00:00:25
What I'd like to talk about is really the biggest problems in the world.
00:00:29
I'm not going to talk about "The Skeptical Environmentalist" --
00:00:31
probably that's also a good choice.
00:00:33
(Laughter)
00:00:34
But I am going talk about: what are the big problems in the world?
00:00:37
And I must say, before I go on, I should ask every one of you
00:00:40
to try and get out pen and paper
00:00:42
because I'm actually going to ask you to help me to look at how we do that.
00:00:45
So get out your pen and paper.
00:00:47
Bottom line is, there is a lot of problems out there in the world.
00:00:49
I'm just going to list some of them.
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There are 800 million people starving.
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There's a billion people without clean drinking water.
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Two billion people without sanitation.
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There are several million people dying of HIV and AIDS.
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The lists go on and on.
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There's two billions of people who will be severely affected by climate change -- so on.
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There are many, many problems out there.
00:01:09
In an ideal world, we would solve them all, but we don't.
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We don't actually solve all problems.
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And if we do not, the question I think we need to ask ourselves --
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and that's why it's on the economy session -- is to say,
00:01:22
if we don't do all things, we really have to start asking ourselves,
00:01:25
which ones should we solve first?
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And that's the question I'd like to ask you.
00:01:29
If we had say, 50 billion dollars over the next four years to spend
00:01:34
to do good in this world, where should we spend it?
00:01:37
We identified 10 of the biggest challenges in the world,
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and I will just briefly read them:
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climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, education,
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financial instability, governance and corruption,
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malnutrition and hunger, population migration,
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sanitation and water, and subsidies and trade barriers.
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We believe that these in many ways
00:01:54
encompass the biggest problems in the world.
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The obvious question would be to ask,
00:01:58
what do you think are the biggest things?
00:02:00
Where should we start on solving these problems?
00:02:03
But that's a wrong problem to ask.
00:02:05
That was actually the problem that was asked in Davos in January.
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But of course, there's a problem in asking people to focus on problems.
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Because we can't solve problems.
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Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die.
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But we don't have a technology to solve that, right?
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So the point is not to prioritize problems,
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but the point is to prioritize solutions to problems.
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And that would be -- of course that gets a little more complicated.
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To climate change that would be like Kyoto.
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To communicable diseases, it might be health clinics or mosquito nets.
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To conflicts, it would be U.N.'s peacekeeping forces, and so on.
00:02:37
The point that I would like to ask you to try to do,
00:02:42
is just in 30 seconds -- and I know this is in a sense
00:02:45
an impossible task -- write down what you think
00:02:47
is probably some of the top priorities.
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And also -- and that's, of course, where economics gets evil --
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to put down what are the things we should not do, first.
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What should be at the bottom of the list?
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Please, just take 30 seconds, perhaps talk to your neighbor,
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and just figure out what should be the top priorities
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and the bottom priorities of the solutions that we have
00:03:04
to the world's biggest issues.
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The amazing part of this process -- and of course, I mean,
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I would love to -- I only have 18 minutes,
00:03:11
I've already given you quite a substantial amount of my time, right?
00:03:13
I'd love to go into, and get you to think about this process,
00:03:17
and that's actually what we did.
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And I also strongly encourage you,
00:03:21
and I'm sure we'll also have these discussions afterwards,
00:03:23
to think about, how do we actually prioritize?
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Of course, you have to ask yourself,
00:03:27
why on Earth was such a list never done before?
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And one reason is that prioritization is incredibly uncomfortable.
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Nobody wants to do this.
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Of course, every organization would love to be on the top of such a list.
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But every organization would also hate to be not on the top of the list.
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And since there are many more not-number-one spots on the list
00:03:46
than there is number ones, it makes perfect sense
00:03:49
not to want to do such a list.
00:03:51
We've had the U.N. for almost 60 years,
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yet we've never actually made a fundamental list
00:03:56
of all the big things that we can do in the world,
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and said, which of them should we do first?
00:04:01
So it doesn't mean that we are not prioritizing --
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any decision is a prioritization, so of course we are still prioritizing,
00:04:08
if only implicitly -- and that's unlikely to be as good
00:04:11
as if we actually did the prioritization,
00:04:13
and went in and talked about it.
00:04:15
So what I'm proposing is really to say that we have,
00:04:17
for a very long time, had a situation when we've had a menu of choices.
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There are many, many things we can do out there,
00:04:23
but we've not had the prices, nor the sizes.
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We have not had an idea.
00:04:28
Imagine going into a restaurant and getting this big menu card,
00:04:31
but you have no idea what the price is.
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You know, you have a pizza; you've no idea what the price is.
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It could be at one dollar; it could be 1,000 dollars.
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It could be a family-size pizza;
00:04:39
it could be a very individual-size pizza, right?
