Hypertension – Ghana’s Disease of the Future?

May 16, 2012By Bjorn Lomborg 

Project Syndicate

COPENHAGEN – If you had $75 billion to spend over the next four years and your goal was to advance human welfare, especially in the developing world, how could you get the most value for your money? That is the question that I posed to a panel of five top economists, including four Nobel laureates, in the Copenhagen Consensus 2012 project. The panel members were chosen for their expertise in prioritization and their ability to use economic principles to compare policy choices. 

Across the world, countries have imposed social distancing regulations to avoid overwhelming the health care capacity during the coronavirus pandemic — the so-called “flatten the curve”. Such a policy can make a lot of sense.

The first peer-reviewed cost-benefit analysis of the US shows just that. It looks at moderate social distancing, an approach similar to Sweden’s. Here, social interaction is reduced about 40 per cent, allowing schools and work to stay open but dramatically reducing contacts in all other public areas.

CBC news, Thursday, August 14, 2008 If Bill Gates, say, offered you $10 billion to solve the big problems of the world, what would you spend it on? Counterterrorism? Global warming? World hunger? What about on the three great plagues of the modern era: HIV, malaria, TB? Where do you think you would get the most bang for your buck? These are exactly the questions a think-tank called the Copenhagen Consensus has been asking, on three occasions now, over the past four years, with the support of such influential publications as The Economist magazine and, this year, the Wall Street Journal.