is an argument, and that's one of the reasons why I think inequality is somewhat of a slippery slope.
	Inequality is not by itself an amazing achievement, because one of the simplest ways to make sure you don't have inequality is by making everyone poor.
	Yes, that's the typical communist approach, for example.
	Most people wouldn't see that as a great outcome.
	And so what we have to make sure is that everybody can participate in this.
	And one of the problems that have happened...
	So we used to be very focused on saying we should have more trade.
	That's a good thing.
	It actually means that we all become richer.
	But as we increasingly realized...
	You know, with the battle for Seattle back in, was it, 1999?
	You know, the whole Doha round and essentially the breakdown in more free trade agreements was that a lot of people realized, but there are also negative impacts from trade.
	And that's absolutely true.
	If you have trade and if you have more trade, it means if you work in an area where you're not quite as good as the guys who are trading...
	Yeah.
	You will see your salary drop, or you will possibly...
	Or if you're facing corrupt competition.
	I mean, this is partly what happened to the working class in the, let's say, outside of China, is that the Chinese were very efficient at providing low-cost labor, but there was also no shortage of corruption in that.
	And unfortunately, the people who paid the highest price for that were working-class people in the West.
	Now, they got cheaper goods, and the Chinese weren't starving and were much less likely to pose a geopolitical danger as a consequence of that.
	But it still fell disproportionately on their backs.
	And this is sort of the rust belt of the U.S. and many other places.
	Some of it may be unreasonable in part of China, but I think it was also just inevitable that if you open up for a wide range of things that you can do much cheaper in China and Vietnam and many other places, you will see some people who will actually see their pay go down.
	Economists were very bad at doing that, and I've been partially guilty of that.
	We would just say, oh, everybody gets much richer, which is not quite true.
	A lot of people get a lot richer.
	Most people probably in the long run get better off, but there are some people who are very clearly in the short and medium term not better off, and we need to say that.
	So we've actually done—I'm very excited about this particular paper— We've done probably the first paper that actually tries to look at both the cost and the benefits of free trade.
	We've done it with a standard free trade model.
	We're not looking at particularly how do you increase trade.
	We just simply say, let's assume we increase trade by 5%.
	You could do that through a free trade agreement.
	You could do it by making transportation cheaper so that more people will want to transport.
	You could have lower tariffs.
	There's a lot of different ways you could do it.
	We're not talking about that.
	We're simply saying, let's look at the case of us having 5% more trade.
	What would that do?
	What are the costs?
	What are the benefits?
	And it turns out that, not surprisingly, overall, we'd be much better off.
	the world would be about $11 trillion better off over the next 50 years.
	But there's a cost of about a trillion dollars.
	And that's the cost of all the people who work in import-exposed industries.
	So essentially think of, and this is obviously an old term thinking, but think of the people who work in T-shirt sewing industries in rich countries.
	Yeah, they're not going to have a job in five or ten years if you open up for trade.
	Now, eventually they'll be doing other works, and I think there are very few people who sit around and feel like, I really missed out on that, you know, t-shirt sewing opportunity, right?
	So overall, in the long run, we all get better off, but there are certainly losses.
	Those losses are mostly in the rich world.
	And when you think about it, it's not surprising.
	They have to be.
	Yeah, that's where you are least effective at doing the stuff that poor countries do really effectively.
	And so what we see is that in the rich world, the benefit-cost ratio of free trade, or more trade, It's only 7 to 1.
	So you get $7 back, you get cheaper and better goods in Walmart, but yes, some people also lose out.
	And those people, of course, lose out in a much bigger way.
	They're the ones who are going to be shouting at the politicians and likely make the politicians say, oh, maybe we don't want this much.
	Voting for Donald Trump.
	Yes, exactly.
	Whereas in the poorer part of the world, the benefits vastly outweigh the costs.
	So we're estimating the costs of free trade is about $1.7 billion a year.
	That's not nothing.
	But the benefits is $166 billion a year.
	Wow, wow, wow.
	And this is in the bottom half of the… Bottom half of the world.
	95 to 1.
	So again, it's rich people who are saying, oh, maybe we shouldn't have so much free trade, although it actually helps everyone.
	It's the poorest of the rich people who are most hurt by that, which is not a trivial problem.
	I get that, and we should certainly address that, and we should also recognize that even in the rich world, we get $7 back for every dollar.
	How do you best address the problem of the poorest strata in the rich world bearing the brunt of the free trade problem?
	Well, so I think, first of all, you need to recognize it's there.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	Then you also should say we should have much better re-education.
	So these guys should have the opportunity.
	First of all, you know, I come from rich welfare states where we would take care of these people.
	We would fund them for many years and say, you know, you can get unemployment insurance for quite a while.
	You will get a re-education.
	You can do all kinds of other things.
	So access to retraining.
	Essentially, and re-education.
	Sorry, that sounds like it.
	Yeah, I know.
	It's a hell of a term.
	So, more education.
	That you would get all those things that would enable you to now get another job.
	And of course, one of the things that can happen is that you actually realize, oh, I actually really like doing something else.
	You get stuck in one place, and so this could also be an opportunity.
	Again, that's a hard sell, right?
