0:00

I'm

0:07

Dave Rubin

0:08

and joining me today is the president

0:10

of the Copenhagen Consensus and

0:12

author of Best Things First,

0:15

the 12 most efficient solutions

0:17

for the world's poorest and our global

0:20

SDG promises, Bjorn

0:22

Lomberg. Welcome back to the Rubin Report. Hey,

0:24

it's great to be here. Bjorn, I checked

0:27

right before we started. It's been over two

0:29

years, which is absolutely crazy

0:31

since the last time that we spoke. I

0:33

don't know how that happened. But I do

0:36

know that in these two years, the climate

0:38

people, the catastrophization people

0:41

have all increasingly gone crazier.

0:44

But before we dissect them, for the people

0:46

that may not know you, can you give me a one minute

0:49

bio on what gets you

0:51

to doing all the things you're doing and writing a book like

0:53

this, and then we'll take it from there.

0:54

Sure. So what I focus

0:56

on is really to say, look, we don't have

0:59

unlimited funds. We have limited resources,

1:01

but there's so many things we'd like to do. Why

1:04

don't we focus on where we can spend money

1:06

and do the most good first? That's

1:09

both true for climate. So let's do the smart

1:11

stuff and not the stupid stuff on climate. But

1:13

it's also true for all the other world's problems. Remember,

1:15

we promised to fix hunger and poverty

1:18

and education and all the other problems

1:20

in the world. So what this book really does

1:23

is try to say there are some amazingly

1:24

smart policies that we

1:26

can do.

1:27

Let's do those first. Whatever else

1:29

you'd love to do, let's spend money on that. But

1:32

let's just get those, you know, it's about $35

1:34

billion globally and make

1:37

the world an impressively much

1:39

better place.

1:40

Right. So basically, I mean, the thesis of

1:42

the book, you think for about $35 billion, we can fix pretty

1:47

much the major stuff. I assume

1:49

by your background there that you think some of this includes

1:51

just some some plants you could probably get

1:53

at Home Depot just to keep the air in your house

1:55

clean, huh? Please give me more plants.

1:58

Yeah, no.

1:59

going to fix all problems, but we're going to fix

2:02

a majority of problems. And what we're

2:04

essentially showing is, and we

2:07

worked with more than 100 world's top economists

2:09

and several Nobel laureates to try to find out

2:12

what do we already know works. And

2:14

what we find is for $35 billion a

2:16

year, that's not nothing. I don't

2:18

think you have it. I certainly don't have it. But you know,

2:21

I'm doing all right, but that might be pushing it. Yes.

2:24

But in the global setting of things,

2:26

that is really couch change. For $35

2:29

billion a year, we could save 4.2 million

2:32

people from dying each and every year. And

2:35

we could make the poor half of the world about $1.1

2:38

trillion better off. This is probably

2:41

the very best

2:42

thing we could do for the world. And that's

2:44

why I'm saying let's at least do those best

2:46

things first.

2:48

And that's also why you're a bit of a controversial

2:50

character, because you're trying to give

2:52

solutions that are different than

2:54

what seemed to be the solutions given

2:56

to us by say the WEF and

2:58

the UN and much of our Western governments

3:01

and all that. So I want to spend most of this conversation

3:03

talking about those solutions. But

3:05

I thought, why don't we get some of the people

3:08

and organizations out of the way that are causing the problems?

3:10

Like when you see the WEF

3:13

and the 2030 project, all

3:15

of these things, the Green New Deal here

3:17

in America, all of these giant expenditures

3:20

that will massively change things.

3:22

Do you look at them all as sort of these are just

3:24

complete nonsensical boondoggle

3:27

pipe dreams that will never work? Like

3:29

is there anything good? Is there any good nugget

3:32

in any of these things? Well, first of all,

3:34

there's the amazing good that actually

3:36

shows that a

3:37

lot of people want to do good.

