where prominent economists are seeking to establish priorities for advancing global welfare.

He's the former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen.

Bjorn became known internationally for his book 'The Skeptical Environmentalist'

in 2001 and 'How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place,'

'Cool It' in 2007, which is also a movie and lately, published in 2018

'Prioritizing Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of The UN's Sustainable Development Goals,'

among many other works and books. And so, I'm hoping we'll have a very productive conversation today

and welcome to this

discussion.

Bjorn: Thanks a lot Jordan.

Jordan: All right, so why don't you just start by letting people know what you've been up to?

Over the last, let's say, two decades

I know that's a very broad question. I've been interested in talking to you because I

read a number of your books a few years ago, and I was interested in their economic

analysis as a way of determining which which

crises, let's say, or which potential crises are real and, also, how they might be managed most intelligently.

Bjorn: Thanks a lot Jordan and so

fundamentally, what I try to do is to say and this really is very very obvious

'We only have a limited amount of resources,

so let's make sure we focus those resources on the places where we can help the most. Where we can do the most good.'

Remember, what is it that we mostly focus on in the world?

It's very often the things that get the headlines, the things that people talk about and very often that ends up being

the things that have the cutest animals or the most crying babies or the groups with the best PR and

surely that's not the right way to prioritize. The right way should be to look at : If I spend a Dollar or a Peso or

Rupee here

Will I do more good than if I spent that same Dollar or Rupee or Peso over here?

So basically asking across all the different areas you can spend

resources, where do I help the most. Now, obviously, that's a huge

conversation in-and-of itself because it's not easy to just determine that but the basic idea is simply to say

Let's focus on the places where you can do the most good

Rather than the places where it makes us feel the best about ourselves. So that's really what I've been trying to do for

for two decades and you know

Prioritizing the world and trying to say 'Where should you spend money?' of course makes the the projects that we say

'These are the really really great interventions!'

They all love us and think we're like the best things since sliced bread

but of course the projects of the policies that are not so effective, they think we're terrible so it creates a lot of

antagonism and makes a lot of people annoyed and interested, but I think it's crucial to ask these questions.

Jordan: Well, one question would be 'What's the alternative?'

You know like when I was looking at the UN Development Goals, for example, if I remember correctly

there was something approximating 200 of them and this was a few years ago

I worked on a UN panel and I thought 'Well, the problem with 200 goals is that you can't have 200'

They're not goals if there's 200 of them because you absolutely have to prioritize in order to move forward assuming some limitation on resources

Which is exactly what you just described and so then then the question would become

'Well, how do you calculate benefit?' And that's a really difficult problem,

which is, I think, why it wasn't addressed with the mishmash of 200 goals.

Apart from the fact that you're going to offend people by rank ordering their priorities.

So why don't you tell people a little bit about the methods that you used because I think there are definitely interesting.

Bjorn: So, you're absolutely right. The sustainable development goals:

We actually worked with the UN back in 2015 when they were doing this. It was about

60 to 90 (it was very unclear) UN ambassadors.

I actually met with a quarter of them

in New York and talked to each one of them and said 'Shouldn't we try to, you know,

focus on the targets that would do the very most good?' Now, of course, each one of them said 'Yes' individually,

but the the the combined effort of all the UN ambassadors was, of course, not to actually do the best goals

It was to get everybody's goals in there.

So, you know, the Norwegians had three ideas and the Brazilians at four and everybody else had you know

three or four that they want in there. That's why we ended up with a hundred and sixty nine targets

which of course simply means she promised everything to everyone everywhere and that means a lot of people are going to be very disappointed when

2030 rolls around and we haven't actually dealt with all the things that we promised.

Jordan: Right, so what happens there

is that the people who are doing that, including everyone on the list,

maximize short-term emotional well-being of the people who had been doing the consultation at the cost of medium to long term progress.

But then, again,

they're not going to be around in 2030, in all possibility, to suffer the consequences of that.

Bjorn: Or, at least, yeah

or at least they're not nobody's gonna see that we fail to do as much good as we possibly

could because we will have done a little bit of good everywhere. But, doing a little good everywhere

It is not nearly as good as doing an enormous amount of good in the places where you can view the very most good with

extra resources.

Remember we're estimating

the total cost of the SDGs is somewhere in the range of two and a half trillion dollars and

the actual amounts available is about a hundred and forty billion dollars.

So we literally have five percent of what we're promising

So we're promising the world and then we say:

'Hey, here's a small amount of money and let's spread it thinly so everybody gets a little bit of it'

Jordan: Okay,

so that's partly where you derive your premise that we're dealing with limited resources is that you're actually using a real number and

that the number you're using is what's actually available and when you wrote 'How to Spend $75 billion'

you basically took half of what was available.

Bjorn: That yes, I was about much much earlier on and that was mostly sort of a oh, it's a fun idea to say:

'How would you spend a specific amount?' Yes, and that was half

So we weren't saying we should spend all of it in the exact way that we were talking about.

Jordan: Okay, so to agree with you

So to agree with you, people have to agree that

Everything can't be done for everyone all at once at infinite expense and that it's useful

practically and and also

Even in a utopian sense in the desirable sense to rank order so that the obvious

Money that's available the money that's genuine available can targeted best.

