Aug. 21, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| So, you're not going to solve it with this incredibly costly and very, very ineffective policy. | ||
| The way you're going to solve it is like we've solved all other problems through innovation. | ||
| Remember back in the 1950s, Los Angeles was a terribly polluted place. | ||
| It was mostly because of cars and a geological, you know, it put in a basin and stuff. | ||
| But fundamentally, the point was not to tell everyone in Los Angeles, I'm sorry, could you walk instead? | ||
| Which would never work, right? | ||
| They do not walk in LA. | ||
| No, you're not going to take people's cars away. | ||
| The solution was this. | ||
| You know, tiny technological advance called the catalytic converter, innovated in 1978. | ||
| You plug it on the end tailpipe, and then you can drive much longer and pollute much less. | ||
| Yeah, it costs a couple hundred dollars, but you've actually managed to convince almost everyone across the world, this is a good idea. | ||
| And it solved a very large portion of the problem. | ||
| Likewise, the U.S. | ||
| is the country that's caught most emissions, CO2 emissions, over the last 10 years. | ||
| How? | ||
| Not because of Obama or Trump. | ||
| But because of fracking, you basically inadvertently made gas so much cheaper that most people switch from coal to gas and gas emits about half as much CO2 as coal. | ||
| So you solved a large part of the climate problem through innovation. | ||
| That's how we do it. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus and | ||
| author of Best Things First, the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest and our | ||
| global SDG promises, Bjorn Lomberg. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey, it's great to be here. | ||
| Bjorn, I checked right before we started. | ||
| It's been over two years, which is absolutely crazy, since the last time that we spoke. | ||
| I don't know how that happened. | ||
| But I do know that in these two years, the climate people, the catastrophization people, have all increasingly gone crazier. | ||
| But before we dissect them, for the people that may not know you, can you give me a one-minute bio on what gets you to doing all the things you're doing and writing a book like this? | ||
| And then we'll take it from there. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| What I focus on is really to say, look, we don't have unlimited funds. | ||
| We have limited resources, but there's so many things we'd like to do. | ||
| Why don't we focus on where we can spend money and do the most good first? | ||
| That's both true for climate. | ||
| So let's do the smart stuff and not the stupid stuff on climate. | ||
| But it's also true for all the other world's problems. | ||
| Remember, we promised to fix hunger and poverty and education and all the other problems in the world. | ||
| And what this book really does is try to say there are some Amazingly smart policies that we can do. | ||
| Let's do those first. | ||
| Whatever else you'd love to do, let's spend money on that. | ||
| But let's just get those, you know, it's about $35 billion globally and make the world an impressively much better place. | ||
| Right, so basically, I mean, the thesis of the book, you think for about $35 billion we can fix pretty much the major stuff. | ||
| I assume by your background there that you think some of this includes just some plants you could probably get at Home Depot just to keep the air in your house clean, huh? | ||
| Please give me more plants, yeah. | ||
| No, so we're not going to fix all problems, but we're going to fix a majority of problems. | ||
| And what we were essentially showing is, and we worked with more than 100 of the world's top economists and several Nobel laureates, to try to find out what do we already know works. | ||
| And what we find is for $35 billion a year, that's not nothing. | ||
| I mean, I don't think you have it. | ||
| I certainly don't have it. | ||
| I'm doing all right, but that might be pushing it. | ||
| But in the global setting of things, that is really couch change. | ||
| For $35 billion a year, we could save 4.2 million people from dying each and every year. | ||
| And we could make the poor half of the world about $1.1 trillion better off. | ||
| This is probably the very best thing we could do for the world. | ||
| And that's why I'm saying, let's at least do those best things first. | ||
| And that's also why you're a bit of a controversial character, because you're trying to give solutions that are different than what seem to be the solutions given to us by say the WEF and the UN and much of our Western governments and all that. | ||
| So I want to spend most of this conversation talking about those solutions, but I thought why don't we get some of the people and organizations out of the way that are causing the problems. | ||