3:39

They really want to be part of something

3:41

that makes the world better. Now, there

3:44

is a real problem with many of the things they identify,

3:46

but very often it ends up being a very

3:49

ineffective way to try to tackle

3:51

the problem. Take heat

3:53

waves, which is in the conversation

3:56

right now. Yes, we're going to see more heat

3:58

waves because of climate change. real

4:00

problem. But we need to get a sense

4:02

of proportion. First of all, remember

4:04

many, many more people die from cold

4:06

and from heat. And so we also need to remember

4:09

to actually help all the people who suffer from

4:11

cold, which is mostly about getting them cheap

4:14

energy access. But also if you want to help the people

4:16

who are suffering from more heat, and

4:18

we should, it's mostly about

4:20

getting people access to

4:23

air conditioning. It's about having them get

4:25

cheap electricity, and

4:27

of course also make cities more livable.

4:30

One of the ways you could do that is by making greener,

4:32

making more water features, making

4:34

them lighter. Los Angeles and many

4:37

other cities are, you know, experimenting with

4:39

painting the rooftops white, or painting

4:41

the tarmac white. And that reflects

4:44

a lot of the energy away and actually makes these

4:46

cities much cooler. The point here is

4:48

those sorts of solutions

4:50

will actually help right now

4:52

at very low cost, and help real people.

4:54

Whereas much of the argument that you have with

4:57

these, you know, we should all go net zero, will

4:59

have huge costs. We're talking five, ten

5:02

trillion dollars. This is more than

5:04

what most countries spend on education

5:06

or even health care. And

5:08

even if you did it,

5:10

it would only mean that temperatures would

5:12

rise but not quite as much. That's no way

5:14

to help people. So my point here is to say,

5:17

let's focus on the smart solution

5:19

that'll actually help.

5:20

Right. And I think one of the problems is, as I often

5:22

play clips of these people, the elites who

5:25

seem to be pushing a lot of these policies and, you

5:27

know, they don't want you to have your stove and they're, you

5:29

know, they don't want you to have this hot water heater

5:31

or whatever it might be. We know they're on their private jets

5:33

and all of these things. And by the way, I don't begrudge them any

5:36

of those things, except for the fact that

5:38

they're trying to make sure none of us get those

5:40

luxury items. But when you say, and I

5:42

quote, climate change is real, I know a certain

5:44

amount of my audience is going to go, wait a minute, we've

5:47

just had it even hearing that because

5:49

they're so upset by hearing

5:51

John Kerry and they're so upset by watching

5:54

Leonardo DiCaprio act one way on

5:56

his yacht and helicopter and then preach

5:58

another way. So when you say climate change,

5:59

that change is real. What do you actually

6:02

mean by that? Meaning that obviously the climate

6:04

is changing, but do you mean man-made

6:07

and how much of that is something that we can

6:09

actually affect?

6:11

So again, I work with economists,

6:13

so we're looking at what are the smart solutions.

6:16

I have read, unlike I think a lot of people,

6:19

almost all, I don't advise anyone

6:21

to do that, it's very, very boring, but all of the UN

6:24

Climate Panel reports, and they're reasonably sensible

6:26

all the way through. They're really trying to tell you what

6:28

is the best scientific

6:31

evidence, and the short version

6:33

is we're pumping out more CO2, mostly

6:36

from fossil fuels. CO2 is one

6:38

of the many greenhouse gases that trap heat

6:40

and make

6:41

the world a little bit warmer. This,

6:43

all other things equal,

6:45

is going to make more problems than it's going

6:47

to make solutions, simply because we built

6:49

our entire society on what the temperatures

6:52

was the last 100, 200 years. If

6:54

it got colder or if it gets warmer, which

6:56

is probably going to be because of global warming,

6:59

that will incur a cost. This is

7:01

not the end of the world as it's being sold.

