Bjorn Lomborg

"Don't believe people when they tell you, you can change the world by changing your behavior a little. No, that's not how we change the world. We change the world by inventing the catalytic converter."

“Many of the solutions that we're proposing will cost much more than the problem that they're trying to solve."

"Imagine if we could come up with a new energy source that was cheaper than fossil fuel and was green, we'd be done. Everyone would just switch. And not just rich, well-meaning Americans, but also the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans."

Auren Hoffman (00:01.07)

Hello, fellow data nerds. guest today is Bjorn Lundberg. Bjorn is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and has authored several bestselling books, including The Skeptical Environmentalist, False Alarm, and recently Best Things First. Bjorn, welcome to World of Nets. Very excited. Now, your book last year, Best Things First, you laid out 12 kind of data -backed policies for doing the most good in the world and kind of your proposals.

Bjorn Lomborg (00:16.596)

It's great to be here.

Auren Hoffman (00:28.782)

say, you you'd save over 4 million lives a year and only cost, let's say, $35 billion. And I think by con for context, like the US spends over $60 billion on non -military foreign aid in 2022. How'd you come up with that list?

Bjorn Lomborg (00:46.273)

So you just took away the main bang of the point. But yes, no, that is exactly what we tried to do. We tried to say, look, the world has promised all kinds of things. You may not have heard about the sustainable development goals, but it's actually a list of goals that everybody in the world, so the US, every other country in the world has signed up to that we're gonna deliver by 2030. So we basically promised we're gonna get rid of poverty, which of course,

It's a nice thing, but it's not going to happen. We promised, I know, and we should get rid of hunger and we should get everybody clean drinking water and sanitation. We should get everybody organic apples and everything in between. So it's one of those lists that just simply says, let's do all good things in the world. And not surprisingly, we're failing badly. It's no big surprise when you promise everything to everyone all the time.

Auren Hoffman (01:16.236)

Also, you just keep raising the bar on poverty. So we'll never get rid of it, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (01:43.297)

There's just not enough money to do this. And so what we try to say to the world, we actually tried when they decided this back in 2015, we were totally unsuccessful. We tried to say, please, please, please don't promise everything to everyone. Promise the smartest stuff first, right? Promise the stuff that for very little money can do an amazing amount of good for the world.

And now I think we say, all right, let's try and find out what are the very most efficient policies for the world. Remember, you and I and other people in the rich world live incredibly comfortable lives compared to the six or seven billion other people on this planet. And half of the world's population live in low and low and middle income countries. And their concerns

are not the concerns that many rich people have. They literally worry about the fact that their kids might die tonight from easily curable infectious diseases, that there's not enough food, that the education sucks, many, many other issues. And so what we try to say is, let's focus on the ways that we can spend a little money and do a lot of good. So we work with a lot of economists. So this is what economists are good at, right? They sort of look at what are the costs. Sorry? Yes, trade -offs. And we...

Auren Hoffman (02:55.512)

Trade -offs, Trade -offs.

Bjorn Lomborg (03:00.449)

Work with more than 100 world's top economists, several Nobel laureates, trying to find out where can you spend a dollar and do an amazing amount of good, not just in terms of economics, but also in terms of saving lives and in terms of making the environment better. We looked across all these different areas and we came up with these 12 policies. And actually, and I'm a little happy you did that, you left out half of the benefits.

So what we find is it's going to cost $35 billion, which is not a trivial amount of money, but as you pointed out, certainly within the range of what nations can do. This is literally...

Auren Hoffman (03:34.766)

Yeah, it's a rounding error. What do you mean? Is it 35 billion a year or OK, per year? OK, still a rounding error for what global.

Bjorn Lomborg (03:39.393)

Yes, it's per year. yeah, even Bill Gates or Elon Musk would run out after a couple of years. But the point is, this is couch change compared to most of the money that we spend globally on other things. So just to give you a sense of proportion, we spend about $2 trillion each year on both weapons and on climate change. We spend perhaps $5 trillion on education.

So spending a very, very tiny fraction of this on making the world incredibly better would be a good deal. What it would achieve is not only save for

Auren Hoffman (04:15.41)

Sorry, we spent two trillion on climate change? Holy knuckle. I understand the weapons thing because like we always need weapons, but like, wow, I didn't realize we spend that much on. Should we spend as much on climate change we do on weapons globally? wow. Okay, I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

Bjorn Lomborg (04:18.421)

Yes, we do. And we can get back to that. Yes.

Bjorn Lomborg (04:31.164)

Yes. And yeah, and again, I would probably argue that maybe spending on climate is a nicer thing to do than for weapons, but as you point out, the guys without the weapons are the ones that get overrun. again, but the main point here is for a very trivial sum of money, we could save, as you pointed out, 4 .2 million lives each and every year, and we could make the poor half of the world about $1 .1 trillion richer each and every year. That's the kind of thing that comes out of

Auren Hoffman (04:38.55)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (04:43.19)

Yes, yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (05:00.353)

making better education, of course makes people more productive, which will dramatically improve economic growth in poor countries. This is just a phenomenal outcome and one I would argue that we should do and we should do first. Before we worry about all these other things, let's do these 12 things.

Auren Hoffman (05:14.562)

Mr. Moose.

Some of your solutions are pretty kind of on, not, you know, let's say not controversial at all fighting malaria, you know, working on fighting chronic diseases, but other things that say improving education or immigration seem like they're a lot more complicated. And, know, so how do you think about like stack ranking and where, do you kind of come up with those things?

Bjorn Lomborg (05:40.555)

So what we did, we went through all of the world's promises for the good world, which literally is a list of almost everything we could think of in the world. And then we worked with the economists who work on each of these fields. And then we said, look, which of all these promises are actually stuff we know that for money, we could make work out? A lot of stuff we don't know how to work. A lot of problems are just very, very hard, but some of them are very, very simple. So you mentioned malaria.

malaria still kills what six or seven hundred thousand people each year and we basically know how to fix this. It's about getting more insecticide treated bed nets out. You sleep under this, it both protects you from the mosquito and it also kills the mosquito so it doesn't go and infect someone else. This is very cheap and we know that this could dramatically improve it. So we estimate this would cost about one point one billion dollars a year, but you would end up saving about two hundred thousand lives.