	At the Yeah, well, you know, I developed this software to help people develop a vision for their life, you know, so what they do, it's a prioritization exercise that's akin in some ways to, it's a very good thing for people to do, and we had the, we had students, I'll just tell you one study, they went to a trade school, a Mohawk college in Ontario, And they sat down and wrote out a vision for their life on seven dimensions.
	And so that was the dimensions are intimate relationship, family, job and career, education, personal self-care on the medical and psychological front, regulation of temptation like alcohol and drug abuse, and use of time outside of work, right?
	So now imagine you could have what you wanted.
	Now, you could have it in those seven domains.
	Five years down the road, how would you strategize towards that?
	So, we had students do this for 90 minutes when they first came into their orientation session before they went to trade school.
	Or they wrote for 90 minutes about what they've done in the last two weeks.
	And we decreased the dropout rate 50%.
	And so, for a $10 intervention, by the way, and in other studies, we'd increase the GPA 35%.
	But what was really cool was that the biggest increases were among the most disaffected populations.
	So, the biggest effect was for minority men.
	And it was for minority men who had a bad academic record, who didn't have well-formulated plans about what they were going to college for.
	And so the reason I'm bringing that up is because one of the ways of addressing these problems of a transition, let's say at entry-level economic jobs that would be displaced, would be also to retool the way that we handle those situations psychologically so that people could see An expanding horizon of opportunity instead of just, what would you say, the forcible removal of their one source of income.
	Now, it's not an easy thing to do, but it's not impossible.
	And I've worked with lots of clinical clients who had to make, you know, lateral job transitions.
	And if they could get their attitude properly oriented and with a bit of luck, they could take the opportunity to raise themselves up the economic hierarchy instead of merely suffering as a consequence of the displacement.
	So these things aren't impossible.
	So that's part of what we need to do.
	Maybe we should have that in our...
	Yeah, yeah.
	But then we have 13, and that doesn't sound good.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right, right, right, right.
	We'd have to add an additional one.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay, so...
	You will have huge impact for the poor part of the world, and we could do this also well for the rich part of the world.
	So, absolutely.
	Okay.
	So, this is...
	So, that was...
	What was this?
	Well, we're on to 10 now.
	All right, 10.
	So, 10...
	Is skilled migration.
	So economists like to say we should have free trade, so we should have movement of goods.
	But we should also have movement of people.
	And this will have a lot more of sort of a political dimension.
	People feel somewhat uncomfortable about some of these things.
	But let me just give you the economic argument first.
	So a lot of economists will tell you, and I think there's some value to this point.
	If you look at, for instance, people who work in McDonald's, they have a very, very set setup of how should you work.
	Yet, a person who works in McDonald in Nigeria makes about one-fifteenth of what the same person with the same skills get in the US. This is simply a question of saying, if you live in a country where you're surrounded by a lot of other really highly productive people, you are also more productive.
	And so what happens is if you take a person who has grown up in, say, Nigeria, and we've looked at those kinds of cases that have had Nigerian education and then moved to the U.S., they have about five times as high an income as if they'd stayed back in Nigeria, simply because they're more productive.
	They still have had a pretty bad education, which is why they don't get 15 times as much, but they get much higher productivity.
	So economists would tend to say, why don't we let everyone move?
	Right.
	Now, if you did that, so there's surveys, for instance, Bangladesh, they ask young people, if you could, would you like to move to another country?
	Right.
	92% say they would like to at least try.
	Now, a lot of people would probably return because they also, you know, there's something about your home country and all that kind of stuff.
	But, you know, a lot of people would want to move.
	Economists will tell you there are trillions of dollars to be had out there.
	So they're talking about, you know, if you just let out, you know, let everyone move, it turns out that the model showed that about 2.4 billion people would move to the rich countries.
	Workers.
	That's, you know, like five times as many, four times as many as what we have of all workers in the rich countries.
	So from an economist's point of view, you just say, oh, they become more productive.
	I think it's leaving out some really, really big things.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	Like the carrying capacity for transformation in the countries.
	I know, I know.
	Imagine just building the houses and all that kind of stuff.
	It's one of those, I think it's slightly one of those castles in the air that academics are very good at doing.
	I think there's some point to making this.
	So, you know, Tom Schelling, one of the Nobel laureates I used to work with, he's unfortunately dead now, he would usually say, well, if we could imagine, if we worry about poverty in the poor world, imagine if you could move a large portion of these people from the poor world to the rich world and make them rich.
	That would be good, wouldn't it?
	And yes, it would be good, but not if it means that it will make everyone in the rich world really, really annoyed.
	For instance, because it actually will reduce their pay, many other things.
	So, look, this is not going to happen.
	But what could happen, that's the proposal that we're looking at, is skilled migration.
	So Canada, for instance, actually embraces the idea of bringing in skilled migrants because it's a great way for Canada to become richer.
	But there's many places there's a lack of engineers and doctors.
	And so we look at that.
	Now, remember, if you move these people from poor countries, it actually means that the poor countries will lose out on some of this.
	They will have what people sort of tend to call a brain drain.
	But we actually find, and that's also what most of the literature finds, is if you move them, They will also send more remittances.