| Like, when you see the WEF and the 2030 project, all of these things, the Green New Deal here in America, all of these giant expenditures that will massively change things, do you look at them all as sort of, these are just complete nonsensical boondoggle pipe dreams that will never work? | ||
| Like, is there anything good in, is there any good nugget in any of these things? | ||
| Well, first of all, there's the amazing good that actually shows that a lot of people want to do good. | ||
| They really want to be part of something that makes the world better. | ||
| Now, there is a real problem with many of the things they identify, but very often it ends up being a very ineffective way to try to tackle the problem. | ||
| Take heatwaves, which is in the conversation right now. | ||
| Yes, we're going to see more heatwaves because of climate change, and climate change is a real problem. | ||
| But we need to get a sense of proportion. | ||
| First of all, remember, many, many more people die from cold than from heat. | ||
| And so we also need to remember to actually help all the people who suffer from cold, which is mostly about getting them cheap energy access. | ||
| But also, if you want to help the people who are suffering from more heat, and we should, It's mostly about getting people access to air conditioning. | ||
| It's about having them get cheap electricity and of course also make cities more livable. | ||
| One of the ways you could do that is by making greener, making more water features, making them lighter. | ||
| Los Angeles and many other cities are experimenting with painting the rooftops white or painting the tarmac white and that reflects a lot of the energy away and actually makes these cities much cooler. | ||
| The point here is Those sorts of solutions will actually help right now at very low cost and help real people, whereas much of the argument that you have with these, you know, we should all go net zero, will have huge costs. | ||
| We're talking 5, 10 trillion dollars. | ||
| This is more than what most countries spend on education or even health care. | ||
| And even if you did it, it would only mean that temperatures would rise, but not quite as much. | ||
| That's no way to help people. | ||
| So my point here is to say, let's focus on the smart solution that'll actually help. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think one of the problems is, as I often play clips of these people, the elites who seem to be pushing a lot of these policies and, you know, they don't want you to have your stove and they're, you know, they don't want you to have this hot water heater or whatever it might be. | ||
| We know they're on their private jets and all of these things. | ||
| And by the way, I don't begrudge them any of those things, except for the fact that they're trying to make sure none of us get those luxury items. | ||
| But when you say, and I quote, climate change is real, I know a certain amount of my audience is going to go, wait a minute. | ||
| We've just had it, even hearing that. | ||
| Because they're so upset by hearing John Kerry, and they're so upset by watching Leonardo DiCaprio act one way on his yacht and helicopter, and then preach another way. | ||
| So when you say climate change is real, what do you actually mean by that? | ||
| Meaning that obviously the climate is changing, but do you mean man-made? | ||
| And how much of that is something that we can actually affect? | ||
| So, again, I work with economists, so we're looking at what are the smart solutions. | ||
| I have read, unlike, I think, a lot of people, almost all, I don't advise anyone to do that, it's very, very boring, but all of the UN Climate Panel reports, and they're reasonably sensible all the way through. | ||
| They're really trying to tell you what is the best scientific evidence. | ||
| And the short version is we're pumping out more CO2 mostly from fossil fuels. | ||
| CO2 is one of the many greenhouse gases that trap heat and make the world a little bit warmer. | ||
| This all other things equal is going to make more problems than it's going to make solutions, | ||
| simply because we built our entire society on what the temperature was the last 100, 200 years. | ||
| If it got colder or if it gets warmer, which is probably going to be because of global warming, that will incur a cost. | ||
| This is not the end of the world as it's being sold. | ||
| It is a problem. | ||
| So economists, and the only climate economist to win the Nobel Prize, William Nordhaus, estimate that by the end of the century, if we do nothing, which is stupid and we shouldn't do and probably also implausible, but even if we did nothing, the cost by the end of the century would be equivalent to losing about 4% of our GDP. | ||
| Now remember, by then we'll be much richer, the UN estimate, we'll be about 450% richer, as rich as we are today. | ||
| So what this really means is because of global warming, if we do nothing, it will feel like we'll only be 434% as rich by the end of the century rather than 450. | ||
| That's not the end of the world. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| And that's why I'm saying, look, if it's the end of the world, of course you should spend everything to fix it. | ||