Now, notice, I'm not saying we can save everyone because saving everyone turns out to be very expensive, but we can save a substantial number of people at very low cost. You also mentioned education and said that's much harder. Yes, a lot of things you do in education are much, much harder. And we know in rich countries that education is really, really hard to do. But remember, the problem in most poor countries is incredibly basic. It's basically that many of these kids

Auren Hoffman (06:41.292)

Yep. Yep.

Bjorn Lomborg (07:08.065)

So we estimate about 80 % of all kids, that's almost half a billion kids, don't really learn how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. And of course that means they can't participate in 21st century economy. If we could help improve that, we could dramatically change the growth path of the world. And we can. There's lots of evidence that shows that if you put a kid, and I'm just mentioning one of the solutions that we have. If you put a kid,

Auren Hoffman (07:19.8)

Yep. Yep.

Bjorn Lomborg (07:36.233)

in front of a tablet with educational software one hour a day. Now notice it's only one hour a day, so you share the tablet with many other kids that drives down the cost. You also don't give the kid the tablet because then they're just gonna go away and play games and watch movies and all kinds of other stuff, which is not gonna help lead to learning. If you just do this one hour a day for a year, the outcome is that, so this kid goes to the same old boring school seven hours a day of boring, and then one hour a day they actually learn.

If you do that for one year, the kid will have learned three times as much as what he or she normally would. We've just tripled the efficiency of school and we know this from randomized control.

Auren Hoffman (08:15.018)

Yeah, but that is, mean, all those schools could afford that today. Like that's not something you really need any money for today. Like they literally could just do it. there's no...

Bjorn Lomborg (08:23.937)

Well, that's because you're thinking of your kids' school. In poor countries, so we actually convinced, for instance, Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, this is going to cost, you in the order of, say, $30 per kid per year. So it's not nothing. But yes, you're absolutely right. is a free school. So there's also, remember, there's a lot of, when you've done these studies, some of these tablets will go missing. People will steal it.

Auren Hoffman (08:39.692)

Why would it even cost that much or, or, or, I yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (08:51.073)

I see. Okay, got it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's fair. Yeah, that's fair.

Bjorn Lomborg (08:53.021)

Some people won't use it correctly. There's a lot of other things that we count into this. But the fundamental point is it's fairly cheap. But remember, while there's lots of people campaigning for higher wages for teachers, not the least the teachers, there are very few people campaigning for tablets. And so what we need to get people to understand, this is actually a proven technology that at very low cost can dramatically improve outcomes. So we estimate that this kid from just doing this one year

Auren Hoffman (09:07.085)

Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (09:22.337)

will on average over his or her lifetime make $20 ,000 more because he or she is more productive. Now all of that comes far in the future so that's probably worth about $2 ,000 today. But remember, spending $31 to do $2 ,000 worth of it, it's a fantastic deal. So again, we're simply saying all the smart, simple stuff. We're not saying how to fix everything. We're certainly not talking about all the complicated stuff, but we are saying there are some things we know very,

Auren Hoffman (09:38.882)

Yeah, it's a good investment. It's good ROI. Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (09:52.167)

simply that we could do with money.

Auren Hoffman (09:54.83)

And how do you think about it? you know, if let's say, you know, if we value a life of a U S person at $10 million or something, should we value the like, I mean, this is kind of crass, but do we value the life of someone in a poor country at, at, at 1 million or a hundred thousand, or should all lives be valued the same? Or how do you think about it?

Bjorn Lomborg (10:12.415)

My mom is.

Bjorn Lomborg (10:20.565)

Yeah. Yeah. First, let's just attack it head on. A lot of people feel like, my god, you shouldn't put a price on human life. But we do all the time. as we find out, the US government decidedly, they put in these roundabouts or road dividers where there's lots of cars, but not where there are very few cars, because we actually have to sort of weigh costs and benefits.

Auren Hoffman (10:29.718)

Of course, yeah, even road safety and other types of things, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (10:44.824)

Right.

Bjorn Lomborg (10:47.969)

The US has gotten to this price of about $10 million to save statistical life. If it was your life, obviously you'd pay infinite, but if it's an average life somewhere and we don't know who it is, it turns out in a lot of different ways, we tend to believe that it's worth about $10 million. You can also see it on.

Auren Hoffman (11:09.55)

like that is a lot of money. you know, you know, only it's let's say 1 % of Americans are maybe less than maybe 2 % of Americans are have a net worth of in that neighborhood or more. So where do we like, do we even get that high? Like that seems like a lot. Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (11:11.531)

Yes.

Bjorn Lomborg (11:20.459)

Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (11:26.158)

We also find these numbers, for instance, if you look at people who do dangerous jobs, they want extra money, right? In the UK, they actually call it danger money, which is very sort of straight up. You get extra money because you have a slight extra death risk. That makes sense. If you look at...

Auren Hoffman (11:40.206)

Of course. Yeah, that makes sense. But you get like you're getting 10 grand a year extra or something. Does that add up to 10 million? Right.

Bjorn Lomborg (11:47.169)

Yes, if you look, you know, if you have a 1 % chance of, or it's more likely to be 0 .1 % chance or something like that, then you take that extra amount and that turns into that you're saying you're willing to extract an average life, but of course not your life, you think it's always someone else's life. But of course we don't do the same valuation in poor countries. For one simple reason, if we really said every life is equally valuable, we would spend

Auren Hoffman (11:54.368)

Okay, I see. Got it. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (11:59.374)

The 10 million, okay.

Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (12:14.94)

all of our extra money in the US and everywhere else in poor countries because that's where you can save a lot of lives. We also know, if you look at pictures from developing countries, people will ride like tens of people on a truck with very little safety because they have many, many other concerns and they have much less resources. So we have, and we worked together with Harvard University and several others to estimate what is the value of a human life in poor countries. What we came up with

Auren Hoffman (12:20.088)

Right.

Auren Hoffman (12:31.149)

Yep.