	You really saw this with Indians in Silicon Valley, right?
	Because there was a tremendous brain drain from India, especially from the Indian Institute of Technology to Silicon Valley.
	But man, they dumped billions of dollars back into India and generated a whole IT industry there that's just like killing it.
	That's a great example.
	And so we actually estimate this will even be beneficial for the poor countries, so the center countries.
	But of course, this will mostly be beneficial for those people who are moving to the rich world, and it will be beneficial also for the rich world.
	But because these are poor people, we're basically making poor people much richer.
	Any sense of how you prioritize what skills should be required, or is that a nation-to-nation element?
	No, we looked at a lot of different interventions, and only doctors and engineers will have such a great differential that it actually pays more than $50 back in the dollar.
	I see.
	Because if you move your McDonald's worker, you will get benefit, but not just nearly as much.
	And there's also a number of costs there.
	So what you're doing is you're maximizing the ability of the most in-demand, productive people to move.
	And your sense is that will be a benefit to them, but also to the countries that they've left behind.
	Yes.
	Yes, and also to the countries that they move to.
	Yes, of course.
	And we're only saying 10% more than what you already have.
	So a country that has a lot will take in a little more.
	A country that will take 10% more of that almost no more.
	So basically what it is, it's a more intelligent immigration policy.
	It's a politically...
	Feasible thing to do.
	And it turns out that it'll cost about $2.8 billion, but it'll generate about $50 billion in benefits, mostly to these poor people who are now moving to rich countries and becoming more productive.
	But also because they'll be sending back money and helping generate more education and more investing in, as you pointed out, more investing in local businesses back where they came from.
	So overall, It's a good idea.
	It's not, you know, it's about 20 back on the dollar.
	So it's a good idea.
	It's not the best thing we should do.
	Well, that's why it's number 10.
	Again?
	Well, so we should also talk about one other infectious disease.
	So we talked about malaria.
	Okay.
	So is this a side shoot or is this number 11?
	No, this is 11.
	Okay.
	This is 11.
	Well, if we're counting, right?
	Yep, we are at 11.
	I think at some point we need to go back and make sure because we're not quite sure what the 12th is, but we'll figure that out.
	But, you know, 11th, tuberculosis.
	And again, there's no point.
	We're not making a list of priorities.
	We're saying all 12 are amazing things, right?
	Yeah.
	Oh, okay.
	So they're not necessarily rank ordered within the 12.
	They're not.
	They're not at all.
	Okay, okay, okay.
	And that's crucial for us because we're not—usually, we would have rank ordered them.
	But these are so cheap and so good that we should just do them.
	They're rank ordered, sort of, if you will, compared to everything else you could do.
	Yeah, okay, okay.
	So we're simply saying, let's do those 12.
	So that's also why they've been jumbling around.
	So that would be like advice to any national government.
	Do at least one of these things.
	At least one of them.
	Or two.
	Please.
	Twelve.
	Yeah.
	Exactly.
	So number 11 is tuberculosis.
	So tuberculosis is a huge disease that's killed over the last 200 years about a billion people.
	Yeah.
	You know, if you think back in the 1800s, Pretty much anyone you know from the 1800s probably died from tuberculosis.
	About a fourth of all death was due to tuberculosis.
	And all the people who died before that time typically had tuberculosis.
	It's a very city-oriented disease, so we've known it throughout human history.
	But it was really only when people got together in big cities.
	You need a lot of people together in pretty...
	Dense areas for tuberculosis really to get going.
	So it happened, you know, around 1600 in European cities.
	We had a little bit of it in Rome back in ancient times.
	But this was really something that came to the fore in 1600, 1700.
	So in 1700, 1800 in London, for instance, about one of every hundred people Died every year from tuberculosis.
	So more people died from tuberculosis in the 1800s than died from all diseases today in London.
	You know, it's just outstanding how much this is.
	Now, what basically fixed it was we got antibiotics.
	We know how to get rid of it.
	So we got rid of it around 40s, 50s.
	So it basically drops down.
	It dropped down before because you got richer.
	When you're better fed, you don't get tuberculosis as easily.
	You sent people off to sanatoria.
	So we think it didn't actually help very much, but it got rid of them.
	So they didn't infect someone else.
	But we basically got rid of tuberculosis, yet it's the world's leading infectious disease killer.
	So it kills some 1.4, 1.5 million people.
	It killed last year more people than died from COVID. So COVID certainly outweighed it in 2020 and 2021, not in 2022.
	And so tuberculosis is back as the leading infectious disease killer, yet virtually nobody cares about it because We don't get it anymore.
	It's just poor people.
	It's marginalized people.
	And so in India, when they got independence in 1947, they realized that they had a huge tuberculosis problem.
	They had about half a million people dying from tuberculosis every year.
	Last year, India had about half a million people dying from tuberculosis.
	Now, admittedly, they've grown to about four times the size, so it's a relatively smaller problem, but it's still a huge problem.
	So we can save most of these people by investing in two things.
	So it's basically about making sure that we discover more of the tuberculosis.
	The big problem right now is that we believe, we don't know, But we only diagnose about six of them.
	So the rest of them are this untreated reservoir.
