Education

An investment of $3bn annually in better nutrition could help 100 million children in developing countries to start their lives without stunted growth. And the benefits would be delivered an entire life-time.

In Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley asks how rich countries can best help poor ones and identifies five goals with great bang for the buck based on the output from Post-2015 Consensus so far.

From Business Insider (Australia), 23 June 2014...

"During the 20th century, the sharpest declined in mortality involved deaths of children under 5 years old, according to the assessment on human health from the Copenhagen Consensus on Human Challenge. "However, the pace of decline has been rapid in low and middle-income countries, especially since 1950," that report said..."

How do we best spend our scarce resources to do good in the world?

In his talk to Reason Foundation, Lomborg takes you though how to prioritize the solutions to some of the world's greatest problems.

COPENHAGEN – The world has generally become a much better place during the last half-century. Skeptics will scoff at the idea of overall improvement, but the numbers don’t lie. The task we face now is to make the world even better.

At the U.N., a Free-for-All on Setting Global Goals

MAY 6, 2014

by Eduardo Porter

"There are, of course, better and worse ideas. Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus, who achieved renown by arguing that current efforts to cut carbon emissions to slow climate change cost too much and deliver too little, argues that many of the new targets also fail the test. He has been making the rounds among diplomats, showing them the results of cost-benefit analyses of some of the ideas on the table..."

2014-01-16

PRAGUE – Read a newspaper or watch the evening news, and the world always seems to be getting worse. One problem after another is put under a spotlight. The more death, destruction, and despair, the better. As one Danish journalism textbook puts it: “A good story is usually bad news.” 

Only occasionally do we get uplifting, things-are-getting-better stories. When we do, they feel like a guilty pleasure. As a result, we often think that the world is in worse shape than it is – even if we think our own lives are improving.

2014-01-08 Will we be living better in 2050 than our predecessors did in 1900? The discussion over the state of the world, and whether things are getting better or worse, is not new. Scientists and philosophers have debated the topic for centuries. From Malthus to The Limits to Growth, pessimists have built their case for a future blighted by overpopulation, starvation, and depleted resources as optimists have tried to assure them that everything would be OK.

Bjorn Lomborg gave a TED Talk in New York on How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World? A Scorecard from 1900 - 2050. He presents a new way to compare global problems and shows that the world is becoming a better, more livable place.

2013-11-06 One of the longest-running big picture debates is between optimists and pessimists  arguing the state of the world. Pessimists  have constantly painted a dystopian future from Malthus and Jevons to the 1972 book Limits to Growth. Optimists have cheerfully pointed to how everything is getting better.