Bjorn Lomborg (12:43.969)

And of course, this is not uncontroversial, but it's reasonably what would be the correct way of thinking about this is about $100 ,000 per life in poor countries or about $4 ,000 per life year. That's what we try to weigh up against these things. Now, again, you can disagree with this, but this is how we act in many different ways. This is how countries themselves act like Malawi and many other countries. And it also means that we have

a consistent framework for comparing different things like saving lives with malaria versus improving incomes through education.

Auren Hoffman (13:22.414)

So in certain countries, he's like, if we can save a life for less than 100k, that's very cost effective. And, you know, we should start to think about it. So if you see something that is saving a life for $1 ,000 or something like that, okay, great. Like, I'm going to spend that money all day long because it's good ROI.

Bjorn Lomborg (13:37.793)

Yes. I should just mention that we only look at incredibly good ones. So if you can save it for a little less than 100 ,000, it's not terribly good. But we're exactly looking at the things that will save it at $1 ,000 where you get 100 -fold back. That's a great investment. So we simply look at things that deliver at least $15 back on every dollar. Again, it's not a get rich quick scheme because this is not, you you're helping other people. But it is if you want to do good in the world.

Auren Hoffman (13:45.848)

Correct. 100x. Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (14:06.837)

This is one of the ways that you could do an amazing amount of good at very low cost.

Auren Hoffman (14:10.626)

Now, how do you think like, you know, if you think of there's one side, okay, we got to spend our time and treasure and stuff like that, trying to save lives, you know, and help these things around the world. The other side, there's this maybe a little bit more wealthy countries that are kind of determining where the world goes. And some of those wealthy countries like maybe not being run as well. Maybe they're going to go to nuclear war with one another, or there's some sort of like big existential threat.

There's a lot of internal divisions where some of these could have civil wars in the future or something. And that could like really take the world in a very bad spot if they, if they kind of spiral in a bad way. So should we be spending like X amount of time on one and Y percentage of time on another? how do you think about these bigger kind of things that are going on in the world?

Bjorn Lomborg (14:58.527)

Of course, like I think most other people, I also think about this and I'm worried about this, but that's actually not what I professionally have been doing because I'm simply saying, where can we spend a fairly small amount of extra money and do a lot of good?

Auren Hoffman (15:06.445)

Yes, of course.

Bjorn Lomborg (15:14.081)

That's one not unimportant question, but it's certainly not the only question. I don't know how to avoid nuclear war. Well, I have a few ideas, but there's a lot of things I don't know how to do, and that's not what I write books about. But I know there are a few really, really good things that we know we can do at very low cost, and those are the ones that I'm simply saying, let's do those. But of course, if you spend $35 billion, remember, the world is what in the order of

Auren Hoffman (15:16.76)

Yep.

Bjorn Lomborg (15:40.289)

God, I'm trying to, you 3 ,000 times richer than that. So there's lots of other money that needs to be spent in many other ways and that's what political conversations across the world is.

Auren Hoffman (15:49.55)

And you're proposing your kind of proposal for 35 billion a year, which is, mean, I'm sure you, yeah, maybe you're getting, you know, 50 X on that today. But probably, you know, in your kind of your same idea as you could spend a hundred billion and maybe not get 50 X, but maybe still get 20 X, which is still an amazing ROI or you get 10 X or something, which amazing ROI is your kind of like reason for proposing.

35 billion a year is just, that's just what is politically palatable to do. So, okay, I'm to, I'm going to propose something that's like that people would actually just go for.

Bjorn Lomborg (16:20.993)

It's also what our economists came up with. We simply looked at the academic evidence and said, what's realistic that you can spend on these things? Some of them, as I mentioned with malaria, you can probably double, but you can't triple it because then you've run out of people to save. And also it gets much more expensive. Some of them like vaccinations, still a great idea, childhood vaccinations.

Auren Hoffman (16:38.36)

Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (16:46.785)

We know that measles and other things, just incredibly effective. But it's harder to catch up because we've already saved 80 percent of all people, but we're suggesting we should go to 90 percent and that would still save about a million kids at very low cost. There's a lot of different inhibitors on this. But fundamentally, yeah, these are some of the best things the world could do. But what we really have to remember is,

Auren Hoffman (17:03.245)

Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (17:11.743)

that while we're very, very good at talking about all the things we want to do, we often end up focusing on the wrong things because they're more fun, they're more people who stand to make money off of them, and they make better for better headlines. And so very often we worry not about solving things that instead of the things I'm talking about that deliver, say, 50X, maybe deliver 5X.

but often something that delivers less than an X back. You spend a dollar and you do 50 cents of good or 17 cents. That's a terrible idea. And so part of my work is to try to get people to focus of these amazing ideas, but it's also to try to make a stop focusing on essentially stupid.

Auren Hoffman (17:42.156)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (17:52.738)

At the very least, if you spend a dollar, you should get more than a dollar back in return, right? And I always say most spending, whether it's government spending or charitable spending, is probably a negative ROI today. Okay.

Bjorn Lomborg (17:55.835)

Yes, please. That's a good rule of thumb.

Bjorn Lomborg (18:07.581)

I don't know. Obviously, we haven't done this. I think most things that we do on sort of a global scale and governments are probably good things. Some of them are obviously political things. So if you take redistribution, if you take a dollar and give it to someone else, you basically made a dollar. You can make the argument if you give it to poor people. They have more benefit from it. But fundamentally, that's a political conversation. And I'm not going to get into that.

Auren Hoffman (18:26.572)

Yeah, maybe you can make more, depending on what's going on. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (18:34.126)

But usually what happens in the government is like you take a dollar and then it goes through like eight layers and then you end up giving 40 cents to somebody or something, right?

Bjorn Lomborg (18:40.129)

Sure, sure, yes, yes. But what we also see, and this is the standard argument, at least for a smaller state, is that having roads, having military, having infrastructure, incredibly good things. Things that actually make everything else multiply in effectivity. mean, we couldn't have this conversation if we didn't have an internet and somebody had decided to put cable underneath the Atlantic Ocean. And I'm pretty happy about that.