	Now, what happens is that when you have tuberculosis, you'll typically go to a doctor.
	But it's also very stigmatizing to have tuberculosis in many places.
	So you kind of go to the doctor and you hope him to say, oh, no, it's not tuberculosis.
	If you go to a private doctor, you do that a lot in India and many other places, the doctor obviously has an incentive to keep you happy.
	So he will likely say, no, don't worry.
	Take this drug, this other thing.
	Take this green powder, whatever it is.
	And so you don't get treated.
	And 45% of people who remain untreated die from this.
	So we need to get more people identified.
	You do that by screening.
	You need to do this in large proportions.
	So these are very marginalized people.
	It would be people in slum cities.
	It would be people in prisons and You know, the people who do mining communities, those kinds of places where you would screen people.
	So in Bangladesh, for instance, we worked with the world's biggest NGO that has, you know, more than a million workers there.
	They would hire old women to walk around and knock on people's doors and say, has anyone been coughing a lot lately?
	And, you know, try to get them involved and then try to get them tested and then you can get on treatment.
	Most government actually offer this treatment for free, but the problem is it takes six months to get rid of tuberculosis.
	And if you've ever gotten, you know, medication for, you know, you just have to take it for 14 days, you get better after, what, you know, a week, then it becomes hard to remember.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Compliance is a huge problem.
	If you have to do this for half a year, you're likely not to do it.
	So what we're also saying is, and we're working together...
	Or to do it in a way that'll increase antibiotic resistance, right?
	Absolutely.
	If you stop...
	Yeah, yeah.
	Very, very bad.
	Then suddenly get a situation where it becomes a resistant tuberculosis, and it becomes much more costly and much harder to deal with.
	And a much bigger public health threat.
	Absolutely.
	So what you need to do is to incentivize people.
	One of the ways is you have sort of Alcoholics Anonymous kind of where you meet once a week and say, proudly, yes, I took all my tuberculosis medication.
	You can get an app.
	You can also have premiums.
	You know, you get like a juice box or something for every week where you've done this, where you've taken your medication.
	And it seems a little weird to pay people to take their medication.
	It isn't weird once you understand how likely it is that people won't be compliant.
	You know, because they deny they have the illness or they're skeptical of the drugs or they forget because you do forget things you have to do every day unless it's really instilled as a habit.
	So, no, compliance is a major problem.
	And remember, if you have someone who's untreated, Chances are that that person every year will give on the tuberculosis to somewhere between 5 and 15 other people.
	Wow.
	So, you know, by coughing.
	So the point is, if we can get that person to take his drugs or her drugs, it means not only would that person survive...
	But he or she won't pass it on, and they won't be making this multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.
	So we estimate that you can do about $46 of social good for every dollar spent.
	It'll cost $6.2 billion.
	But the benefit will be, and now I forget, I have to look at my...
	There's too many numbers in this project.
	You said about 40 to 1, so the benefit would be about 200 billion.
	Sorry, yes, it's because I don't actually remember that number.
	It's 600,000 people we'll save every year for this decade.
	But as we get further in, it's actually an underestimate of how good it's going to be, because eventually we'll save almost everyone.
	We'll get tuberculosis down.
	So it'd be nice to target that as a disease to eradicate if that was a possibility.
	We've eradicated smallpox and damn near killed off polio.
	We eradicated smallpox and that was an amazing achievement.
	But we haven't gotten rid of polio.
	And it turns out it's really, really hard to do these things.
	So again, we should probably be careful about saying we'd love to eradicate...
	It turns out that that's very hard.
	Smallpox only infects humans.
	It doesn't have a natural reservoir, as tuberculosis and many other diseases have, and that's one of the reasons why it's much, much harder to get rid of.
	Right, right.
	So what we're looking at is minimizing it to the degree that that's possible.
	So, okay, so why don't you take a look at the list?
	Well, I remember it now because we just talked about it.
	So, number 12 is childhood vaccination.
	So, you know, obviously we know that vaccinations are incredibly good.
	We've, as you pointed out, with smallpox, we've gotten rid of smallpox.
	Smallpox was the reason why we started with vaccinations.
	It was, you know, probably from before 1900, we estimate that one in seven people of everyone who's ever lived on the planet died from smallpox.
	And basically we got rid of it.
	It killed about 300 million in the 20th century.
	And then we got rid of it.
	Last documented case was 1978.
	This is an amazing achievement.
	We estimate if we hadn't gotten rid of it.
	Hopefully there's no lab in Wuhan that's re-cooking it up.
	That's true.
	Oh, now you just left me with that bad image in my head.
	Anyway, so fundamentally, if we hadn't gotten rid of it, we estimate that every year we would have about 5 million people dying from smallpox.
	That's just an incredible achievement.
	We've gotten rid of a lot of measles.
	So we give kids measles vaccinations.
	By all means, please get your measles vaccination.
	There's a few people who don't get it, and that's a very bad idea.
	It saves literally millions of children's lives.
	We have pertussis and tetanus, and we have lots of other things that we're vaccinating against.
	We're increasingly starting to vaccinate against a lot of other things.
	You probably haven't heard, or maybe haven't heard about, rotaviruses.