| But that's not what this is. | ||
| It's a problem and we should spend money smartly on this problem. | ||
| But also remember there are lots of other problems that are much bigger for most people. | ||
| So before we get to some of those specific 12 solutions, what would you say to the people who are just sort of skeptical that we can do anything about this? | ||
| Meaning like, so from an American perspective, for example, that we're so sort of inefficient, our politics is so broken, these people can't build a road much properly, or at least in a cost-effective way. | ||
| Uh, that the idea that they could solve any of these things is completely crazy, and then you hear people like AOC say, you know, we only have 12 years left on Earth, I think that was about three years ago, so now we've got nine, and it's like, if you think AOC can solve any of your problems, much less solve climate problems, you know, I got a bridge to sell you. | ||
| So I think a lot of the intuition is right, that we are essentially embarking on something that's going to be so phenomenally costly that most countries are actually not going to deliver on this. | ||
| I live in the EU, I actually worry a little bit. | ||
| The EU is so good at doing stuff they promised that we might actually do it despite the fact that it's going to be phenomenally costly. | ||
| But certainly in the US and most other places, you'll simply elect other politicians once they really start hurting. | ||
| That's how democracies work, and that's probably really good. | ||
| So you're not going to solve it with this incredibly costly and very, very ineffective policy. | ||
| The way you're going to solve it is like we've solved all other problems through innovation. | ||
| Remember back in the 1950s, Los Angeles was a terribly polluted place. | ||
| It was mostly because of cars and a geological, you know, it put in a basin and stuff. | ||
| But fundamentally, the point was not to tell everyone in Los Angeles, I'm sorry, could you walk instead? | ||
| Which would never work, right? | ||
| They do not walk in LA. | ||
| No, you're not going to take people's cars away. | ||
| The solution was this. | ||
| You know, tiny technological advance called the catalytic converter, innovated in 1978. | ||
| You plug it on the end tailpipe, and then you can drive much longer and pollute much less. | ||
| Yeah, it costs a couple of hundred dollars, but you've actually managed to convince almost everyone across the world, this is a good idea. | ||
| And it solved a very large portion of the problem. | ||
| Likewise, the US is the country that's caught most emissions, CO2 emissions, over the last 10 years. | ||
| How? | ||
| Not because of Obama or Trump. | ||
| But because of fracking. | ||
| You basically inadvertently made gas so much cheaper that most people switch from coal to gas and gas emits about half as much CO2 as coal. | ||
| So you solved a large part of the climate problem. | ||
| Through innovation. | ||
| That's how we do it. | ||
| Remember, if we can innovate green energy to be cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone will switch. | ||
| Not rich, well-meaning Americans or Europeans, but also the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans, who are going to be emitting most of the CO2 in this century. | ||
| So I totally get your views, sort of reluctance. | ||
| We are trying to solve this very ineffectively and incredibly expensively, which probably means we won't solve it at all. | ||
| But there is a smart way and it's called innovation. | ||
| That's exactly why I wanted to have you on because I know even for me in the last year, especially as I've watched so many of these globalist organizations with these crazy projects and then the hypocrisy and literally the gas stove thing here in America, all of this nonsense, even I have become more skeptical in a way that I don't want to be blindly skeptical. | ||
| I want to be skeptical with some knowledge of what's going on, | ||
| which is exactly why we have you on. | ||
| So let's talk about some of those solutions, because you lay out these 12 solutions. | ||
| So give me, what's like the easiest thing that we can start doing now? | ||
| Probably some of which we're doing to some degree. | ||
| So I'll tell you two. | ||
| One is to save lives. | ||
| It's asking, I have 12 great solutions. | ||
| You're asking me to pick my favorite child. | ||
| I'm not going to do that. | ||
| But yeah, I am going to give you two. | ||
| One is to save lives. | ||
| So one thing that I think most people don't recognize is that each year, tuberculosis still | ||
| kills 1.4, 1.5 million people. | ||
| Last year, it was bigger again than COVID. | ||
| COVID took the top place for infectious disease killer in 2020 and 2021. | ||
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But otherwise, it's been tuberculosis. | |
| We in the rich world fixed this more than half a century ago. | ||
| But if you actually go back, tuberculosis was a terrible killer. | ||