Auren Hoffman (18:50.124)

Yep, for sure.

Bjorn Lomborg (19:06.945)

So yeah, there's a lot of things that actually work, but yes, I'm not gonna sit and defend everything governments do or private philanthropies. But again, I think most philanthropies probably do say 1 .5X or maybe even 3X, but I'm simply saying, come on guys, you could do 50X, how about that?

Auren Hoffman (19:20.148)

Okay, all right. It's pretty good.

Auren Hoffman (19:25.132)

Now, how do you think people should be thinking more about their personal charitable giving? You know, when I think about myself and most people I know, I say a lot of our personal charitable giving is giving to things that probably don't really need it. School, rich schools or other types of things, you know, we're doing things probably that's in our best interest, but not necessarily in the world's best interest. Cause we get our names somewhere and people think good of us.

We get to go to the gala and somebody like who says our name and everybody claps or we're in some book in the president's circle or something. So how should people think about this?

Bjorn Lomborg (20:00.981)

Look, these are all valid reasons. Of course, you shouldn't think that then you're doing it for the world, you're doing it for you, but then, I'm fine about it. So I'm not trying to get everybody to change their whole living, but to the extent that you actually want to just simply do good, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (20:06.424)

For vanity, right, right, yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (20:18.549)

Look at Warren Buffett. Well, he actually just decided maybe he's not going to do this with Gates, but for a very long time he just gave the money to Gates because he said, look, I'm not going to try and get a whole philanthropic thing with my own name and all that because the Gates Foundation is actually spending its money really, really effectively. I think there are some concerns that you can have about the Gates Foundation, but it's probably one of the best spends of money. And so we should give it to really, really effective spenders.

and we should give it to philanthropies that are already working really well. One thing, of course, we should think about, and I know this from, when Christmas comes around, you sit and write out a lot of hundred dollar checks, because it feels like you saved or solved 10 problems instead of one. But of course, an economist would say, one of these is the best. You should give all the money to that. It's really only very rich people that will sort of fill up the whole measure and then have to move on to something else.

Auren Hoffman (21:00.109)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (21:09.762)

Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (21:16.657)

It is not correct that you should give a little bit to dog shelter, a little bit to the country club, a little bit to, yeah, that's probably wrong. You should think of one of them as incredibly good. Again, Americans give a lot. You give a lot within America, and that's not what I've looked at at all. But to the extent that you're thinking, I want to help a lot of poor people in developing countries, you should be thinking about some of those things like tuberculosis, malaria.

maternal and newborn health. These are incredibly effective things. Nutrition, chronic diseases, education, as we talked about, or agricultural research and development to get more food on the table and actually both make farmers and city dwellers better off. There's a lot of really smart things that you can give your money to. They're not quite as sexy, but they just happen to be incredibly effective.

Auren Hoffman (22:08.162)

Now that philosophy is kind of similar to that of let's say the effective altruistic movement. How do you differ from those in EA?

Bjorn Lomborg (22:17.173)

Yeah, so I I think we have a lot in common with the effect of altruism. So effective altruism has always been more sort of a fun movement. If you go there, they have a lot of exciting things. One of the things I find are very sort of a good thought as they say, there's a lot of animal suffering in the world and a lot of people will then give to dog or cat shelters. But surely by far the biggest animal suffering

Auren Hoffman (22:35.128)

Mm

Bjorn Lomborg (22:47.165)

is in the farm industry. So maybe you should give to some to making better conditions for farm animals instead. I think that's a very sort of effective altruism kind of thought. I blew my mind. think that's a great sort of point. But what they're not as good at is to look at just plain old boring stuff like what we're looking at with economic evidence and saying here are things that are incredibly important and where we have

very good knowledge that we can do a lot. So they don't talk very much about tuberculosis malaria. Remember tuberculosis.

Auren Hoffman (23:20.334)

think that is kind of how they started, right? Like, they started with like the give well stuff. But then they, then they moved to like future humans and okay, humans for about 1000 years from now, okay, we should be treating them in the same way as treating humans. And it got like, it became this very complicated math problem.

Bjorn Lomborg (23:23.071)

Yeah. Yes. They started with that and then they sort of... Yes.

Bjorn Lomborg (23:36.385)

And that's another thing. They've gotten very much into existential threats for humanity in the long run. I'm incredibly happy somebody's thinking about it, but it's not actually how most people are. We don't think about the world 1 ,000 years from now, except for sort of very casually. And we've never done that. Imagine someone in the year 1 ,000 thinking how he or she could make your life better. I'm not sure there's...

any good way that they could have done that and that would in any way have helped you except in the two ways we do namely they left more knowledge and they left you with a little more money that's what we've done we we care about the future but sort of in a generalized way because we don't know how to help the future in a thousand years and that's why we're focused very much on proposals that are also fairly short run if you will yeah this is about saving a kid that's dying from malaria tonight

This is about making sure that we don't get tuberculosis, which still kills 1 .4 million people each year, and that we know how to fix. This is about all the things we know how to fix very briefly and that can dramatically help the world in just a few days or a few years.

Auren Hoffman (24:47.298)

Got it. Well, on the climate stuff, why is not like investing in like emission reductions not one of the top priorities? People talk about that a lot. UN talks about that a lot.

Bjorn Lomborg (25:01.195)

So, first of all, climate is a real problem. It's a manmade problem that we should certainly be addressing because we are actually making the world worse off than it otherwise would be because of global warming. But you also need to look at what are the impacts and what are the costs? So basically the cost benefit analysis again.

Auren Hoffman (25:21.038)

Yeah. I mean, that two trillion number you said before just blows my mind. If someone would have asked me, would have said a hundred billion, maybe 200 billion worldwide. two trillion just seems like just an astronomical sum. had no idea it was that high. I don't think anyone that I know thinks it's that high.

Bjorn Lomborg (25:38.229)

Two trillion is what both the International Energy Agency and Bloomberg estimates. So yeah, this is obviously a very rough number, but it's all the things that we're spending. Yeah, yeah. And what it tells you is we're spending a lot of money, and remember, we're not spending nearly enough to actually achieve the kind of promises that we've made. Now, if global warming was sort of the end of the world, if it was a meteor hurtling towards Earth, it makes sense.