	So, you know, the major part of why a lot of children get diarrhea.
	If you get rotavirus vaccinations, you can actually reduce the amount of diarrhea and also reduce the number of kids that die.
	Great investment.
	We're also starting to vaccinate against stuff that only happens far into the future.
	So, for instance, hepatitis B. That's not something that kids die from now, but if you vaccinate now, it means they avoid getting...
	Chronic liver disease and eventually die from liver cancer when they become old.
	If you vaccinate against human papillomavirus, HPV, you avoid especially girls getting cervical cancer.
	These are all great investments, and what we show is if you actually spent An extra $1.7 million.
	This is what Gavi, the Global Alliance for a Vaccine, they're projecting that they could do more into the future.
	So they're already vaccinated on a lot of people.
	Did you say million or billion?
	So billion.
	Yes, 1.7 billion.
	It's not that cheap.
	Yeah.
	But if you did that, you could save an extra half a million kids dying every year.
	Kids, a few old people as well, right?
	From the hepatitis B and so on.
	So the point here being, again, you could get $48 back on each dollar spent.
	The beauty of this is, again, it's something we know how to do.
	It's not rocket science.
	It's very, very simple to do.
	So, again, I've basically given you an outline of 12 amazing things.
	And these are, you know, I hope they're sort of interesting stories and they sort of give us both a perspective of how far we've come, but also how the poorest part of the world still needs to come further.
	And we know how to do this for $35 billion in total.
	So it's $41 billion, but $6 billion is in consumer costs.
	So these are the costs of, you know, you don't get to enjoy your tobacco costs.
	That you need to go to a clinic and actually take a bus ticket, but it's not something we need public resources for.
	$35 billion.
	And you could get benefits so you could save 4.2 million people's lives every year.
	That's across the 12.
	That's across the 12.
	And you could get economic benefits of $1.1 trillion.
	So that's about $1 per person per day in the poor part of the world.
	For $35 billion.
	So again, what I would love to see is that we engage Global Affairs Canada, that's not what it's called anymore, USAID, GIZ, the Japanese government, but also all governments in the world and all good people of will.
	And if there's somebody out there listening who have a billion dollars, that's what you should be spending your money on.
	That's the kind of thing where we could make an incredible amount of impact at very low cost.
	Well, you know, there is obviously this hunger.
	Perhaps more particular, particularly in the developed world, perhaps because people now have the luxury of contemplating such things, to be engaged in some enterprise that is aimed at some transcendent good, let's say.
	And I see the climate apocalyptic catastrophizing as a form of religious striving.
	I think it's...
	Unsophisticated and ill-aimed and contaminated with a fair bit of malevolence.
	But by the same token, I see the reason that it's attractive to young people, as we mentioned earlier, is that there is some sense that while you should atone for your privilege, we are rich in the West, And some of that's a consequence of our own diligence driving forward, but some of it's a consequence of being arbitrarily born in a favorable place.
	And so I think everyone feels that there's something morally incumbent upon them to return in proportion to what they've received, and then that's channeled into a kind of apocalyptic hysteria.
	That's unfortunate and produces kickback effects that aren't good.
	I mean, correct me if you think I'm wrong, but I look at Germany now and I think, well, look, guys, you're hyper-concerned about the planet.
	You've reduced that to carbon.
	You've put in place these incredibly expensive energy proposals that have quintupled the cost of energy, roughly speaking.
	Made it much more unreliable.
	Made Germany much more dependent on single points of failure like Russia for distribution and supply.
	But worst of all, perhaps, also increased the pollution that's produced by the energy-generating enterprises rather than made it better.
	And that just seems like a really bad strategy, right?
	It doesn't even succeed by the criteria laid down by the people who are aiming at the outcome.
	And I look at your...
	Strategy, which is very low cost.
	And I think, well, here's a place where everyone could have the opportunity to contribute in a dozen ways, all of which are, I think, self-evidently good.
	We could argue about the details of implementation.
	And, you know, you mentioned, for example, on the immigration front that there are political complexities that have to be taken into account there.
	But mostly you're...
	Propositions were, well, let's make our immigration policy somewhat more intelligent, which is not that radical a solution.
	And I can't see why people couldn't be on board with this if, well, and I do think mostly it's ignorance that's stopping it from happening, right?
	I mean, we've really only been wrestling with these large-scale global problems Conceptually, since probably, what, the early 1960s?
	It's only 60 years.
	It's not that surprising.
	We're not that good at it yet.
	And so… I also think it's another thing.
	I mean, fundamentally, what is it that you read about in the papers?
	You read about stuff that really seems scary.
	Yes.
	And scary stuff is not that 1.5 million people die from tuberculosis.
	Because they did that for the last 50 years.
	It doesn't seem like...
	And oh, it's not...
	None I know of.
	So it feels like it's far away and it's not really...
	But it doesn't seem farther away than climate change.
	Well, but climate change has this...
	And I think climate change is this one very, very prominent sort of building block of the same kind of thing.
	It seems like this could actually hit you and certainly your children.
	Right, and weather is also local.
	Yes, it's being portrayed as something that is negatively affecting you right here now, and it could become the end of the world.
	And look, that makes sense.