| This is why Sabine and Moulin Rouge died from tuberculosis. | ||
| A fourth of everyone who lived in the 1800s in Europe and the US died from tuberculosis. | ||
| This was a terrible killer. | ||
| It killed probably about a billion people over the last 200 years. | ||
| But we figured out a way to do it. | ||
| Now we don't have a problem. | ||
| But most poor countries is not that place. | ||
| And there's a very simple way. | ||
| It's unfortunately one of the reasons why it's hard to do. | ||
| You actually have to take your medication for half a year, and most people know that it's hard to just take your medication for two weeks. | ||
| But there's a lot of ways to, you know, sort of gamify it, get sort of Tuberculosis Anonymous, where everybody gets together once a month and say, yes, I took my medication all the way through. | ||
| You know, you gamify it and give people a carton of orange juice, that kind of thing. | ||
| And it may seem a little weird that you have to pay people to do it, but if you do that, if you make sure that they don't have tuberculosis, they don't pass it on to another 10 to 20 people. | ||
| And this is how we solve much of the problem. | ||
| You also need to screen many more people. | ||
| We've investigated, and there's lots of models that show, how much is this going to cost? | ||
| It's probably going to cost about $6 billion a year. | ||
| So again, not nothing. | ||
| But we can save almost a million people from dying over the next half century. | ||
| Every year. | ||
| So this is one of the things where we say, and we're slightly crude economists, we go in and say, how much will it cost and how much good will it do? | ||
| So we give you a benefit-cost ratio. | ||
| We try to estimate for every dollar spent, how much good will you end up doing? | ||
| Turns out if you do it on tuberculosis, for every dollar spent, you'll do $46 of social good. | ||
| That's just an incredible opportunity. | ||
| So do you guys bring these ideas to, say, a guy like Bill Gates, who's got the billions, who seemingly wants to help, you know, by his own words, would say he wants to help the people of Africa and help the world? | ||
| Do you bring these ideas to them? | ||
| And then what do they say? | ||
| Yes, we both talked to Bill Gates. | ||
| Actually, the Gates Foundation paid for this project. | ||
| But we talked to Bill Gates. | ||
| I wrote an op-ed together with him. | ||
| We talked to USAID and other organizations. | ||
| But crucially, we also talked to a lot of poor country governments. | ||
| Who obviously should also pony up some of this money because it's their own citizens who are dying. | ||
| And much of this is they're dying because they're not the rich people in the poor part of the world. | ||
| If you're rich in the poor part of the world, you don't get tuberculosis and even if you do, you don't die from it. | ||
| But you know, the slum populations, it's the migrant populations, it's the minors, it's the prison populations. | ||
| But the problem is this percolate all the way through societies. | ||
| So we try to take all of these arguments and make people aware that here's a very cheap way to make the world much, much better. | ||
| And yes, they say, Oh, that's really interesting. | ||
| Now they're not going to say, Oh, sure. | ||
| So here's $6 billion, make it go way beyond. | ||
| First of all, that's not what I do. | ||
| I'm an academic. | ||
| I wouldn't know what to do with 60 people. | ||
| And there's a lot of organizations that are actually really good at this. | ||
| So you should give it to your national healthcare systems and the Stop TPE campaign and many others in those countries. | ||
| But the point is, we're trying to make it easier for politicians and for philanthropists | ||
| and for development organizations to spend right, to spend it where it really matters. | ||
| So, all right, before we get to that second one that you like out of these 12, | ||
| and then we'll get to as many as possible, how do you make sure that the mechanisms are in place, | ||
| that these things just don't become what seemingly most government things become, | ||
| which are giant government waste projects? | ||
| We don't, you know, we give money to everybody. | ||
| We never get receipts on anything. | ||
| I think that that's another thing that a lot of people are worried about these days. | ||
| Like, even if you can convince them of some of the risks and why we can do some good things here, they're just like, ah, you know, we're just going to pour money and maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but we just won't know. | ||
| And that's a very correct concern. | ||
| And a lot of the things that we spend money on go to things that make you feel good, things that look good on TV, but have very little effect. | ||
| But we're actually using the best models of things that have already been done, where we showcase, look, if you spend the money here, even though some of it is going to go to waste, that's Probably true almost everywhere in the world. | ||
