Bjorn Lomborg shared that 8 world's top economists prioritised problems faced in the world today.
Some of the statistics he shared in his talk:
- Best projects:
- HIV/AIDS - if we invest $27 million over 8 years, we can avoid 28 million new cases of HIV/AIDS.
- malnutrition - 1/2 of the world's population lack iron. Merely $12 billion will help a lot.
- free trade - By promoting free trade in Europe and US, we can pull in $2400 billion a year. With that, we are pulling 200-300 million people out of poverty in 2-5 years.
- malaria - Investing $13 billion over the next 4 years can prevent 500,000 people from dying.
- Bad project: climate change. We are doing very little good with 150 billion a year. UN estimated that 75 billion a year can solve clean drinking water, basic sanitation to every human being in the world.
An interesting perspective. I always feel that we can do very little to save the earth. In fact, I tend to believe that it is part of a clean-up process, like how the dinosaurs were wiped out. Well, I think the Singapore authorities agree with me. We are doing very little in this area as a country. Again it will come nevertheless. Why do we have to spend so much effort to prolong our sufferings? It is part and parcel of life. Then again, this is just me.