	If climate change or something else really was the end of the world, if it was a meteor hurtling towards Earth that would destroy us all in 10 years if we don't do something about it, We should do nothing else than think about that meteor, right?
	Because nothing else would matter.
	I think a lot of people actually think about climate in that way.
	And if you do that, it kind of makes sense.
	Yes, if you accept the apocalyptic nightmare.
	It's wrong because that's not what the UN Climate Panel is telling us.
	It is one of many problems.
	that the world needs to fix.
	And unfortunately, it turns out that most of the things that we can do, as you pointed out, in Germany, you end up spending an enormous amount of money to do a little bit of good.
	Well, I would actually argue, certainly on the climate front, they have made it a little bit better, but very little better at very high cost.
	And the air pollution, for a variety of reasons, have come down in almost all rich countries, just simply because of regulation.
	Air pollution is only weakly related to carbon emissions, fundamentally because it's about putting a catalytic converter on your car.
	It's about making sure, oh, by the way, that's not one we got right about not having diesel cars.
	We obviously switched to diesel cars because we're worried about climate.
	That turned out to be a very bad deal.
	You know, those kinds of things.
	Fundamentally, I think it's not a discussion between people who want to do stupid things versus people who want to do good things.
	It's more a question of people who want to do spectacular things, which often end up being fairly ineffective.
	That is, they'll do very little good at really, really high cost.
	Remember, changing the entire energy system in order to help people 100 years from now is not...
	of helping compared to something where you, I don't know, give them a jab and then they don't die or get the maternal, the pregnant moms, a slightly more encompassing vitamin pill.
	Those kinds of things, they don't seem as majestic, if you will, but they just happen to be much, much more effective.
	And so again, I would love to see if we can't make it such that the world can start being a little more sort of, I want to do something that actually is really good rather than I want to be the guy who stands up for the thing that has the most media attention.
	I was very curious.
	We had the SDG, so every year in Denmark, people meet with all the politicians at one island, and it's a very fun thing, and there's lots of talks.
	All kinds of things, and you get to see, you know, politicians right up close and people you typically just see on TV and stuff.
	It's a very good sort of setup.
	One year, it was on the SDGs, and they actually invited me, which a lot of people got very annoyed about.
	But, you know, so they also had these 17, so there's 17 cross-cutting goals for the SDGs, and they're like, no hunger, no disease, you know, better and Employment, climate change, that kind of thing.
	And then people could put in, I think it was pebbles, to show what they wanted.
	And, you know, there was like, a little bit, little bit, little bit, climate, boom!
	Just totally overfull, and then everything.
	And I think, you know...
	It's a niche issue, you know?
	I get it.
	If you're rich, you're not worried about tuberculosis.
	You're not worried about poverty.
	You're not worried about...
	And then if you really think this is the end of the world, this is the thing that you're going to focus on.
	I think, so the way I'm looking at this is much more about saying, look, I get that there are all these things that you want to do, and surely climate is not the only thing, and we need to make sure that you have sort of an adequate understanding of how bad it is.
	It's a problem, not the end of the world.
	But surely we should also do something about, you know, corruption.
	Surely we should also do something about world peace.
	Surely we should do something about all these things.
	Then we also need to recognize...
	We're not.
	We're doing really badly on both climate and on corruption and on world peace and all these other things.
	So we're fighting against people's desire to make a complex situation as simple as possible.
	So you collapse it to a single variable and then you have a single pathway to moral virtue.
	We're fighting against The desire, the narcissistic desire for unearned moral virtue on that front, because then you can put yourself forward as the, let's say, carbon dioxide savior and you've done all the work.
	We're fighting against the fact that negative apocalyptic information garners disproportionate attention.
	That's a deep psychological problem because we are tilted more towards observing negative information and you're trying to put forward a positive view and that is a harder thing to manage.
	You have to tell a very good story in that case because you don't have that immediate cachet of the apocalyptic, right?
	And then we're also fighting against the fact that...
	To walk through the material that you have been providing for us, for example, today, and this has been condensed a lot, and it's taken decades to collapse, it basically took three hours.
	And so that's, you know, that's more exposure to issues of international governance likely than most people get in their whole life, right?
	Well, I know that people think about political issues an average of something approximating three minutes a week.
	Right?
	Because, I mean, people like you and I... Oh my God, so we've just taken up the whole...
	The whole lifetime.
	The whole lifetime of political thought.
	But...
	Sorry, guys.
	People do have a glancing familiarity with such things, partly because they're properly concerned with the local domain.
	But that doesn't mean that...
	I don't think that that means that there's any reason for despair.
	My sense is, and I think we've seen that in the collaborative ventures that we've undertaken too, is that when you provide people with the information, there is incremental movement towards appreciating it.
	So what do you see happening in the immediate future?
	You have this book coming out.
	Tell us again what that is.
	So, the book basically makes this argument with all the wonderful graphs.
	I'm a statistician.
	I think those kinds of graphs where you see how we used to die a lot, and now we die a lot less, but this is mostly for Sub-Saharan Africa, and here's how you can fix it.
	Those kinds of things.
	Great stories.
	I think a lot of people will like it, and it'll make it much easier to sort of get the idea of saying...