00:04:41
We'd like to know these things.
00:04:43
And that is what the Copenhagen Consensus is really trying to do --
00:04:45
to try to put prices on these issues.
00:04:48
And so basically, this has been the Copenhagen Consensus' process.
00:04:51
We got 30 of the world's best economists, three in each area.
00:04:55
So we have three of world's top economists write about climate change.
00:04:58
What can we do? What will be the cost
00:05:01
and what will be the benefit of that?
00:05:02
Likewise in communicable diseases.
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Three of the world's top experts saying, what can we do?
00:05:07
What would be the price?
00:05:08
What should we do about it, and what will be the outcome?
00:05:11
And so on.
00:05:12
Then we had some of the world's top economists,
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eight of the world's top economists, including three Nobel Laureates,
00:05:18
meet in Copenhagen in May 2004.
00:05:21
We called them the "dream team."
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The Cambridge University prefects decided to call them
00:05:26
the Real Madrid of economics.
00:05:28
That works very well in Europe, but it doesn't really work over here.
00:05:30
And what they basically did was come out with a prioritized list.
00:05:34
And then you ask, why economists?
00:05:36
And of course, I'm very happy you asked that question -- (Laughter) --
00:05:38
because that's a very good question.
00:05:40
The point is, of course, if you want to know about malaria,
00:05:43
you ask a malaria expert.
00:05:45
If you want to know about climate, you ask a climatologist.
00:05:47
But if you want to know which of the two you should deal with first,
00:05:50
you can't ask either of them, because that's not what they do.
00:05:53
That is what economists do.
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They prioritize.
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They make that in some ways disgusting task of saying, which one should we do first,
00:06:01
and which one should we do afterwards?
00:06:03
So this is the list, and this is the one I'd like to share with you.
00:06:06
Of course, you can also see it on the website,
00:06:08
and we'll also talk about it more, I'm sure, as the day goes on.
00:06:11
They basically came up with a list where they said
00:06:13
there were bad projects -- basically, projects
00:06:16
where if you invest a dollar, you get less than a dollar back.
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Then there's fair projects, good projects and very good projects.
00:06:23
And of course, it's the very good projects we should start doing.
00:06:25
I'm going to go from backwards
00:06:27
so that we end up with the best projects.
00:06:29
These were the bad projects.
00:06:31
As you might see the bottom of the list was climate change.
00:06:35
This offends a lot of people, and that's probably one of the things
00:06:39
where people will say I shouldn't come back, either.
00:06:41
And I'd like to talk about that, because that's really curious.
00:06:43
Why is it it came up?
00:06:45
And I'll actually also try to get back to this
00:06:47
because it's probably one of the things
00:06:49
that we'll disagree with on the list that you wrote down.
00:06:51
The reason why they came up with saying that Kyoto --
00:06:54
or doing something more than Kyoto -- is a bad deal
00:06:56
is simply because it's very inefficient.
00:06:58
It's not saying that global warming is not happening.
00:07:00
It's not saying that it's not a big problem.
00:07:02
But it's saying that what we can do about it
00:07:04
is very little, at a very high cost.
00:07:07
What they basically show us, the average of all macroeconomic models,
00:07:11
is that Kyoto, if everyone agreed, would cost about 150 billion dollars a year.
00:07:16
That's a substantial amount of money.
00:07:18
That's two to three times the global development aid
00:07:20
that we give the Third World every year.
00:07:22
Yet it would do very little good.
00:07:24
All models show it will postpone warming for about six years in 2100.
00:07:28
So the guy in Bangladesh who gets a flood in 2100 can wait until 2106.
00:07:32
Which is a little good, but not very much good.
00:07:34
So the idea here really is to say, well, we've spent a lot of money doing a little good.
00:07:39
And just to give you a sense of reference,
00:07:41
the U.N. actually estimate that for half that amount,
00:07:43
for about 75 billion dollars a year,
00:07:45
we could solve all major basic problems in the world.
00:07:48
We could give clean drinking water, sanitation, basic healthcare
00:07:51
and education to every single human being on the planet.
00:07:54
So we have to ask ourselves, do we want to spend twice the amount
00:07:58
on doing very little good?
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Or half the amount on doing an amazing amount of good?
00:08:02
And that is really why it becomes a bad project.
00:08:05
It's not to say that if we had all the money in the world, we wouldn't want to do it.
00:08:08
But it's to say, when we don't, it's just simply not our first priority.
00:08:12
The fair projects -- notice I'm not going to comment on all these --
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but communicable diseases, scale of basic health services -- just made it,
00:08:19
simply because, yes, scale of basic health services is a great thing.
00:08:22
It would do a lot of good, but it's also very, very costly.
00:08:25
Again, what it tells us is suddenly
00:08:27
we start thinking about both sides of the equation.
