The Copenhagen Consensus
Last month, along with my copy of Gleebooks (the magazine I get from the book club/shop I joined at the writer's festival), I got a flyer advertising some talks at Sydney University described as "Sydney ideas - international public lecture series".
The first of these was a talk given by Bjorn Lomborg on "How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place". This sounded exactly like the sort of thing I was interested in so I booked tickets for Sean and myself.
The talk was run in conjunction with the Centre for Independent Studies a theoretically "independent" but clearly right-wing think tank. I took a copy of their magazine; anyone who has ever engaged with Sean on one of his favourite themes of "how taxis are ripping us off" would have been interested to read an article espousing similar views. Apparently the situation is even worse in Australia.
Bjorn Lomberg was very energetic and enthusiastic. His talk basically outlined the method used at the Copenhagen Consensus to rank a selected list of the worlds greatest problems. The criteria were "How much good can we do per dollar spent?" instead of the more usual question of "What is the biggest problem?". This is a great way of analysing the situation and as Bjorn said, it is a wonder that no-one has done it before.
The list was slightly surprising, although it makes quite a lot of sense if you think about it. At the top (i.e. most good for money spent) was preventing the spread of communicable diseases, namely AIDS followed by Malaria. At the bottom was climate change prevention (expensive, and we can't make much difference).
The talk was aimed a little low for me, but that was OK since I could just buy the book afterwards, which I am now going to read. He took questions at the end but we couldn't stay through all of them as almost everyone asked the same question without listening to or understanding the previous answers. I realise now that this may be because a lot of the people who went were reacting against Bjorn Lomborg's own book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and as such were people with a vested interest.
A typical question was "The results show X (e.g. that putting money into reducing global warming doesn't do much good, or that putting money into preventing corruption doesn't do as much good as we thought it would) but have you considered Y?" to which the answer was to explain the methodology used and how it would take all these things into account etc. etc.
Still, I've got the book now so I can find out all about it.
Last month, along with my copy of Gleebooks (the magazine I get from the book club/shop I joined at the writer's festival), I got a flyer advertising some talks at Sydney University described as "Sydney ideas - international public lecture series".
The first of these was a talk given by Bjorn Lomborg on "How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place". This sounded exactly like the sort of thing I was interested in so I booked tickets for Sean and myself.
The talk was run in conjunction with the Centre for Independent Studies a theoretically "independent" but clearly right-wing think tank. I took a copy of their magazine; anyone who has ever engaged with Sean on one of his favourite themes of "how taxis are ripping us off" would have been interested to read an article espousing similar views. Apparently the situation is even worse in Australia.
Bjorn Lomberg was very energetic and enthusiastic. His talk basically outlined the method used at the Copenhagen Consensus to rank a selected list of the worlds greatest problems. The criteria were "How much good can we do per dollar spent?" instead of the more usual question of "What is the biggest problem?". This is a great way of analysing the situation and as Bjorn said, it is a wonder that no-one has done it before.
The list was slightly surprising, although it makes quite a lot of sense if you think about it. At the top (i.e. most good for money spent) was preventing the spread of communicable diseases, namely AIDS followed by Malaria. At the bottom was climate change prevention (expensive, and we can't make much difference).
The talk was aimed a little low for me, but that was OK since I could just buy the book afterwards, which I am now going to read. He took questions at the end but we couldn't stay through all of them as almost everyone asked the same question without listening to or understanding the previous answers. I realise now that this may be because a lot of the people who went were reacting against Bjorn Lomborg's own book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and as such were people with a vested interest.
A typical question was "The results show X (e.g. that putting money into reducing global warming doesn't do much good, or that putting money into preventing corruption doesn't do as much good as we thought it would) but have you considered Y?" to which the answer was to explain the methodology used and how it would take all these things into account etc. etc.
Still, I've got the book now so I can find out all about it.
posted by Zoe at 5:41 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home