	This is where I really want to spend my time and my effort in making the world a better place.
	So that's called Best Things First.
	You're right, and that's coming out mid-April.
	Best Things First.
	Yes.
	And then I think what will happen is, because we're asking for so little money, So $35 billion.
	I can actually envision, so I don't know if you remember, somebody sort of suggested to Elon Musk that he could get rid of world hunger for $6 billion.
	It was somewhat of a misinterpretation from the World Food Program, and it turned out there was a lot less.
	He basically said, hey, guys, if I can eradicate world hunger for $6 billion, I'm willing to do it.
	Show me how to do it.
	And then it turned out, oh, we can't quite do that.
	And, you know, so I'm not going to offer Elon that deal because it's not available.
	We can't do something that good, but he could, you know, save, you know, if he spent $1.1 billion a year on malaria, he could save 2,000 people every year.
	Right.
	He could do all of these things, and, you know, he could do any combination of this.
	And, of course, Elon Musk is just sort of the most visible guy.
	Maybe we need to set up a reward program, like the Nobel, one for each of these 12 domains, where there's one person a year working on each of these 12 things who gets recognized, you know?
	For what?
	Well, I mean, these things, it's good to do good and it's good to reward people who are doing good.
	That helps expand the story.
	And it seems to me that looking for cardinal contributors on each front, I mean, people are looking...
	Especially people who've been hyper-fortunate.
	They are often seriously looking for a way to provide compensation for their disproportionate advantage, let's say.
	And to provide people with a pathway to that that was real.
	I should also just say, this whole project is funded by the Gates Foundation.
	And I also talked to Gates himself about this.
	So, you know, he clearly does a lot of these things, and he would probably also want to contribute to this.
	But there are lots of, you know...
	Very wealthy people.
	But I think it also, it's incumbent on us.
	We spend $175 billion on development aid.
	And a lot of this goes to nice things, but honestly, not nearly as effective things as what we're, you know, some of it goes to very, very effective things.
	We shouldn't just dismantle the whole thing.
	But a lot of it also goes to, you know, and I've seen this in a lot of developing countries where, you know, a lot of rich people come down and say, you worry about the climate, right?
	We'd like to give you a place to, you know, we'll collect the methane from your local garbage dump and get you some energy with that.
	And they're like, yeah, that was not quite what we wanted, but if you're going to give it to us for free, we'll take it rather than say no.
	But the sense is, this was not what we would have chosen ourselves.
	And I think in some sense we have a moral requirement to come out and say, maybe we should make sure we give the stuff to the developing world.
	Do you think these 12 steps, they fit into that category?
	These are programs that the developing countries would be thrilled to participate in if it was on the table?
	Absolutely.
	Again, I think if you ask any one politician, they would say some of these 12 and then some really dumb things.
	Right.
	So, you know, for instance, in India, one thing that they love to do, politicians, is pharma loan waivers.
	So, yeah.
	Basically, they say, you know what?
	You guys loaned a lot of money.
	I'm going to waiver all of that.
	We're just going to pay it off for you.
	Which is obviously very popular and incredibly bad idea.
	Partly, it's incredibly costly for the government to pay off those loans.
	Because you now know that the government will probably do it next time, you'll take up really bad loans.
	Plus you punish the people who actually paid the loans off.
	Exactly.
	And the banks will increasingly not give loans to small hole farmers because they know that they're going to be forgiven.
	But the government will be really late in paying it off.
	So they'll actually lose a lot of money.
	So it has all kinds of bad impacts.
	So politicians, being politicians, and I understand they want to get re-elected, they'll also be doing some bad proposals.
	But they will also want to embrace some of these great things.
	And we should all, as individuals, say this is some of the things we need to be doing.
	So what do you think people who are watching and listening, apart from being more generally informed about the fact that these options exist, and also hearing a narrative that isn't It's sort of multidimensionally apocalyptic, which I think is quite interesting.
	Well, you're saying, look, here's 12 bins of serious problems.
	These are serious problems.
	Tuberculosis could get...
	But they're not apocalyptic.
	No, no, no.
	They're terrible.
	Right, right.
	But if you were also paranoid, you could see apocalyptic possibilities emerging from them, too.
	Like, a really decent antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis would be quite the bloody catastrophe.
	Right.
	So, I mean, there are places where positive feedback loops could be developing on any of these fronts.
	So what I'm pointing out is that there's many serious problems for us to contend with.
	I would love for people to take away from this conversation that if I want to be a good person, These are some of the 12.
	Just pick one.
	And say, whenever people next time say, we should do something about plastic straws in the ocean, or we should do something about climate change, absolutely, but we haven't been doing very well on these things, right?
	I actually have this really, really simple, incredibly effective policy proposal.
	Shouldn't we do that first?
	Right.
	Right, so you just have those arguments at hand.
	I think the argument is not to say no to everything else.
	It's just to say, of all the things we can do, shouldn't we do the very most effective things first?
	And so you ask me what's gonna happen next.
	So the UN is gonna get together in September and sort of say, yay, we're halfway on our sustainable development goals.
	And then in a more soft voice, they're also gonna say, and we're not doing very well.
	Right.