Auren Hoffman (25:44.728)

Sure, but it's probably directionally right. I mean, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (26:03.702)

Right, right. We should spend everything, right? Of course. Yeah, yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (26:05.087)

that we should send up Bruce Willis and try to do something about this, right? Maybe not Bruce Willis anymore, but the idea at least to say this would be the only thing that mankind should be focused on. But of course, it's not actually. If you look at the two latest meta studies, so a study that tries to into account all the period studies that have looked at what is gonna be the cost of global warming. So one of them is made by one of the most quoted.

climate economist in the world, Richard Tull. The other one is the only climate economist who's ever won the Nobel Prize in climate economics, William Nordhaus. They both have papered out this year. They estimate the total cost if we basically follow the current trajectory and end up about three degrees higher temperatures by the end of the century. Three degrees will be equivalent to losing out somewhere between two and 3 % of our GDP by then. Now remember,

By then, we estimate, this is the UN, we estimate that the average person in the world will be about 450 % as rich as he or she is today. So what they're essentially saying is, because of global warming, instead of being 450 % as rich, it will feel like we're only 435 to 440 % as rich. Yeah, that's a problem. No, it's not the end of the world. It's not a meteor hurtling towards Earth. It's a problem. And the real issue is here,

that many of the solutions that we're proposing will cost much, much more than the problem that they're trying to solve. So we could easily end up sort of spending, and this is one estimate, that we'll end up spending about 7 % of global GDP. So that's about $27 trillion per year over the century to achieve net zero by 2050. $27 trillion.

The benefit, of course, is we're not going to avoid all of climate change and therefore we won't avoid all of the 3%. But the benefit will be across the century about 1 % of GDP. 7 % to avoid 1 % is a really bad idea. Now again, you can do smaller things and do them smarter. There are some things that are actually smart in climate. But if you look at the global impacts, most of the things we know how to do,

Auren Hoffman (28:03.552)

This is a terrible investment. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (28:10.019)

Yes.

Bjorn Lomborg (28:20.967)

are just very low ROI or reasonable ROIs, they're not anywhere close to what we're talking about, these amazing things that we can do.

Auren Hoffman (28:29.878)

If you get in the psyche of a people, climate was really only a big issue in let's say the US and Europe and really never that big in the US. So it's really much more of a Europe thing. And then it seemed like it had peaked maybe a few years ago and it seems like it's less of a big issue today if you just think of like the different parties that are like the green parties are mostly in Europe more on decline today than they were. Why is that kind of like

public shift in Europe changing.

Bjorn Lomborg (29:01.323)

So I think I actually, I would love if what you just described was correct. I think that when you look at surveys, there's a lot of people across the world who are very worried about climate change. And we can talk a little bit about why that is. think fundamentally, newspapers love to sell bad news. That's what gets you clicks. And so they, you know, not misinformed, but certainly give us a very skewed picture of what climate change will result in. But I agree with you.

Auren Hoffman (29:18.114)

Yep.

Bjorn Lomborg (29:29.761)

that we are less concerned about climate. think to a large extent, that's because we've suddenly realized there many other problems in the world. Remember when the Cold War ended in you know, in 89, the feeling was, you know, Francis Fukuyama, this is the end of history, we're done, we're here. And then people was, but there's just one little problem. Well, actually not so little. There's just one problem we need to fix, climate change. And yeah, it's gonna cost you a couple of trillion dollars, but yeah, you'll be fine.

And we were sort of willing to go along with that. And now, of course, we realize, yeah, yeah, then, you know, I'm rich enough to do that kind of thing. But suddenly we realized that we had, you know, we had a global financial crisis, we had a pandemic, we've had a loss of education, so we have a lot of education to cover. We have a war in both in Europe, but there's a sense that this could go much wider in many ways. And of course,

Auren Hoffman (30:01.01)

If that's the only problem, great, let's fix it. And then we're in utopia. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (30:15.586)

We have real wars going on.

Bjorn Lomborg (30:25.013)

We also starting to realize we have a huge immigration problem and that we have tax problems. We have not enough money for our healthcare. We're growing older. There's suddenly a lot of other things that also need our attention. I think that's healthy because it's always been unhelpful to believe that, yeah, sure, we'll just waste some money on climate. It's not the only thing there and they have to compete. If we're spending more money on climate, it means we have less money left over for all the other problems. It's fair to spend money on good stuff.

But you need to be open and upfront about it.

Auren Hoffman (30:55.96)

Yeah. As long as, mean, if you get a good ROI, you get a good ROI and there should be some sort of, now there are a lot of advocates. And I would say this is much more of a Europe thing where there people are proposing kind of more strategic degrowth to deal with different issues, including climate, but maybe other issues as well. it, it, that type of like a little bit more pessimism for whatever reason doesn't play as much in, the U S it doesn't seem like it plays that much in Asia, but it seems like it does.

have a lot of residents in Europe. Like, why is this kind of like psyche more resonant in Europe than it is in other places in the world?

Bjorn Lomborg (31:34.687)

Yeah, it certainly is a really, really weird argument and one that you would never get a majority of people to sign up for. But the idea here is to say if the environment is such a bad shape, and much of it is because we get richer and richer and then consume more and more, then it sort of stands to reason to say maybe we should stop with all that growth. Now, first of all, this is a flawed analysis. But secondly,

Of course, it also is impossible to imagine that most of the world would go along with that. Now, some rich people actually tend to think, I have enough. Although, of course, if you ask them at their next pay negotiation, so you have enough, they will rarely say sure. But the fundamental point is most of the poor part of the world are still trying to get out of...

actual poverty and of course they want to get to lives that look a lot more like rich world lives. And so this, you know, this degrowth idea has always been doomed from the start. I think it's almost hilarious and a little depressing, you know, that you have all these academics at fairly good pay that get together at a conference, they presumably fly all there to talk about degrowth. You know, that's very first world kind of problem.

