To Whom Should we be Listening to Solve the World’s Problems?

We’re hearing a lot these days from climatologists.  They are telling us that global warming is the world’s largest problem.

Meanwhile, other scientists think it’s malnutrition, or the harvesting of the rain forests, or the lack of safe drinking water, or…

The list is long.

Which branch of science should we look towards to help us decide which of these problems is the most important of all?  None of them, it turns out.  We need to listen to the economists.

Economics is a science of choices, really.  The job of the economist is to assess impacts.  And it turns out that a number of economists have now begun to turn their attention toward these problems of science.  The problem is a little different from the economist’s viewpoint: he doesn’t really assess the science — he simply determines what impact a dollar spent to help solve one problem would have, versus a dollar spent to help solve another.  It’s not just an evaluation of how big the problem is — it’s an assessment of how much impact we can have toward solving the problem, of how effective a dollar spent here can be, versus a dollar spent there.

Economist Bjorn Lundberg has taken a lot of well-deserved hits for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist because he overstepped his bounds and spent a lot of time assessing environmental science.  Unfortunately, that has caused too many people to ignore his fundamental premise: that global warming is one of our most intractable problems, and perhaps therefore it is one on which our efforts do us the least good.  When he has his head on straight, he admits that global warming is a huge problem, and it’s an important one.  It’s just that we can do a lot more good with a lot less money if we focus elsewhere.

The question isn’t: what’s a big problem?  It’s: How can we best apply scarce resources to alleviate suffering?

A lot of economists agree on this way of thinking.  The 2004 Copenhagen Consensus was a “dream team” of economists set to the task of assessing the solutions to our world’s biggest problems and producing a prioritized list.  The economists, including Lundberg and eight others (three of them Nobel laureates), produced the following list:

1. Controlling HIV/AIDS
2. Providing micronutrients (iron, zinc, etc.) to malnourished populations
3. Liberalizing trade to even out world prosperity
4. Control of malaria
5. Development of new agricultural technology
6. Improved water delivery and sanitation technologies
7. Reduced governmental corruption
8. Lowered barriers to migration for skilled workers
9. Improved infant and child nutrition
10. Scaled-up basic health services
11. Guest-worker programs for the unskilled
12. Climate control measures (carbon taxes, Kyoto protocol, etc.)

Note that this is not a prioritization of the world’s biggest problems.  It’s an assessment of how effective we can be in solving important problems.  Malaria, for example, can be hugely limited in the world through the wide-scale use of treated mosquito netting, each of which costs a couple of bucks.  Tremendous suffering could be alleviated very cheaply.

Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars spent toward implementing the Kyoto Protocols would simply move the point in time when a coastal family in Bangladesh has their home flooded from 2100… all the way to 2106.  It’s not that it’s not a huge problem.  It’s that we’re not very effective (at least with what we know currently) at solving it.  More suffering can be alleviated if we focus elsewhere.

Isn’t this the way we should be thinking about our problems?