7:05

It is a problem. So economists

7:07

and the only climate economist to win

7:09

the Nobel Prize, William Nordhaus, estimate

7:12

that by the end of the century, if we do nothing, which

7:14

is stupid

7:15

and we shouldn't do, and probably all is implausible,

7:17

but even if we did nothing, the cost

7:20

by the end of the century would be equivalent

7:23

to losing about 4% of our GDP. Remember,

7:26

by then we'll be much richer, the UN estimate

7:28

will be about 450% richer, as

7:32

rich as we are today. So what this

7:34

really means is, because of global warming,

7:36

if we do nothing, it will feel

7:38

like we'll only be 434% as rich by

7:41

the end of the century, rather than 450.

7:44

That's not the end of the world. That's a problem.

7:47

And that's why I'm saying, look, if it's the

7:49

end of the world, of course you should spend everything to fix

7:51

it, but that's not what this is. It's a problem

7:54

and we should spend money smartly on

7:56

this problem, but also remember, there are lots of other

7:58

problems that are much bigger.

7:59

for most people. So before we get to some

8:02

of those specific 12 solutions, what

8:04

would you say to the people who are just sort

8:06

of skeptical

8:08

that we can do anything about this, meaning

8:10

like, so from an American perspective,

8:13

for example, that we're so sort of inefficient,

8:16

our politics is so broken, these people can't

8:18

build a road much properly,

8:21

or at least that cost, you know, in a cost-effective

8:23

way, that the idea that they

8:25

could solve any of these things is completely

8:27

crazy, and then you hear people like AOC, I

8:31

think that was about three years ago, so now we've got

8:33

nine, and it's like, if you think AOC can solve

8:36

any of your problems, much less solve

8:38

climate problems, you know, I got a bridge to sell you.

8:41

So I think a lot of the intuition

8:43

is right,

8:44

that we are essentially embarking on

8:46

something that's gonna be so phenomenally

8:48

costly, that most countries are

8:50

actually not going to deliver on this. I

8:53

live in the EU, I actually worry a little bit,

8:55

the EU is so good at doing stuff they promised, that

8:58

we might actually do it, despite the fact that it's

9:00

gonna be phenomenally costly, but certainly

9:02

in the US and most other places, you'll simply

9:04

elect other politicians when they really start

9:06

hurting. That's how

9:09

democracies work, and that's probably really good. So

9:12

you're not gonna solve it with this incredibly

9:14

costly and very, very ineffective

9:17

policy. The way you're gonna solve it is

9:19

like we've solved all other problems through

9:21

innovation.

9:22

Remember back in the 1950s, Los

9:25

Angeles was a terribly polluted place. It

9:28

was mostly because of cars and geological, you

9:30

know, it put in a basin and stuff. But

9:32

fundamentally, the point was not to tell

9:35

everyone in Los Angeles, I'm sorry, could you walk

9:37

instead? Which would never have worked, right?

9:39

They do not walk in LA. No, you're

9:41

not gonna take people's cars away. The solution

9:44

was this, you know, tiny technological

9:46

advance called the catalytic converter, and

9:49

innovate it in 1978, you pluck

9:51

it on the tailpipe,

9:52

and then you can drive much longer and pollute

9:55

much less. Yeah, it costs a couple hundred

9:57

dollars, but you've actually managed to convince

9:59

almost every-

9:59

across the world, this is a good idea,

10:02

and it solved a very large portion of the problem. Likewise,

10:05

the US is the country that's caught most

10:08

emissions, CO2 emissions, over

10:10

the last 10 years. How? Not because

10:13

of Obama or Trump, but because of

10:15

fracking.