Auren Hoffman (32:47.309)

Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (32:50.949)

And the reality of course is that's not how you've ever solved a problem. You don't solve climate change by telling everyone, I'm sorry, could you be a little poorer and a little less comfortable and a little colder in the winter and a little warmer in the summer and know you can't use your car and you can't eat meat and all that. That will never work in a democratic setup. And remember, that's not how we've solved problems in the past.

If you think about in Los Angeles, for instance, in the 1950s and 60s, there was a lot of air pollution. It was really, really a big problem in Los Angeles. And it's a standard sort of environmental approach would be to say, to tell all the Los Angeles, is that what they're called? Sorry, can you just walk instead? And of course, that would never have worked. But what did work was we invented the catalytic converter.

Auren Hoffman (33:22.742)

Yeah, really big problem.

Auren Hoffman (33:32.408)

Sure.

Bjorn Lomborg (33:41.653)

that basically cost a gizmo, it cost about a couple of hundred dollars, you put it on the tailpipe and then you can drive much further and pollute much, much less. That's how you solve a problem with technology, not by telling everyone to be worse off.

Auren Hoffman (33:55.596)

Yep. And that was also something where like in a very short amount of time, everyone saw a marketable difference. You went from just like massive smog to really incredibly incredible air quality that you hadn't seen in decades. So it really did change the way people, whereas with the climate stuff, it's not even clear like what the change would be. It's very hard to like sell it to somebody.

Bjorn Lomborg (34:21.921)

Yeah, I mean, some of the things that just drive me nuts is how today almost every catastrophe is now caused by climate change. But if you actually look at the total of all these catastrophes, so if you look at all the floods, drought, storms and wildfires that we've had in the world, we see ever fewer people dying from this. It used to be a hundred years ago about half a million people on average died each year from this. And despite the fact that we've quadrupled the global population, the last 10 years,

That average has gone down to 9 ,000 people. We've literally reduced it by 98%. Now remember, that has nothing to do with climate. It has nothing to do with climate. It has everything to do with the fact that we're richer, that we're better informed, that we have more opportunity, that we don't have poor people that don't know how to get out of the way, that kind of thing. That means that you dramatically reduce the damage impact. This is how we do Exactly. Yeah. I mean, look.

Auren Hoffman (34:56.014)

wow.

Holy mackerel, I had no idea it was that low.

Auren Hoffman (35:05.719)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (35:16.364)

Yeah, we can get food there so they don't have a food crisis afterwards. All these other things.

Bjorn Lomborg (35:22.429)

A hundred years ago, the precursor to the UN, I can't remember the, yes, League of Nations, thank you. I know it in Danish, but I don't know in English. It's not so often you talk about the League of Nations, but they estimated that a century ago, two thirds of humanity was starving, was permanently starving.

Auren Hoffman (35:28.504)

Like the League of Nations.

Bjorn Lomborg (35:46.081)

Today, that number is less than 10%. We've dramatically improved our life quality. And the important part when you talk about all these catastrophes, again, if you look at the damage impact, so Munich Re and many other organizations actually estimate those every year, in percent of GDP, it's actually gone down.

Auren Hoffman (35:46.606)

It's insane.

Bjorn Lomborg (36:05.473)

Now you have to do it in percent of GDP, even the UN says that, because if you have more stuff, you also have more stuff that get damaged. But if you look at percent of GDP, it's actually gone down from about 0 .3 % per year in the 1990s to about 0 .2 % now. It's not such that the world is somehow escalating catastrophes out of control. We're actually, if anything, seeing fewer people and less damage coming out of this. This again,

does not say that climate might not have a small bit, but just that our ability to deal with it is much, much greater than all the problems that we see. But of course, every time a catastrophe happens, every time there's a hurricane, you're now being told, see, climate.

But that's not a good way to be told. That's a little bit like, I don't know if you remember, but over last 30 years, the FBI statistics show that violent crime, robberies, murder rate has gone down dramatically, but we've gotten much more talk TV. So you'd constantly see all the crime that's going on. But when you ask people, most people think crime has gone up.

Auren Hoffman (37:09.155)

Yep.

Bjorn Lomborg (37:12.959)

And that's just not what the data shows us. But that's the impression that we get from a media that constantly feeds us with bad news.

Auren Hoffman (37:19.948)

In the U S it seems like there's this weird thing where the people that most talk about climate change are the people who are probably most likely to buy a second home on like the Jersey shore, Long Island, or, you know, the, the Maryland shore, like the places where probably like the Florida coast or places that most likely like get impacted by it. So there seems to be some sort of like cognitive dissonance where they're like, they're investing their money in places that

like will be most likely to lose it if their prediction is correct. Like how do you think about just like the general psyche of people?

Bjorn Lomborg (37:57.023)

Well, so first of all, I think it's a very small minority that buys the second home on one of these places. And I'm pretty sure a lot of conservatives probably also do that. But yes, you're right in pointing out that if you really believe the end of the world was nigh, there's a lot of things that you do that you wouldn't be doing if you actually believed in. Of course, what that sort of reveals is that these people talk about it as if it's a real thing.

Auren Hoffman (38:02.602)

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm kind of I'm kind of tongue in cheeking it. Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (38:23.371)

but they don't act as if it's a real thing. And I think that underscores.

Auren Hoffman (38:25.496)

Correct.

Bjorn Lomborg (38:28.181)

the sort of duality and a lot of us are caught in this web where on the one side we have to conform to our tribe and say all the ritual things that we sort of tend to signal, yes, I believe I belong to this tribe. But on the other hand, we don't actually believe it. And that of course just leads to a lot of bad policy. not gonna, I think there's probably also a lot of bad policy on the Republican side, but certainly if you look at the Democrat side and the worry on

Auren Hoffman (38:54.862)

Of course, yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (38:57.815)

climate change it leads to a lot of really bad policy because you think the end of the world is nigh so we got a cut right now and that means we're just gonna cut a lot of costly things. Of course what actually happened is you cut very little and at the same time you ship a lot of the production to China which actually if anything probably makes it worse.

and you have not really solved the problem. You've just spent a lot of money and done virtually nothing. The real way to do this is just as we talked about with the catalytic converters, there's of course innovation. Imagine, you know, a lot of

Greens like to say that solar and wind are already cheaper than fossil fuels, but of course that's not true, because if it was, we'd have solved the whole problem, everybody would just switch. The point is solar and wind is cheaper when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but otherwise it's infinitely expensive. But the simple point is, if we could come up with a new energy source that was cheaper than fossil fuel and was green, we'd be done. Everyone would just switch. And not just rich, well -meaning Americans.