	And so if we can get enough attention to these 12 things and the fact that this will cost about $35 billion a year, I actually think, and remember, it's actually, it's a ramping up, so it's about, it starts at $25 billion and ends at $50 billion for a variety of reasons.
	So, yeah, I actually think we could get most governments on board for saying, we're going to promise this.
	Remember, we've already promised all this unrealistic stuff, so why not also promise this?
	Given that the incremental cost is low.
	I think we could actually get people to say, come September, we have badly screwed up all the promises that we've given the world.
	Maybe we should just do this extra little push, $35 billion, and actually do an amazing amount of good.
	More good than we've done in a very, very long time at very low cost.
	And we know this is some of the most effective stuff we could possibly do in the world.
	The doable doesn't.
	The doable doesn't.
	I like that.
	That's the Financial Times.
	We didn't even think of that.
	But yeah, it's a great way of saying, let's do best things first.
	I can't do my own title.
	There you go.
	Best things first.
	Yeah, well, that seems like a good principle.
	All right, Bjorn.
	That was great, man.
	For all of you who've been watching and listening, your time and attention is much appreciated.
	You'll have to keep an eye out for Bjorn's book, Best Things First, mid-April, and then you'll have the arguments at hand in book form, and that's always helpful.
	And thank you.
	To the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating this conversation.
	To the film crew here in Calgary, Alberta.
	That's where we happen to be today.
	Bjorn and I happen to be in the same neck of the woods, so that's good.
	And we'll continue our conversations as we move forward.
	We've got other things cooking on the international development front, which I'm going to be talking about very soon on this YouTube channel, or may have already come out before this does.
	So, well, and I'm happy to do anything I can to facilitate communication about the Doable Dozen and Best Things First.
	So, good to talk to you today, man.
	Likewise.
	I'm actually writing 35 papers around the world on all of these topics.
	So, the Financial Post in Canada, but the biggest daily in India and Indonesia and many other places in the world.
	And so, we should be sharing that every week.
	Yes, absolutely, we'll do that.
	That's the short version of each one of these.
	So 800 words, you get the gist of every one of them.
	Yeah, and you said you've been getting a lot of interest in newspapers in the poorest half of the world because they do see that the 12 proposals that you put forward are- Of course, they actually care about these.
	Right, right, right, right.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, and it's also necessary for us to...
	One thing, maybe we could close with this.
	One thing that's really disturbed me, like truly disturbed me, in the last year has been this insistence, this apparent neocolonial insistence on the part of wealthy people in the West that we just can't afford to have the developed world strive to attain the same levels of security and opportunity that we've reached in the West.
	And first of all, I don't think there's any empirical evidence for that.
	I think it's a pretty damn weak claim On the factual front, given that if you make people richer, they start caring about the environment, plus their children don't die and get to be educated, which seems to be a plus, but it's also morally reprehensible.
	I do not understand why we think it's in our proper moral purview to be saying to people in the bottom half of the developing world that You know, well, turns out if you industrialize, there's some costs and the environment bears some of those costs.
	And, well, we just don't think that you should do it and we're not going to help you do it.
	And I don't see that as moral in the least.
	In fact, quite the contrary.
	It's terrible.
	It's terrible.
	You're absolutely right.
	We're doing it.
	Again, I understand this from the point of view, if you really believe the end of the world is nigh.
	And, you know, global warming is the leading issue.
	Yeah.
	Then it may make sense to say, I'm sorry, everyone has to just stay poor.
	Yeah, you might want to start that with yourself.
	Yes, yes.
	And that's, of course, why this won't work.
	Because you can't even convince your own countries to become poor.
	Right.
	And you certainly can't convince the poorer countries to say, yeah, sure, we'll stay poor.
	So it's not going to happen.
	But partly, just simply making it a little harder for poor countries to get out of poverty.
	Yeah.
	Is, in my view, immoral.
	But, you know, fundamentally we need to get people to realize, yes, climate change is a real problem, but it's not this catastrophic end of the world.
	There is nothing in the UN Climate Panel, the new reports that came out from 2021-2022, these 1,600 pages of...
	There's no apocalyptic cliff.
	There's no apocalyptic...
	Apocalypse in there.
	There is some problems that we will face, and most of these problems will be much alleviated by people not being in poverty.
	So, you know, if a hurricane hits, if it hits Florida, yeah, it costs a lot of money, but it basically don't kill very many people.
	If it hits in Guatemala, the same hurricane, it'll kill lots of people and shut down the economy.
	That's the point of being rich or being not poor, that you're actually much more resilient.
	So again, we need to get people to realize this is one of many problems, and it's unfortunately one of the places where you can spend a lot of money and actually have very little impact.
	Whereas these 12 things, you can spend little money and have an enormous amount of impact.
	So again, My point is not to say that we shouldn't spend money on all of these things and make sure that we try to make a better world.
	All the pet projects you want, as long as you do the things that actually work.
	First.
	Right.
	First.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Good.
	Hey, thanks.
	You bet, man.
	You bet.
	Yep.
	Yep.
	Well, and again, thanks for everyone watching and listening.
	And, well, that's that, guys.
	And onward we go.
	Thank you all.
	Hello, everyone.

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