And so then the next question would be: 'How do you go about that in the least

controversial and most empirically sound manner? (To do the rank ordering)

Bjorn: So, we use

cost-benefit analysis

which is a very well-established economic tool that tries to say: 'All right, for each of the proposals that you come up with -

How much will that proposal cost?' Now, remember, this is not just economics. Most of the cost will be money

but for instance if you want to immunize

small children

You also have to ask the mothers to spend perhaps a day to go to the place where their kids will be immunized.

That'll, both, cost them labor (they can't do labor that day), maybe they will have transportation costs, they'll have food costs

There'll be extra other cost

So we try to add all of those costs up and say: 'So, what's the total cost of this project?'

Then we look at all the benefits and remember the benefits of both economic

Yes

But they're also social, for instance kids not dying or kids not being sick and they're often also environmental.

So we tried to take all of those benefits of both the economic the environmental and social benefits.

Add them all up into one number that is

denominated in Dollars or Rupees or whatever your currency is and then you can say: 'Well, for this many Dollars

you can do this much good' and that means you can also say: 'For every dollar spent you can do this much good."

Obviously I'm simplifying this but in a sense what it means is if you do it

Right and a lot of economists spend a lot of time trying to make this right if you have all the same

parameters across all these different areas

It actually means you can start comparing

Different interventions across all the different areas and say: 'Where do you get the biggest bang for your buck?'

And of course that is what it matters if you're actually going to do good so we did and this is not good

please don't buy this book because this is this is a very long and

Academic book but we did this long and academic book with with more than 50 of the world's top economists

Looking across all these different areas

but the beauty is you can actually

Put it in just one chart and I'm going to show you that and then we'll also put it up there on your website

So this is the ones

One-page chart that has all the targets here and for each of the targets

There's an analysis that says: 'How much will this cost? How much good will it do?' and then it shows 'For every dollar spent..How much good will it do?'

If it's a long line, it'll do a lot of dollars of good if it's a short line not so much.

So it really becomes this very simple menu for the world to say: 'Where can you spend your resources?'

And of course this doesn't mean you know, just like when you go into a restaurant you get a menu

It doesn't mean you buy the cheapest thing or the most nutritious and maybe you're in the mood for you know

an unhealthy cake

But it's incredibly important to know what is the cost and what's the benefit and knowing this

Makes it a lot more

likely that the world is going to focus itself on some of the really long bars where it can do a lot of good for

Every dollar or your Peso spent.

Jordan: Ok. So now

if I was thinking about critiquing this, lets say, from a social science and/or

Political perspective the first thing that I would object is

Well, how do you... how is it that you know that your calculation of the costs and the benefits are

accurate and how do you know that they're

essentially as free as possible of any undue political bias

So because your critics, no doubt, will object, as perhaps they should, that there will be

Let's call them implicit biases even though I'm not a fan of that idea in some sense

There's going to be underlying presuppositions that weight the manner in which the economic

Calculations are made and then of course, you also have to buy the idea that the cost-benefit analysis approach is actually valid

So, can you tell me what you guys did to forestall such or to take such criticisms into account?

Bjorn: Sure, and so first of all, we don't just ask one team of economists

We also have other teams

critiquing those

economists and we exactly try to make sure that there's sort of critiques from both sides if you will so we know that this is

not just an ideologically driven number, but it's actually an empirically pretty clear number that says for instance if you focus on on

Vaccinations you're actually going to do and what we find is you're going to do $60 a social good for every dollar you spend

Now you could argue: 'Well, what would be sort of the

Ideological spin you could put on that?' Well one thing is to say: 'Well, did you measure all humans as equal?'

Yes

we actually did. And of course, you could argue from an economic point the same point that they're not. I think very few people would

want to do that but what we do is across all these areas, all people are ranked as

equally important. That is: equally valuable, and that's obviously political gonna consideration

But I think one if we're looking across the world, that is the right one

If anything that probably means that most rich country people are evaluated way too little compared to what they're actually willing to do themselves

But this means that we actually get the weighting right in the sense of saying: 'Where are you gonna spend extra money if your goal

is to help the most in the world?'

Jordan: Right. Okay, so you're used an approach

that was basically I would say a solid measurement approach

from the theoretical perspective because the idea would be to have

multiple measures of the same phenomenon or set of phenomena and to see where they

dovetail

So that would be an issue of reliability

so if you have multiple teams of economists and

They all converge on something that approximates an agreement and you look at a diverse range of opinions

Then you can be reasonably certain that you've converged on something that's real. And then you also have an element of peer review in there

Bjorn: Yes

Jordan: another way of altering.. Go ahead

Bjorn: and exactly both of these are obviously important to make sure as you say you get the

Reliability and you actually get something that resembles somewhat of a truth

But the real point here is of course in some way. We just take a step back

This is not a question about getting the absolute numbers. Exactly. Right. I mean that would be wonderful if we could do that

but when I just told you that

You know, vaccination - every dollar you spend will give you sixty dollars back in value

It'd be very very unlikely that that's the right number but it's much much more about getting the order-of-magnitude right.