Auren Hoffman (39:55.244)

Be amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (39:59.361)

but also the Chinese, the Indians, and the Africans. And so, you know, imagine if fusion magically comes around or fourth generation fission or, you know, solar and wind with lots and lots of storage. It doesn't look plausible right now. I mean, it could in 20 years. That's why when we ask some of the world's top economists, we work with more than 50 of the world's top climate economists and three Nobel laureates to try to find out where can you spend money and do the most good on climate?

Auren Hoffman (40:01.784)

Sure. Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (40:27.829)

They said by far the best investment is in innovation. If you focus more money on innovation, the long run impact is gonna be that we will quicker be able to switch. We won't switch right now, we won't switch the next decade, but eventually we'll switch and we will therefore avoid a lot more CO2 emissions than anything else you can think of because we'll get the Chinese, the Indians and the Africans on board.

Auren Hoffman (40:53.144)

The thing about on investing in innovation, like what are some of your thoughts on like CRISPR gene changes to get rid of things like malaria and Nangue fever and some of these other types of things. Like there does seem like there's potential innovation to stop it as well.

Bjorn Lomborg (41:09.857)

there's some amazing opportunities for this. Of course, you have to be aware of the potential risks. And there are a lot of people who would be very worried about this kind of thing. But I think we've seen over the last 20 years of talking about gene editing that we know what are the kinds of risks. And we've looked at it. It's not really not different, and in some ways much safer than a lot of ecological farming, organic farming.

that for instance uses that just blast a seed with radiation and sees what happens, which oftentimes leads to being dead, but sometimes lead to beneficial changes. But maybe it could also be really scary because you have no control over what's happened with the CRISPR technology of very clear control. Again, we need regulation because this is not something you just want everyone to do in their backyard kind of thing. But fundamentally,

Auren Hoffman (42:02.402)

Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (42:07.851)

There's so many opportunities to do incredible amount of good for humankind. And I don't know if you saw this, you know, what is this a month ago or something? We have this genetically modified rice, it's called golden rice, which a lot of Nobel laureates have endorsed and would just basically solve a major problem in much of Southeast Asia where you have lots of lack of vitamin A and that leads to about half a million kids going blind every year.

That's just terrible and a lot of kids die, but this is probably the biggest impact. And we know that this golden rice could essentially eradicate that. But because of these scare campaigns, again, frankenfoods as they call it, this is very much green peas and others, the Philippines just banned it. And it was blatantly a political move. And it's just simply, I think it's unconscionable. And again, yes, there are concerns that should be addressed.

Auren Hoffman (42:51.062)

Yep. GMO stuff. Yep.

Bjorn Lomborg (43:04.949)

There are conversations to be had, but this incredible one -sidedness, no, I'm sorry, I live in the rich world, I'm fine, I don't have vitamin A deficiency, so I think nobody should have access to this. It's just simply amoral.

Auren Hoffman (43:19.576)

Now, a couple of personal questions. You mentioned tribes earlier. I don't even know what tribe I could put you in. And maybe that's kind of your appeal is you're not in any kind of core tribe. Do you think of yourself that way?

Bjorn Lomborg (43:35.453)

I certainly try to not make this about what I politically believe or anything. Look, I live in Scandinavia. So it's inevitable that I'm a little sort of left leaning in any kind of sort of on a global level. But I try not to make that influence what I do. What my value add to the world really is, is trying to gather all the world's best economists to say,

Auren Hoffman (43:39.629)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (43:43.8)

Right.

Bjorn Lomborg (44:02.069)

where can you spend money and do good and where should you not spend money because you're gonna spend it really badly. And I think that conversation is one that's much, much more important than what I happen to believe in one way or another. And also honestly, I live in Southern Sweden, we're a parochial little edge of the world and we have our own little bits of problems, but it's not, don't think the world in large can learn a lot from some of these, at least some of the things that we're battling.

Auren Hoffman (44:29.315)

You actually live both in Denmark and in Sweden and there's been a lot written, especially very recently, about what's going on, the differences between Denmark and Sweden. As someone who lives in both countries, how do you see those differences?

Bjorn Lomborg (44:43.189)

Well, first of all, you're going to get me in trouble with both the Danes and Swedes if I say very much, So I'm Danish, but I live in Sweden now. And we speak a language that's pretty close, so I can actually get by speaking Danish, and they'll understand me, but often misunderstand me a little bit. But that's fine. It works. so Denmark, very early on, got very worried about immigration. They actually put in a lot of locks and stopped a lot of the

Auren Hoffman (45:07.96)

Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (45:12.051)

migration whereas Sweden has been very, very open to migration up till the last couple years. And so you have sort of a natural experiment having a more locked down world versus a more open world. And for a very long time, know, the Swedes have lectured us on being more sort of morally superior and,

standing up for humankind, which of course is a very beautiful thing when we had the Syria crisis, there's a lot of people who didn't know where to go and hats off to the Swedes, they opened up their homes and said, you can come, whereas the Danes more sort of said, no, sorry, we just passed them on to Sweden. But now, of course, we also see a lot of problems with immigration. Again, there's a lot of gang violence in Sweden. It's not this sort of thing that just like,

every other thing you see on TV. It's not like you can't go anywhere in Sweden, but there are places where it certainly feels like it's less safe.

Auren Hoffman (46:08.44)

Yeah, I certainly I mean, I have friends that are Swedes that are certainly much more scared today than they were in the past to walk around and they and there's evidence that they should be a little bit more scared and.