10:16

You basically, inadvertently, made

10:19

gas so much cheaper

10:21

that most people switched from coal to gas, and

10:23

gas emits about half as much CO2 as

10:25

coal. So you solved a large

10:27

part of the climate problem

10:29

through innovation. That's how we do it. Remember,

10:32

if we can innovate green energy to be cheaper

10:34

than fossil fuels, everyone will

10:36

switch not rich, well-meaning Americans

10:39

or Europeans, but also the Chinese, the

10:41

Indians, and the Africans, who are gonna be emitting

10:43

most of the CO2 in this century. So

10:46

I totally get your, and your

10:49

view is sort of reluctance. We

10:51

are trying to solve this very ineffectively

10:54

and incredibly expensively, which probably

10:56

means we won't solve it at all. But

10:59

there is a smart

10:59

way, and it's called innovation. Just

11:02

like most other things. That's exactly why

11:04

I wanted to have you on, because I know even for

11:06

me in the last year, especially as I've watched

11:09

so many of these globalist organizations

11:11

with these crazy projects, and then the hypocrisy,

11:14

and literally the gas stove thing here

11:17

in America, all of this nonsense, even I have

11:19

become more skeptical in a way that I don't,

11:21

I don't wanna be blindly skeptical. I wanna

11:23

be skeptical with some

11:26

knowledge of what's going on, which is exactly why we

11:28

have you on. Let's talk about some of those

11:30

solutions, because you lay out these 12

11:32

solutions. So what's the

11:34

easiest thing that we can start doing now, probably

11:37

some of which we're doing to some degree?

11:39

So

11:41

I'll tell you two. I

11:44

have 12 great solutions. You're asking me to pick

11:46

my favorite child. I'm not gonna do that. But yeah,

11:49

but I am gonna give you two. One is to

11:52

save lives. So one thing that I

11:54

think most people don't recognize is that

11:56

each year tuberculosis

11:58

still kills.

12:00

1.4, 1.5 million people. Last

12:03

year it was bigger again than COVID.

12:06

COVID took the top place for

12:08

infectious disease killer in 2020 and 21. But

12:11

otherwise it's been

12:13

tuberculosis. We in the rich

12:15

world fixed this more than half a century

12:17

ago. But if you actually go back, tuberculosis

12:20

was a terrible killer. This is why

12:22

Sabine and Moulin Rouge died

12:24

from tuberculosis. And a

12:27

fourth of everyone who lived in the 1800s in

12:30

Europe and the US died from tuberculosis.

12:33

This was a terrible killer.

12:35

It killed probably about a billion people over the last 200

12:37

years. But we figured out

12:39

a way to do it. Now we don't have a problem. But

12:41

most poor countries is not

12:43

that place. And there's a very

12:45

simple way.

12:46

It's unfortunately one of the reasons

12:49

why it's hard to do. You actually have to take your medication

12:51

for half a year. And most people know that

12:53

it's hard to just take your medication for two weeks.

12:56

But there's a lot of ways to sort of game if

12:58

I get sort of tuberculosis anonymous

13:00

where everybody gets together once a month

13:03

and say, yes, I took my medication

13:05

all the way through. And you know, you game if

13:07

I didn't give people a carton of orange

13:09

juice, that kind of thing. And it may seem a

13:11

little weird that you have to pay people to do

13:13

it. But if you do that, if you make

13:16

sure that they don't

13:16

have tuberculosis, they don't pass it on

13:19

to another 10 to 20 people. And this

13:21

is how we solve much of the problem. You also

13:23

need to screen many more people. We've investigated

13:26

and there's lots of models that show how much

13:28

is this gonna cost? It's probably gonna cost

13:30

about $6 billion a year. So

13:33

again, not nothing, but we can

13:35

save almost a million people from dying

13:37

over the next half century, every

13:39

year. So this is one of the things where

13:41

we say, and we're slightly

13:44

crude economists. We go in and say, how

13:46

much will it cost and how much good will

13:49

it do? So we give you a benefit cost ratio.

13:51

We try to estimate for every dollar spent, how much

13:53

good will you end up doing? Turns out if you do

13:55

it on tuberculosis, for every dollar spent, you'll

13:58

do $46 of social.

13:59

That's just an incredible opportunity.

14:02

So do you guys bring these ideas

14:05

to say a guy like Bill Gates, who's

14:07

got the billions, who seemingly

14:09

wants to help, you know, by his own words,

14:12

would say he wants to help the people of Africa and

14:14

help the world. Do you bring these ideas

14:16

to them and then what do they say?

14:18

Yes, so we both talked to Bill Gates,

14:20

actually the Gates Foundation paid for this project.