| And some of it is just going to be spent incompetently. | ||
| That's just the way the world works. | ||
| We've taken that into our calculation, so we're not assuming that this is going to be heroically spent in the very best possible way. | ||
| It's going to be spent reasonably competently, like Education is something everyone agrees both sucks and we should do much more about. | ||
| this because it's much clearer with the other proposal I was going to talk about, namely | ||
| education. Education is something everyone agrees both sucks and we should do much more about, | ||
| right? It especially sucks in the poor part of the world. | ||
| So there's almost half a billion kids in primary school in the poor part of the world. | ||
| We got almost all kids in school, that's great, but they're learning virtually nothing. | ||
| We say that they technically learn to read, but if you ask them this question, so you ask them to read this question, this is a 10-year-old, right? | ||
| VJ has a red hat, blue shirt, and yellow shoes. | ||
| What color is the hat? | ||
| It's red, right? | ||
| But 80% of kids cannot answer this question. | ||
| And it's not because they're dumb. | ||
| It's because they can't actually string all these words together into a meaningful sentence. | ||
| And of course, that means we've technically taught them to read, but they can't actually use it to become more productive and become richer and more resilient and do all the wonderful things. | ||
| It is. | ||
| They haven't actually learned most of the stuff. | ||
| So what we find is you should spend more money on education. | ||
| But this is exactly where you would say, oh, but there's a lot of ways you can spend it badly. | ||
| And that's absolutely true. | ||
| So one example that I give in the book is Indonesia. | ||
| And you know, bless their hearts, they really wanted to do good. | ||
| They basically said, we care so much about education that we're going to double spending on education. | ||
| So they ended up hiring more than a million new teachers. | ||
| They doubled the pay for each of these teachers. | ||
| And because of the way they did it, so they did it in different regions at different times, there's actually a big study that could sort of look at this as a pseudo-random trial, where you could see, well, how much good does this actually do for the schools? | ||
| And it turns out this famous paper is called Double for Nothing, and it basically shows, yes, you spent twice as much money, and there was no impact whatsoever on teaching. | ||
| It's very, very easy to spend money badly on education, and this is true everywhere else, but what we identify are three great ways that are very, very well tested. | ||
| I'm just going to tell you one of them. | ||
| So the problem in most schools, but especially in poor countries, | ||
| is you have 50 kids in this fourth grade. | ||
| They're all 12 years old, but they have wildly different abilities. | ||
| Some of them are far ahead of the teacher. | ||
| Some of them have virtually no clue what's going on. | ||
| And what's a teacher going to do? | ||
| He's going to try to teach somewhere in the middle. | ||
| And some kids are going to be bored. | ||
| Lots of kids are going to be totally lost. | ||
| He should teach each one of these kids at his or her own level. | ||
| But of course, you can't do that if you have 50 kids. | ||
| But if you put each of these kids in front of a tablet with educational software, just one hour a day, this tablet, | ||
| actually the software, will very quickly figure out where exactly are you on this? | ||
| Are you really ahead of this curve or not? | ||
| And teach you at your exact level. | ||
| So the rest of the school will still be this boring old school where most kids will be lost or bored, but one hour a day they'll actually learn. | ||
| And what it turns out, and there's lots of evidence, that for $21 a year per student, they're not going to get the tablet. | ||
| It's going to be shared with a lot of other kids and all that stuff. | ||
| And you also need, you know, solar panels in places where they don't have electricity. | ||
| You need a locker for the tablet so they don't get stolen, all this. | ||
| But it actually turns out that for every year they go to school, they will now learn three years of schooling. | ||
| Now, it's still pretty bad schooling, so it's not like they're not going to be Einsteins just from this. | ||
| But this is a way that we can actually make almost half a billion kids smarter. | ||
| And what that means is that they will, when they become adults, go out and be much more productive and actually make their nations much richer. | ||
| And of course, that will solve a lot of the other problems they have. | ||
| So we estimate this will cost globally about $10 billion. | ||
| So again, not nothing. | ||
| But it will actually generate benefits worth $600 billion each and every year. | ||
| This is just amazing and astounding. | ||