00:08:29
If you look at the good projects, a lot of sanitation and water projects came in.
00:08:33
Again, sanitation and water is incredibly important,
00:08:35
but it also costs a lot of infrastructure.
00:08:38
So I'd like to show you the top four priorities
00:08:40
which should be at least the first ones that we deal with
00:08:43
when we talk about how we should deal with the problems in the world.
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The fourth best problem is malaria -- dealing with malaria.
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The incidence of malaria is about a couple of [million] people get infected every year.
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It might even cost up towards a percentage point of GDP
00:08:58
every year for affected nations.
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If we invested about 13 billion dollars over the next four years,
00:09:04
we could bring that incidence down to half.
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We could avoid about 500,000 people dying,
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but perhaps more importantly, we could avoid about a [million] people
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getting infected every year.
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We would significantly increase their ability
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to deal with many of the other problems that they have to deal with --
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of course, in the long run, also to deal with global warming.
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This third best one was free trade.
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Basically, the model showed that if we could get free trade,
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and especially cut subsidies in the U.S. and Europe,
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we could basically enliven the global economy
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to an astounding number of about 2,400 billion dollars a year,
00:09:39
half of which would accrue to the Third World.
00:09:41
Again, the point is to say that we could actually pull
00:09:44
two to three hundred million people out of poverty,
00:09:47
very radically fast, in about two to five years.
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That would be the third best thing we could do.
00:09:52
The second best thing would be to focus on malnutrition.
00:09:56
Not just malnutrition in general, but there's a very cheap way
00:09:59
of dealing with malnutrition, namely, the lack of micronutrients.
00:10:02
Basically, about half of the world's population is lacking in
00:10:05
iron, zinc, iodine and vitamin A.
00:10:07
If we invest about 12 billion dollars,
00:10:09
we could make a severe inroad into that problem.
00:10:12
That would be the second best investment that we could do.
00:10:15
And the very best project would be to focus on HIV/AIDS.
00:10:20
Basically, if we invest 27 billion dollars over the next eight years,
00:10:24
we could avoid 28 new million cases of HIV/AIDS.
00:10:28
Again, what this does and what it focuses on is saying
00:10:32
there are two very different ways that we can deal with HIV/AIDS.
00:10:35
One is treatment; the other one is prevention.
00:10:38
And again, in an ideal world, we would do both.
00:10:41
But in a world where we don't do either, or don't do it very well,
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we have to at least ask ourselves where should we invest first.
00:10:48
And treatment is much, much more expensive than prevention.
00:10:51
So basically, what this focuses on is saying, we can do a lot more
00:10:55
by investing in prevention.
00:10:57
Basically for the amount of money that we spend,
00:10:59
we can do X amount of good in treatment,
00:11:02
and 10 times as much good in prevention.
00:11:05
So again, what we focus on is prevention rather than treatment,
00:11:08
at first rate.
00:11:09
What this really does is that it makes us think about our priorities.
00:11:13
I'd like to have you look at your priority list and say,
00:11:17
did you get it right?
00:11:19
Or did you get close to what we came up with here?
00:11:21
Well, of course, one of the things is climate change again.
00:11:25
I find a lot of people find it very, very unlikely that we should do that.
00:11:28
We should also do climate change,
00:11:30
if for no other reason, simply because it's such a big problem.
00:11:33
But of course, we don't do all problems.
00:11:36
There are many problems out there in the world.
00:11:38
And what I want to make sure of is, if we actually focus on problems,
00:11:42
that we focus on the right ones.
00:11:44
The ones where we can do a lot of good rather than a little good.
00:11:47
And I think, actually -- Thomas Schelling,
00:11:50
one of the participants in the dream team, he put it very, very well.
00:11:54
One of things that people forget, is that in 100 years,
00:11:57
when we're talking about most of the climate change impacts will be,
00:12:00
people will be much, much richer.
00:12:02
Even the most pessimistic impact scenarios of the U.N.
00:12:06
estimate that the average person in the developing world in 2100
00:12:09
will be about as rich as we are today.
00:12:11
Much more likely, they will be two to four times richer than we are.
00:12:15
And of course, we'll be even richer than that.
00:12:17
But the point is to say, when we talk about saving people,
00:12:21
or helping people in Bangladesh in 2100,
00:12:24
we're not talking about a poor Bangladeshi.
00:12:26
We're actually talking about a fairly rich Dutch guy.
00:12:28
And so the real point, of course, is to say,
00:12:30
do we want to spend a lot of money helping a little,
00:12:34
100 years from now, a fairly rich Dutch guy?
00:12:36
Or do we want to help real poor people, right now, in Bangladesh,
00:12:41
who really need the help, and whom we can help very, very cheaply?