14:23

But we talked to Bill Gates, I wrote

14:26

an abbot together with him. We talked

14:28

to USAID and other organizations.

14:30

But crucially, we also talked to a lot of poor

14:33

country governments who obviously should also

14:35

pony up some of this money because it's their own citizens

14:37

who are dying. And much of this

14:40

is they're dying because they're not the,

14:42

you know, they're not the rich people in the poor

14:44

part of the world. If you're rich in the poor part

14:46

of the world, you don't get tuberculosis and

14:48

even if you do, you don't die from it. But, you know,

14:50

the slum populations, the migrant populations,

14:53

the minors, it's the prison populations.

14:56

But the problem is this percolate

14:58

all the way through societies. So we try to

15:00

take all of these arguments and make people

15:03

aware that here's a very cheap

15:05

way to make the world much,

15:07

much better. And yes, they say, oh,

15:10

that's really interesting. Now, they're not going to

15:12

say, oh, sure. So here's six billion dollars. Make

15:14

it go away if you want. First of all, that's not what I

15:16

do. I'm an academic, right? I wouldn't know what to

15:18

do with six billion. And there's a lot

15:20

of organizations that are actually really good at this.

15:23

So you should give it to your national health

15:26

care systems and the stop TPE

15:29

campaign and many others in those countries.

15:31

But the point is we're trying to make it easier for

15:33

politicians and for philanthropists

15:36

and for development organizations to spend

15:38

right, to spend it where it really matters.

15:41

So, all right, before we get to that second one that

15:43

you like out of these 12 and then we'll get to as many as possible,

15:46

how do you make sure that the mechanisms are in

15:48

place,

15:48

that these things just don't become what

15:50

seemingly most government things become, which are

15:53

giant, you know, government waste projects.

15:55

We don't, you know, we give money to everybody. We never get

15:57

receipts on anything. I think that that's another.

16:00

that a lot of people are worried about

16:02

these days. Like even if you can convince

16:04

them of some of the risks and why we

16:06

can do some good things here, they're just like, ah,

16:09

you know, we're just gonna pour money and maybe

16:11

it'll work, maybe it won't, but

16:12

we just won't know. And that's a very

16:14

correct concern. And

16:17

a lot of the things that we spend money on

16:19

go to things that make you feel good, things

16:22

that look good on TV, but

16:24

have very little effect. But we're actually

16:27

using the best models of things have already

16:29

been done where we showcase, look,

16:32

if you spend the money here, even though some of it

16:34

is gonna go to waste, that's

16:36

probably true almost everywhere in the world. And

16:38

some of it is just gonna be spent incompetently, that's

16:41

just the way the world works. We've

16:43

taken that into our calculation, so we're

16:45

not assuming that this is gonna be heroically

16:48

spent in the very best possible way. It's

16:50

gonna be spent reasonably competently

16:54

like you would actually hope you

16:56

can reasonably do this. And let

16:58

me share this because it's much clearer with the

17:01

other proposal I was gonna talk about

17:03

named the education. Education is

17:05

something everyone agrees both sucks

17:07

and we should do much more about, right? Especially

17:11

sucks in the poor part of the world. So

17:13

there's almost half a billion kids in

17:16

primary school in the poor part

17:18

of the world. We got almost all kids in school,

17:20

that's great, but they're learning virtually

17:22

nothing. We say that they technically

17:25

learn to read, but if you ask them this

17:27

question, so you ask them to read this question, this

17:30

is a 10 year old, right? VJ has

17:32

a red hat,

17:33

blue shirt and yellow shoes. What

17:36

color is the hat?

17:38

It's red, right? But 80%- I

17:41

got it, I got it. Thank you, thank you, so you're there.

17:45

80% of kids cannot answer this question.

17:47

And it's not because they're dumb, it's because they can't actually

17:50

string all these words together into meaningful

17:52

sentence. And of course that means we've technically

17:55

taught them to read, but they can't actually use

17:57

it to become more productive and become-

17:59

richer and more resilient and do all

18:02

the wonderful things.