| So instead of spending it badly, we should spend it on this really, really effective way. | ||
| You know it's funny I'm reminded of a Simpsons episode from probably around 1993 where Bart is struggling in school so they put him in the slower class and then he looks at the teacher in the slower class and goes let me get this straight I'm struggling in the other class so now you've made me put me in a slower class how does this make any sense to you people so you're trying to solve that okay so it seems like Between education and tuberculosis, if my math is correct, we're at about 16 billion, which is about half of what you need to fix some of the problems. | ||
| So we've got about eight or nine minutes left. | ||
| Let's plow through a couple others. | ||
| Let's get to that 32. | ||
| Tell you one other, so one that I think amazed me is the fact that maternity, and especially pregnancy, and especially birth, is terribly dangerous. | ||
| So it turns out about 300,000 moms die each year around pregnancy, and about 2.3 million kids die in the first 28 days in their life on Earth. | ||
| And this is not rocket science how we deal with this. | ||
| This is simply about getting the women into facilities. | ||
| So about two-thirds of them give birth in facilities. | ||
| We need to get like 90% of them into facilities and these facilities need to have basic emergency obstetric care. | ||
| This is something the World Health Organization and lots of institutions have shown. | ||
| What will that take? | ||
| It's about having, I don't know, disinfectant? | ||
| You'd imagine that would be sort of obvious, but actually a lot of them don't have a clean water so that you can wash down the surfaces. | ||
| But it's also something so simple as it turns out that about 700,000 kids each year die because they never start breathe. | ||
| So they come out, they're given birth, but then they don't start breathing. | ||
| Now, this also happened in rich countries. | ||
| So about 80% of all kids that come out of the mom, you know, just start breathing right away. | ||
| 15% need this slap in the back to get going. | ||
| But the last 5% don't. | ||
| And, you know, in the rich world, of course, we just simply put a mask over their mouth and put positive air pressure, put it into the lungs, and they go, and then they go. | ||
| And then we save them. | ||
| But we don't have that in about half of all the poor parts of the world. | ||
| This hand pump cost, what, $75? | ||
| And it could probably save 25 lives over its three-year life period. | ||
| That's the kind of thing. | ||
| So there's a whole list of things. | ||
| This will cost about $5 billion again. | ||
| But it will save 166,000 moms from dying each and every year. | ||
| And it will save 1.2 million kids each and every year. | ||
| How are we not doing that? | ||
| So, you know, that's another amazing thing. | ||
| Actually, every dollar spent will deliver $87 worth of good. | ||
| So there's malaria. | ||
| Yeah, you've got me to, I see about 21 million so far. | ||
| We're getting there. | ||
| So, and of course, I'm telling you the sort of more expensive stuff first, because they are really big things. | ||
| Malaria is actually huge. | ||
| It used to be a huge problem around the world. | ||
| It's no longer. | ||
| It's just in Africa. | ||
| There's a lot of reasons for that. | ||
| But we know how to fix it. | ||
| It's simply giving out more of these insecticide-treated bed nets. | ||
| So people will sleep under these nets. | ||
| It both physically makes sure that the mosquitoes can't come in and bite you, and it also kills them off because it has insecticide. | ||
| It is very effective, very simple treatment. | ||
| It'll cost about $1.1 billion a year, and it will save about 300,000 people each and every year. | ||
| Again, a fantastic investment. | ||
| One other thing that I think you'll find incredibly interesting is agricultural research and development. | ||
| So, you know, we worry about the fact that people don't have enough food. | ||
| We also have a part, I'm not going to tell you about that. | ||
| We also talk about how we can get better food to kids, but it turns out a lot of that is very corruption prone, right? | ||
| If you spend a lot of money on food, a lot of people will see that. | ||
| For instance, in India, a lot of merchants will sell you really bad food and then you try to distribute it for free and nobody really wants it because it tastes terrible kind of thing. | ||
| So the best way to deal with this is to just like we talked about before with climate innovation. | ||
| We've had a green revolution back in the 60s and 70s, which basically meant that we could produce maybe twice as much food on the same acre of land. | ||
| Which is a great innovation. | ||
| You just simply make the seed much more productive. | ||
| We need that for all the stuff they grow in the poor part of the world. | ||
| So that's sorghum and cassava and all these things that you probably haven't heard of. | ||
| But we need the same green revolution there. | ||
