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How Much have Global Problems Cost the World?, by Bjørn Lomborg
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There are often blanket claims that the world is facing more problems than ever but there is a lack of empirical data to show where things have deteriorated or in fact improved. In this book, some of the world's leading economists discuss ten problems that have blighted human development, ranging from malnutrition, education and climate change to trade barriers and armed conflicts. Costs of the problems are quantified in percent of GDP, giving readers a unique opportunity to understand the development of each problem over the past century, the likely development into the middle of this century, and to compare the size of the challenges. For example, how bad was air pollution in 1900? How has it deteriorated and what about the future? Did climate change cost more than malnutrition in 2010? Rather than offering definitive answers to the questions asked, this innovative book will spark debate amongst a wide readership.
- Sales Rank: #1148448 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-08-05
- Released on: 2013-09-25
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
'For a volume covering such a large number of grim subjects, ranging from climate change and violent conflict to loss of bioversity and malnutrition, this is a surprisingly uplifting read. While mankind has succeeded in creating some depressingly disastrous social, natural and humanitarian disasters, we also have the power to alleviate and overcome these self-inflicted challenges. Bjorn Lomborg reminds us that for every part of mankind that can destroy, there is also one part that can create.' Tilman Brück, Director, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)
'This 150-year view of humanity's biggest challenges, measured in economic terms, gives unique data on the globe's important issues to students, teachers and the general public. Ultimately, it affords everyone the opportunity to answer with facts the questions of humanity's scorecard: are we doing better or worse? Overall, there is more good news than bad, but we could still do better.' Per Pinstrup-Andersen, H. E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy and J. Thomas Clark Professor of Entrepreneurship, Cornell University
'This book is a bracing tonic. An excellent survey for students, teachers and the general public with a wealth of thought provoking material. If you want to know how the world is doing, and get hard, comparable numbers to back it up, this is where to go.' Alix Peterson Zwane, Executive Director, Evidence Action and the Deworm the World Initiative, and former Senior Program Officer, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
About the Author
Bjørn Lomborg is Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. He is the author of the controversial bestseller, The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and was named one of the 'top 100 global thinkers' by Foreign Policy magazine in 2010, 2011 and 2012, one of the world's '100 most influential people' by Time and one of the '50 people who could save the planet' by The Guardian.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Taking a look at global problems from a cost standpoint
By Nick
Bjorn Lomborg is an interesting academic with a fair amount of detractors and supporters. Having read a few of his previous works, I am somewhere in the middle. He definitely is thought provoking, and I enjoy the intellectual challenge of trying to defend his work or trying to prove him wrong, depending on the issue. So when I stumbled across this latest collection of papers by the Copenhagen Consensus, I figured that it wouldn't be dull and would give me a mental workout.
The book is a collection of academic papers on trying to quantify the cost to humanity on the following 10 issues:
Air pollution
Conflicts
Climate change
Biodiversity
Education
Gender inequality
Health
Malnutrition
Trade barriers
Water and sanitation
My big question is: Are things getting better? If you watched the news, you'd wager no. However, in order to see if things are getting better, we need to first define and measure the problem - and this is what the book attempts to do.
I'm not an academic, but the papers were written well enough to understand, and they attempted to put a cost of each problem. It made me realize that I should have paid attention more in economics classes in college, but I could grasp the fundamentals without that much effort. Some parts did leave me scratching my head and taking notes to look up later. I always thought of gender inequality as more of a human rights issue than a financial issue, so to look at it that way was new and interesting.
Overall I liked this book mainly because it put me outside of my intellectual comfort zone. Does GDP percentages really translate into a good measure for quality of life? Does everything truly have a financial cost attached to it? I felt myself arguing with my emotions and brain, and felt frustrated that I wasn't able to articulate how I felt about something like air pollution. I don't think anyone for instance says it's a good thing, but where's the trade off between minimal pollution and quality of life?
An interesting book for sure, and in a way, I wish it was written more towards the average person so it could provoke more discussions as to if the world is getting better and are we on the right track?
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Time on the Cross...
By John P. Jones III
I was first introduced to the work of Bjorn Lomborg by a Danish friend. Although I STILL have not read his most famous work, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, I have read, and reviewed two other works of his, Cool IT (Movie Tie-in Edition): The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (Vintage), which I gave 4-stars to, and RethinkHIV: Smarter Ways to Invest in Ending HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa, which I gave 5-stars too. Overall, I do admire an approach that both provides some skepticism to the "dogma" that can parade as received wisdom, and that also provides a quantitative analysis towards the allocation of resources in addressing unquestionable societal problems. On the other hand, famously defying Harry Truman's search for a "one-handed economist," I also believe that healthy dollops of skepticism should be applied to that quantitative analysis. Many a flim-flam has been facilitated by the opaque symbols of a complex equation that only the "initiated" purport to understand. Anyone for another "tranche" of AAA super-safe, but high yield and highly leveraged mortgage bonds?
This book, edited by Lomborg, seeks to examine ten major issues that have, and will affect humankind: air pollution, conflicts, climate change, biodiversity, education, gender inequality, health malnutrition, trade barriers, and water and sanitation. The time period is a century and a half, 1900 to 2050. Lomborg provides a 25 page introduction, the rest of the text are the academic papers of scholars in the field, with extracts at the beginning of the book, followed by the complete paper. The papers are filled with many a graph, numerous tables, and naturally some equations that will bamboozle "the unwashed." The complete book is less than four hundred pages, and given the agenda, surely is, at least, "ambitious."