Bjorn Lomborg (46:14.473)

Yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (46:18.645)

Yeah, and certainly my very anecdotal evidence is that some of the friends that we know who lived in Malmere, which is the city right across from Copenhagen, which is very sort of immigrant heavy, have moved just simply because schools are not as good and you can get better opportunities elsewhere. And so you get this segregation that's probably long -term really bad. I don't profess to have any real

great answers and again, I will very easily get in trouble if I say much more than that. But I think it is interesting that you've done this and I think we'll learn a lot from this. think there's also an unwillingness for the longest time in Sweden, for instance, you weren't allowed to talk about a lot of these problems. The Swedes have this wonderful expression that's called the corridor of acceptable opinions.

Auren Hoffman (47:11.414)

-huh.

Bjorn Lomborg (47:11.621)

that they have this idea that there's a narrow corridor of stuff that you can say, and then there's a lot of stuff you're not allowed to say. Yes, but it's more sinister, right? Because basically, if you say something that's outside this corridor of acceptable opinion, you're just simply outcast. And they've always thought of Baines as the loudmouth guys that just say everything. You remember the Mohammed cartoons, right?

Auren Hoffman (47:17.774)

It's like the overturn window kind of thing. yeah, it's more narrow. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (47:30.871)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (47:40.915)

right, right, that was a Danish thing, I forgot about that, yeah.

Bjorn Lomborg (47:41.101)

And that's a very Danish kind of thing. It's not because we're bad people or really annoying people. We just don't take anything terribly serious. And in Sweden, there's a lot more saying, you can't say that, you shouldn't say that. And of course, that's bad for making good decisions and how you get to solutions. You need to listen to at least a wide variety of good arguments. I think these suites have opened up more

But again, there's a lot of stuff that needs to get fixing. I'm not quite sure how they're going to go about doing that. Again, the thing my heart beats for is much more, fix malaria, fix tuberculosis. That's not what we're going to, how are you going to fix Sweden? But I've given you my anecdotal senses of Sweden.

Auren Hoffman (48:23.062)

Yeah, of course.

Auren Hoffman (48:31.01)

Well, it's an interesting, because it's kind of a little bit of a natural experiment, at least from, you know, from my American point of view, like the Swedes and the Danes are kind of very similar people, very similar cultures, as you mentioned, similar languages, similar economies. And so, and then, you know, they've chosen a few different kind of like core.

policies and then you can start to see, okay, well, what happens? What's the difference, et cetera. So it's kind of like when two different States in America that are right next to each other, know, Pennsylvania and Ohio or something, decide to do something different. You can see what happens and then you can make some decisions later on based on.

Bjorn Lomborg (49:09.119)

Yeah, exactly. And I look forward to see what we can decide from Denmark and Sweden.

Auren Hoffman (49:14.798)

Cool. Our last question, we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice? And we've probably already gone over quite a few in this podcast.

Bjorn Lomborg (49:24.28)

Yeah, we have a lot, but if you look at advice, I think, so there was a wonderful guy called David McKay, who's advisor to the British Ministry of Climate back in the early 2000, 2010s, he's unfortunately dead now, but he wrote a book that's an incredible book. It's actually available online. It was Energy Without the Hot Air.

And he basically went in and looked at what is the reality of most of the stuff that you're being told? You're being told a lot of stuff with climate and energy and what's possible and what's not. And one of the things he battled, and I think this is the advice that I'm gonna say is bad advice. We're often being told that your lifestyle choices can really make a difference. If you go vegetarian, you'll dramatically reduce your carbon emissions.

Auren Hoffman (50:14.006)

Mm Or recycling or, you know, composting or something.

Bjorn Lomborg (50:18.665)

Yeah, and you know, I'm vegetarian, not because I worry intensely about the climate, but because I don't want to kill animals. But you know, the reality is no, it'll reduce my emissions by a couple percent. That's just not what's going to make a big difference. And so what he said, David McKay, he said, you know, if everyone does a little, it'll amount to a little.

Auren Hoffman (50:39.371)

little.

Bjorn Lomborg (50:40.905)

And I think that's the real point. Don't believe people when they tell you, you can change the world by changing your behavior a little. No, that's not how we change the world. We change the world by inventing the catalytic converter. We change the world by making dramatic progress in science.

Auren Hoffman (50:55.054)

Mm

Bjorn Lomborg (50:59.081)

And this is again, unless you're one of those rocket science, this is not what you can do. But what we can do is to make sure that we invest in making some of these guys come up with these amazing technologies that'll change the world for the better and actually make the world a much better place.

Auren Hoffman (51:13.592)

How do these like, there are these things that happen, like somehow it just like hits the zeitgeist and you know, where like everyone has to do something that probably won't have any help at all. getting rid of plastic straws or something and moving to paper straws. to me, the main thing that did I remember with my kids was it turned them to anti -environmentalists because they hated the paper straw and they just yearned for the plastic straw, Ken, you know.

Bjorn Lomborg (51:26.881)

God,

Bjorn Lomborg (51:35.477)

Yeah. Well, of course. I mean, we have no sense of proportion. So in the EU, we've actually had a lot of legislation on water as opposed to air. And the simple reason is water pollution is mostly because of farmers.

which is mostly not us. Most people are not farmers. Whereas air pollution, of course, is us. It's all the people driving around in cars. So not surprisingly, the EU decided, no, we'd rather battle against all the small minority segment of farmers. And so we've decided that we want to clean up water before we clean up our air. That's not entirely true, but it's roughly in that direction. And that's unbelievably stupid. Where do people live?

Auren Hoffman (52:02.785)

Yep.

Bjorn Lomborg (52:24.681)

We mostly live in cities, we live in the air. Every once in a while I dip my feet in water, but it's not, you this is not the first thing that we want to clean up. We'd want to clean up our air first and then the water. But we often get it wrong because we're so focused on what seems like the right thing to do. And so again, I want to pull us back and start being smart about this. And you know, if this conversation can help, I'm excited about that.

Auren Hoffman (52:52.11)

All right, this is amazing. Thank you, Bjorn Lundberg for joining us on World of Dazs. I follow you at Bjorn Lundberg on X or Twitter, whatever it's called. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been a ton of fun.

Bjorn Lomborg (53:04.587)

Thank you, it was fun.