00:12:44
Or as Schelling put it, imagine if you were a rich -- as you will be --
00:12:49
a rich Chinese, a rich Bolivian, a rich Congolese, in 2100,
00:12:54
thinking back on 2005, and saying, "How odd that they cared so much
00:13:00
about helping me a little bit through climate change,
00:13:04
and cared so fairly little about helping my grandfather
00:13:08
and my great grandfather, whom they could have helped so much more,
00:13:11
and who needed the help so much more?"
00:13:14
So I think that really does tell us why it is
00:13:17
we need to get our priorities straight.
00:13:19
Even if it doesn't accord to the typical way we see this problem.
00:13:22
Of course, that's mainly because climate change has good pictures.
00:13:27
We have, you know, "The Day After Tomorrow" -- it looks great, right?
00:13:30
It's a good film in the sense that
00:13:33
I certainly want to see it, right, but don't expect Emmerich
00:13:36
to cast Brad Pitt in his next movie
00:13:39
digging latrines in Tanzania or something. (Laughter)
00:13:41
It just doesn't make for as much of a movie.
00:13:43
So in many ways, I think of the Copenhagen Consensus
00:13:45
and the whole discussion of priorities
00:13:47
as a defense for boring problems.
00:13:50
To make sure that we realize it's not about making us feel good.
00:13:54
It's not about making things that have the most media attention,
00:13:59
but it's about making places where we can actually do the most good.
00:14:02
The other objections, I think, that are important to say,
00:14:05
is that I'm somehow -- or we are somehow -- positing a false choice.
00:14:09
Of course, we should do all things,
00:14:11
in an ideal world -- I would certainly agree.
00:14:13
I think we should do all things, but we don't.
00:14:15
In 1970, the developed world decided we were going to spend
00:14:19
twice as much as we did, right now, than in 1970, on the developing world.
00:14:25
Since then our aid has halved.
00:14:27
So it doesn't look like we're actually on the path
00:14:30
of suddenly solving all big problems.
00:14:32
Likewise, people are also saying, but what about the Iraq war?
00:14:35
You know, we spend 100 billion dollars --
00:14:37
why don't we spend that on doing good in the world?
00:14:39
I'm all for that.
00:14:40
If any one of you guys can talk Bush into doing that, that's fine.
00:14:42
But the point, of course, is still to say,
00:14:44
if you get another 100 billion dollars,
00:14:46
we still want to spend that in the best possible way, don't we?
00:14:49
So the real issue here is to get ourselves back
00:14:51
and think about what are the right priorities.
00:14:53
I should just mention briefly, is this really the right list that we got out?
00:14:57
You know, when you ask the world's best economists,
00:15:00
you inevitably end up asking old, white American men.
00:15:03
And they're not necessarily, you know,
00:15:05
great ways of looking at the entire world.
00:15:09
So we actually invited 80 young people from all over the world
00:15:11
to come and solve the same problem.
00:15:13
The only two requirements were that they were studying at the university,
00:15:17
and they spoke English.
00:15:19
The majority of them were, first, from developing countries.
00:15:22
They had all the same material but they could go vastly
00:15:24
outside the scope of discussion, and they certainly did,
00:15:27
to come up with their own lists.
00:15:29
And the surprising thing was that the list was very similar --
00:15:31
with malnutrition and diseases at the top
00:15:34
and climate change at the bottom.
00:15:36
We've done this many other times.
00:15:37
There's been many other seminars and university students, and different things.
00:15:40
They all come out with very much the same list.
00:15:43
And that gives me great hope, really, in saying that I do believe
00:15:47
that there is a path ahead to get us to start thinking about priorities,
00:15:52
and saying, what is the important thing in the world?
00:15:54
Of course, in an ideal world, again we'd love to do everything.
00:15:57
But if we don't do it, then we can start thinking about where should we start?
00:16:01
I see the Copenhagen Consensus as a process.
00:16:03
We did it in 2004,
00:16:05
and we hope to assemble many more people,
00:16:06
getting much better information for 2008, 2012.
00:16:10
Map out the right path for the world --
00:16:12
but also to start thinking about political triage.
00:16:15
To start thinking about saying, "Let's do
00:16:17
not the things where we can do very little at a very high cost,
00:16:20
not the things that we don't know how to do,
00:16:22
but let's do the great things where we can do an enormous
00:16:25
amount of good, at very low cost, right now."
00:16:29
At the end of the day, you can disagree
00:16:31
with the discussion of how we actually prioritize these,
00:16:33
but we have to be honest and frank about saying,
00:16:36
if there's some things we do, there are other things we don't do.
00:16:39
If we worry too much about some things,
00:16:41
we end by not worrying about other things.
00:16:43
So I hope this will help us make better priorities,
00:16:45
and think about how we better work for the world.
00:16:47
Thank you.
