Skilled Youths for Improved Employment

The first-ever national survey to measure child nutrition levels is an excellent and timely endeavour that will help India to tackle one of its biggest challenges to development. The survey by UNICEF and the government will quantify micronutrient deficiencies as well as worm infestation.

Both children and adults need a high quality diet, but feeding young children well makes a big difference for their lives. The first 1,000 days of a child’s life – from conception to the age of two – are vital for proper development.

There is a way to make the poor of this world $500 billion better off, but this solution is rarely discussed.

This matters, because the international community is gearing up to produce the next set of development goals for 2015-2030, to continue the work of the Millennium Development Goals. $2.5 trillion in development aid plus unknown trillions from national budgets hang in the balance of these goals, so getting our priorities right is vital. Spending money on poorly chosen targets is a wasted opportunity to do much more good elsewhere.

BBC Radio 4's The Today

2012-06-19 Bjorn Lomborg

BBC asked Dennis Meadows, co-author of Limits to Growth, to debate its predictions, but he said no sound bite would convince people who would listen to people like Lomborg. Yet, this debate is not about sound bites, Lomborg explains on the BBC Today program. It really is about a 40 year track record of spectacularly bad predictions. Limits to Growth set the agenda for worrying about the wrong problems with poor solutions.