18:04

It is. It's that they

18:06

haven't actually learned most of the stuff. So

18:09

what we find is

18:10

you should spend more money on education.

18:13

But this is exactly where you would say, oh,

18:15

but there's a lot of ways you can spend it badly. And

18:17

that's absolutely true. So one example

18:19

that I give in the book is Indonesia.

18:22

And you know, bless their hearts, they really want to do

18:24

good. They basically said, we care

18:27

so much about education that we're going

18:29

to double spending on

18:31

education. So they ended up hiring more than

18:33

a million new teachers. They doubled

18:36

the pay for each of these teachers.

18:38

And because of the way they did it, so they did in different

18:41

regions at different times, there's actually a

18:43

big study that could sort of look this as

18:45

a pseudo random trial where you could

18:47

see, well, how much good does this actually do

18:49

for the schools? And it turns out this famous

18:51

paper is called Double for Nothing. And

18:54

it basically shows, yes, you spent twice

18:56

as much money, and there was no impact

18:58

whatsoever on teaching.

19:00

It's very, very easy to spend money

19:02

badly on education. And this is true

19:04

everywhere else. But what we identify

19:06

are three great ways that are very,

19:09

very well tested. I'm just going to tell you one of them. So

19:12

the problem in most schools, but especially

19:14

in poor countries, is you have 50 kids

19:16

in this one, you know, in this fourth grade, they're

19:18

all 12 years old, but they have

19:21

wildly different abilities. You

19:23

know, some of them are far ahead of the teacher,

19:25

some of them virtually no clue what's going

19:27

on. And what's a teacher going to do? He's going

19:30

to try to teach somewhere in the middle. And

19:32

you know, some kids are going to be bored, lots

19:34

of kids are going to be totally lost. He should teach

19:37

each one of these kids at his or her

19:39

own level. But of course, you can't do that if you have 50

19:41

kids.

19:42

But if you put each of these kids

19:44

in front of a tablet with educational

19:47

software, just one hour a day,

19:48

this tablet with the actually

19:51

the software will very quickly figure out where

19:53

exactly are you on this? You know, are you

19:55

really ahead of this curve or not

19:58

and teach you at your exact level?