| We estimate this would cost about 5.5 billion dollars a year, but it would generate much more food. | ||
| But that would both means the price would be lower for people who live in the cities, but it would mean that the farmers could produce much more, so the farmers would also get richer, everyone would win, and we'd avoid about a hundred million people starving each and every year. | ||
| Going on that for a moment, how much tension do you see between big cities and rural areas these days? | ||
| You know, I was in Cali before, where there was always this incredible tension between, say, Los Angeles, where I was. | ||
| Obviously, you have, you know, eight million people, something like that, in a relatively small area. | ||
| Then you have the whole north of the state, which is all the agricultural land. | ||
| They were always fighting for more water. | ||
| The people of L.A. | ||
| wanted the water. | ||
| Just the general, like, day-to-day living of who gets what. | ||
| Oh, and look, cities get a lot more money everywhere because that's where the power is. | ||
| That's where the politicians live. | ||
| That's who runs the media and everything else. | ||
| And so in that sense, what we try to pick up is a lot of the great investments are in poor areas because that's where you can save people really cheaply. | ||
| So one thing is, for instance, more childhood immunization. | ||
| And that's especially bad. | ||
| So we got about 80, 90% vaccinated most places around the world. | ||
| Measles, for instance. | ||
| Great idea. | ||
| Don't skimp on your measles vaccination rate. | ||
| It's just a terribly deadly disease that used to kill about 800,000. | ||
| Now we're down to 80,000. | ||
| But you still need to get more people vaccinated. | ||
| Otherwise, you're going to get these epidemics again. | ||
| And getting the last ones out in the sticks is going to be more expensive. | ||
| But even then, we find with a much more expensive cost, it's going to cost about... Sorry, I'm just looking at the cost because I can't just remember those. 1.7 billion dollars a year, but it's going to save about half a | ||
| million kids each and every year. | ||
| So the benefit cost ratio is about 101. So again, we try to identify different things that are incredibly good. | ||
| We simply said, we're going to identify the best buys. | ||
| And we put the bar at 15, which is somewhat arbitrary, but it's something our Nobels did, just simply for saying, look, these are the so-no-brainers. | ||
| Everybody should just agree this is something we should be doing. | ||
| How worried are you when you talk about vaccines now, because of everything that happened with COVID, you know, these bells go off in my head about vaccines and how they get in people's arms and that the pharmaceutical companies, you know, they have no ability to be sued, all of these things, that now people are skeptical of things, say, a measles vaccine that really very few people were skeptical of, say, five years ago. | ||
| Now you just say vaccine, and now it's setting off bells on people that have long been dormant. | ||
| And that's a terrible outcome. | ||
| And the way I try to treat it is to talk about childhood immunization. | ||
| We're not talking about, you know, we should do another COVID vaccine, which obviously is hugely divisive. | ||
|
unidentified
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Either way, I'll go with you. | |
| But, you know, childhood vaccines, everyone know, have just saved an enormous amount of kids. | ||
| Obviously, the fact that we could vaccinate against smallpox, which, you know, just last century actually killed somewhere between 300 and 500 million people. | ||
| And we eradicated it in 1978. | ||
| There's no more smallpox in the world. | ||
| This probably every year saves, what, 4 or 5 million people from dying. | ||
| That's just a fantastic outcome. | ||
| This is true for measles and many of these other simple diseases. | ||
| This is not rocket science. | ||
| This is something we know. | ||
| So we need to sort of get over ourselves and worry about. | ||
| And I think, you know, I see the correct conversation about to what extent did we do right in the priorities on COVID, and that's for a whole different kind of conversation. | ||
| But we know that this works for childhood immunization, and that's what we're arguing for. | ||
| Bjorn, if my math is correct, we got to about 26 billion, but unfortunately we're out of time. | ||
| But I will have you back on soon to continue this discussion, because I think it's important to get between the skepticism and the ability to do things functionally that will actually make our lives better. | ||
| That's what you're all about. | ||
| We'll link to the book down below, and it was good to see you. | ||
| Thank you, likewise. | ||
| If you want to find out precisely when the world is going to end, check out our environment playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a wide variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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