In the days of my youth I did many a physics problem, and was told to "ignore friction" or "ignore wind velocity" or "hold X constant." As a first approximation, this is a most valid approach, enabling a better understanding of gravitational laws for example. However, if you don't always remember what assumptions you make, in the real world, by ignoring wind velocity of, say, 100 mph, you might not be carrying enough fuel to fly over the Andes, for example, and you, as well as your equations, will reach terminal velocity. And in this book, I was appalled by one of Lomborg's central assumptions, and even he categorized me as in the "many." Specifically, he said: "Second, many have suggested that happiness is potentially a better measure of human welfare than GDP, and thus questions the basic unit of comparison in this project...moreover, while no one would argue that GDP is a perfect measure, it is clear that higher GDP correlates with other attractive outcomes like economic freedom, freedom from corruption (!! Explanation points added), better health and social outcomes, lower poverty, life satisfaction, etc.) I really think some health skepticism, that Lomborg proclaims, should be applied to that statement.
It was John Maynard Keynes, in the depths of the depression, who provided some of this skepticism to the shibboleths of the day, noting famously that GDP would increase if we took in each other's laundry. And long before the gazillion "labor savings devices" that we now have, he noted that there might be only 15 hours of "real work" that needed to be performed each week, with the rest relegated to "make work." So, I would have loved to have seen some papers that examined how the ten issues might be improved if GDP contracted (!), by, for example, riding a bike more often instead of a supersized pickup truck (yes, just like they do in Denmark), close many a "fast-food" restaurant, and prepare and cook meals at home, just like in the 1950's, eliminate at least one aircraft carrier battle group... etc... yes, I know, "heretical ideas," but presented in a skeptical mode.
There were a lot of other assumptions in the actual papers that I found both difficult to accept, and wondered what validity the corresponding graphs and equations held under such assumptions. Consider, in Hutton's paper on Air Pollution: "Solid fuel use is difficult to estimate, because of lack of data (!! Explanation points added) I assume solid fuel use as 50% of developed country households in 1900, with a linear rate of decline until 2010, when a 5% rate is assumed. For developing countries, I assume a 95% use in 1900..." In Blomberg and Hess' paper on Armed Conflicts: "This is a straightforward calculation which assumes there are no long-run growth costs or economic volatility costs of war." Or, "The additional cost of human losses may seem large, but in fact is quite conservative, since we do not take account of civilian deaths..." Or the clincher: "It is for reasons such as these that we have chosen to concentrate on losses of welfare due to lost consumption, which are less sensitive to these challenges." Amazing, war is bad for consumption, which is, I guess, the reason why President Bush urged all Americans to do their part after the events of 9/11/01 by still shopping.
In the 1970's, Fogel and Engerman wrote a highly controversial book entitled Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery. It examined the slave system in the Southern states before the Civil War in economic terms, and concluded that slavery was highly efficient, producing such "proofs" as a "Total Factor Productivity Ratio" calculated to be 1.33. They noted "statistics" that proved that the slaves' life expectancy declined 10% after they had been freed. It should be required reading for any economist who wishes to use the tools of his profession to examine complex social issues. Regrettably, I must give Lomborg 3-stars for this effort.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A wealth of information
By Abacus
Just to clarify this is not a book written by Bjorn Lomborg. Thus, you will not find his collegiate friendly writing style (except for his 25 page introduction at the beginning of the book). Instead, Lomborg has aggregated the equivalent of long detailed scientific papers on 10 different subjects written on the history and forecast of various environmental and socioeconomic costs such as air pollution, climate change, malnutrition, and gender inequality (just to mention four out of the 10 costs). Each of the 10 cost working paper is authored by one or more different set of authors. Not a single author has contributed to more than one paper on a specific cost. In total, 21 different social scientists/authors contributed to produce the 10 different papers. Thus, Lomborg has solicited a broad range of opinions.
The cost estimates run from 1900 to 2050 combining a long historical component with a pretty long forecast period. Those costs are often scaled as a % of GDP, which is really useful. There are a lot of related tables and graphs that are very informative, as you can readily observe pronounced long term trends.
The book is very well organized.
Lomborg’s introduction is very informative as it covers a lot of ground by itself on numerous long-term trends. Note that the majority of long term trends reviewed by Lomborg are positive including the exponential rise in economic growth since the 1950s that is not anticipated to slow down (page 4). The risk of death from air pollution is dropping quickly (page 9). Global welfare loss from illiteracy and gender inequality are plummeting (pg. 15) and so are losses due to poor nutrition (pg. 20). Mortality and morbidity related losses are also dropping quickly (pg. 22).
After the introduction, the next 45 pages consist of summaries of the findings on all of the 10 costs. Those are very useful and allow you to extract the main information out of this book without reading the entire 360 pages.
After the introduction and summaries, you have ten chapters each one earmarked to cover a specific cost out of the ten. That is where such cost issue is covered in much greater detail and presented as a scientific paper. Each such chapter is fully referenced with supporting scientific literature relevant to the subject studied.
All in all, this book provides a wealth of information on the subject. The data, information, and findings will most often diverge from the Media coverage that rarely provides a sense of scale on such costs (i.e. something will cost us $10 billion over the next century… is that a lot? Actually, as a % of world GDP over the same period it is close to nothing. But, the Media rarely scales such information).
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