19:59

So the rest of the school will still be

20:02

this boring old school where most kids

20:04

will be lost or bored But

20:06

one hour a day they'll actually learn

20:09

and what it turns out and there's lots of evidence

20:12

that for $21 a year

20:14

per student, they're not gonna get the tablet It's

20:16

gonna be shared with a lot of other kids and all that

20:19

stuff And you also need you know, solar panels and places

20:21

where they don't have like TrisDee You need a locker

20:24

for the for the tablet so they

20:26

don't get stolen all this But it actually

20:28

turns out that for every year they go to school. They

20:31

will now learn three years of schooling

20:33

Now it's still pretty bad schooling. So

20:35

it's not like phenomenal They're not gonna be Einstein's

20:37

just from this but this is a way

20:40

that we can actually make almost half a billion

20:42

kids Smarter and what that means

20:45

is that they will when they become adults

20:47

go out and be much more productive Actually

20:50

make their nations much richer and

20:52

of course that will solve a lot of the other problems

20:54

they have So we estimate this will cost

20:57

globally about ten billion dollars

20:59

So again, not nothing, but it will

21:01

actually generate benefits worth

21:03

600 billion dollars each and every

21:05

year. This is just amazing and astounding

21:08

So instead of spending it badly, we should spend

21:10

it on this really really effective

21:12

way,

21:13

you know, it's funny I'm reminded of a Simpsons

21:15

episode from probably around 1993 where

21:17

Bart is struggling in school So they put him in

21:19

the slower class and then he looks at

21:21

the teacher in the slower class and goes let me get this straight

21:24

I'm struggling in the other class. So now you've made

21:26

me put me in a slower class How does this

21:28

make any sense to you people? So you're trying to solve

21:30

that? Okay, so it seems like between education

21:33

and tuberculosis if I'm if my math is correct

21:35

We're at about 16 billion, which

21:37

is about half of what

21:39

you need to fix some of the problems So

21:42

we've got about eight or nine minutes left. Let's plow

21:44

through a couple others to let's get to that 32

21:47

Tell you one other so one that I

21:50

think amazed me is the

21:52

fact that Maternity and especially

21:54

pregnancy and especially birth is terribly

21:56

dangerous. So it turns out about 300,000 mom's dying

21:59

year around pregnancy and about 2.3

22:03

million kids die in the first 28 days

22:06

in their life on earth. And

22:08

this is not rocket science, how we deal

22:10

with this. This is simply about getting the

22:12

women into

22:13

facilities, so about two-thirds

22:16

of them give birth in facilities. We

22:18

need to get like 90% of them into facilities

22:21

and these facilities need to have basic

22:23

emergency obstetric care. This

22:26

is something the World Health Organization, lots of institutions

22:28

have shown. What will that take? You know, it's about

22:31

having, I don't know, disinfectant. You

22:33

would imagine that would be sort of obvious, but actually

22:35

a lot of them don't have a clean water so

22:37

that you can wash down the surfaces. But

22:40

it's also something so simple as it

22:42

turns out that about 700,000 kids

22:43

each

22:46

year die because they never start breathing.

22:48

So they come out, they get, you know, they're given

22:51

birth, but then they don't start breathing.

22:54

Now this also happened in rich countries,

22:56

so about 80% of all kids that come out of

22:58

the mom, you know, just start breathing right away. 15% need

23:02

this slap in the back to get

23:04

going, but the last 5% don't. And you

23:06

know, in the rich world of course,

23:09

we just simply put a mask over

23:11

their mouth and put positive air pressure,

23:13

put it into

23:13

the lungs, and they go, and then they go.

23:16

And then we save them.

23:17

But we don't have that in about half

23:20

of all the poor parts of the world. This

23:22

is, this, this hand pump cost what, $75? And

23:24

it could probably save 25

23:29

lives over its three year life

23:31

period. That's the kind of thing. So

23:33

there's a whole list of things. This will cost

23:36

about $5 billion again. So,

23:39

but it will save 166,000 moms from dying each

23:43

and every year, and it will save 1.2

23:46

million kids each and every

23:47

year. How are we not doing that? So you

23:50

know, that's another amazing thing. Actually,

23:52

every dollar spent will deliver $87 worth of good. So

23:56

there's malaria. Yeah, you've got me to

23:58

I see about 21 million.

23:59

and so far we're getting there. So, and

24:02

of course I'm telling you the sort of more

24:05

expensive stuff first because they are really

24:07

big things. Malaria is actually a huge, it

24:10

used to be a huge problem around the world. It's no

24:12

longer, it's just in Africa. There's a lot of reasons

24:14

for that. But we know how to fix it.

24:16

It's simply giving out more of

24:19

these insecticide-treated

24:21

bed nets. So people will sleep under

24:23

these nets. They both physically make sure

24:26

that the mosquitoes can't come in and bite

24:28

you and it also kills them off because as in

24:29

insecticide. It is very effective,

24:32

very simple treatment. It'll cost about 1.1

24:35

billion dollars a year and it

24:37

will save about 300,000 people each and every year.

24:40

Again, a fantastic investment. One

24:43

other thing that I think you'll find incredibly

24:45

interesting is agricultural research and development.

24:48

So, you know, we worry about the fact that people

24:50

don't have enough food.

24:51

We also have, and I'm not gonna

24:54

tell you about that, we also talk about how we can get better

24:56

food to kids. But it turns out a lot of that is

24:58

very corruption

25:01

prone. If you spend a lot of money on

25:03

food, a lot of people, we see that for instance

25:06

in India, a lot of merchants will sell

25:08

you really bad food and then you try to distribute

25:10

it for free and nobody really wants it because it

25:12

tastes terrible kind of thing. So the

25:15

best way to deal with this is to,

25:17

just like we talked about before with climate, innovation.

25:21

We had a green revolution back in

25:23

the 60s and 70s, which basically meant

25:25

that we could produce maybe twice as much food

25:28

on the same acre of land, which

25:30

is a great innovation. You just simply make the

25:32

seed much more productive. We

25:35

need that for all the stuff they grow in

25:37

the poor part of the world. So that's sorghum and

25:39

cassava and all these things that you probably haven't heard

25:42

of, but we need the same green revolution

25:44

there. We estimate this would cost about $5.5

25:46

billion a year, but

25:49

it would generate much more food,

25:51

but that would both means the

25:53

price would be lower for people who live in

25:55

the cities, but it would mean that the farmers

25:57

could produce much more. So the farmers would also

25:59

get.

25:59

get richer, everyone would win and

26:02

we'd avoid about 100 million people starving

26:05

each and every year.

26:06

Going on that for a moment, how

26:08

much tension do you see between big

26:10

cities and rural areas these days? You

26:13

know, I was in Cali before where there was always this

26:15

incredible tension between, say,

26:17

Los Angeles where I was. Obviously, you have, you know, eight

26:19

million people, something like that, in a relatively small

26:22

area. Then you have the whole north of the state, which

26:24

is all the agricultural land. They were always fighting

26:26

for more water. The people of L.A. wanted the water.

26:29

What's the general, like, day-to-day living of

26:31

who gets what?

26:32

Oh, and look, cities

26:34

get a lot more money everywhere because

26:37

that's where the power is, that's where

26:39

the politicians live, that's who

26:41

runs the media and everything else. In

26:44

that sense, what we try to pick up is

26:46

a lot of the great investments are

26:49

in poor areas because that's where you can save

26:51

people really cheaply. One thing is, for

26:53

instance, more childhood immunization. We've

26:57

got about 80, 90 percent vaccinated, most

26:59

places around the world. Measles, for instance,

27:02

great idea. Don't skimp on your measles vaccination,

27:05

right? It's just a terribly deadly disease

27:07

that used to kill about 800,000. Now we're down

27:09

to 80,000, but you still need to get

27:12

more people vaccinated. Otherwise you're going to get these

27:14

epidemics again. And getting the last

27:17

ones out in the sticks is

27:19

going to be more expensive. But even then,

27:21

we find with a much more expensive cost,

27:24

it's going to cost about, sorry, I'm just looking

27:26

at the cost because I can't just remember

27:28

those, $1.7 billion a year. But

27:32

it's going to save about half a

27:34

million kids each and every year. So

27:36

the benefit cost rate is about 101. So

27:39

again, we try to identify different

27:42

things that are incredibly good. We simply said we're

27:44

going to identify the best buys.

27:47

And we put the bar at 15, which is somewhat

27:50

arbitrary, but is something

27:52

our Nobels did simply

27:55

for saying, look, these are the so

27:57

no brainers that everybody should just agree this

27:59

is something. than we should be doing.

28:01

How worried are you when you

28:03

talk about vaccines now because of everything

28:05

that happened with COVID, you know, these bells go off

28:08

in my head about vaccines and how they

28:10

get in people's arms and that the

28:13

pharmaceutical companies, you know, they have no

28:15

ability to be sued, all of these things that now

28:18

people are skeptical of things, say

28:20

a measles vaccine that really very few

28:22

people were skeptical of, say five years ago. Now

28:25

you just say vaccine and now it's setting

28:27

off bells on people that have long

28:29

been dormant.

28:30

And that's a terrible outcome.

28:33

And the way I try to treat

28:35

it is to talk about childhood immunization.

28:37

We're not talking about, you know, we should do another

28:40

COVID vaccine, which obviously is hugely

28:43

sort of divisive. That's

28:46

the way I'll go with you. Okay, yeah. But,

28:49

you know, childhood vaccines, everyone know,

28:52

has just saved an enormous amount of kids.

28:54

Obviously, the fact that we could vaccinate,

28:57

you know, the world against smallpox, which, you know, just

29:00

last

29:00

century actually killed somewhere

29:02

between 300 and 500 million people.