A world of difference: instead of climate change, let’s tackle poverty and poor education

We could make that our resolution for the future, striving to do better than we have in the past – as our young people express their desperation for a more compelling vision of the path forward, write Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan Peterson.

The end-of-year holidays are the traditional time for reflecting on the consequences of our past behaviour, as well as for considering the good we want to achieve in the 12 months ahead. When we set resolutions, for example, we are striving to determine how we can do better in our own lives. Perhaps it is also an occasion to contemplate how we can achieve that improvement on a larger scale.

In 2015, the world’s leaders attempted to address the major problems facing mankind by establishing the Sustainable Development Goals – a compilation of 169 targets to be hit by 2030. Every admirable pursuit imaginable, in some real sense, made the list: eradicating poverty and disease; stopping war; protecting bio­diversity; improving education; and, of course ameliorating climate change.

In 2023, we’re at the halfway point, given the 2016-2030 time-horizon – but we will be far from halfway towards hitting our putative targets. Given current trends, we will achieve them half a century late (and that estimate does not factor the Covid disruption into account). What is the primary cause of our failure? Our inability to prioritise. There is little difference between having 169 goals, and having none. That is simply too many directions to travel in simultaneously – too many projects to track; too much fractionation of attention; too many constituencies all asking for additional resources. Targets of clear fundamental importance (reducing infant mortality; ensuring the provision of basic education) are put on equal footing with well-­intentioned but comparatively trivial targets such as boosting recycling and promoting lifestyles in harmony with nature.

In consequence, we have dithered away seven years, and spent a lot of effort and money doing so. It is long past time to identify and prioritise our most crucial goals. The think tank Copenhagen Consensus has, in consequence, rank-ordered the Sustainable Develop­ment Goals by return on invest­ment. What does this mean? Determining where the most progress can be made, in the most efficient manner, for the most beneficial return. The think tank brought together several Nobel laureates with more than a hundred leading economists, and divided them into teams, each charged with determining where our dollars, rupees and shillings might be devoted to do the most good.

Extinction Rebellion activists throw paint on stuffed toys during an action to denounce the government's environmental policy on the eve of the start in Montreal of the COP15 biodiversity summit in Paris, on December 6.

This careful exercise is already delivering some very compelling results. We could, for example, truly hasten an end to hunger. Imagine that, for example, as priority one: no more emaciated, desperate, permanently damaged children; no more starving or mal­nourished people. We have seen a dramatic decline in hunger over the past century, reducing the proportion of humanity living in a permanent state of nutritional shortage from two thirds to less than 10 per cent. Nonetheless, more than 800 million people still struggle forward without enough food, and three million mothers and their children will die from hunger this year.

Progress toward the UN targets for food provision is occurring so slowly that we won’t achieve our putative goals until the next century – in no small part because of our abject failure to prioritise. This is morally unacceptable, and pragmatically unnecessary.

Hunger is a problem we know how to fix. In the longer run, we need freer trade that can allow the world’s malnourished to lift themselves out of poverty. In the medium term, we need more agricultural innovation that has clearly made its value known over the last century and more.

This would drive higher crop yields, increase the food supply and reduce hunger.

However, we also require solutions that can help now. And the economic research helps identify ingenious, effective and implementable ones.

Hunger hits hardest in the first 1000 days of a child’s life, beginning with conception, and proceeding over the next two years. Boys and girls who face a shortage of essential nutrients and vitamins grow more slowly. It compromises their bodies, and their brains develop less optimally, resulting in a decrease in the general cognitive ability (IQ) so crucial to long-term personal and social success.

Children deprived in this manner attend school less often (and learn less ­effectively when they do attend), achieve lower grades, and are less productive and poorer as adults. The damage done in the earliest period of childhood deprives starved individuals of their potential, making us all much poorer than we might have been.

Hunger damages childrens’ development. Picture: AFP

We could and should deliver essential nutrients to pregnant mothers. The provision of a daily multivitamin/mineral supplement would cost about $US2 per pregnancy. When babies so provisioned are born, they are much less likely to suffer the estimated average five point IQ loss. All babies so provisioned will be more productive, personally and socially, for the entire course of their lives. Each dollar spent in this manner (fewer malnourished children, remember) would deliver an astounding $US38 of social benefit.

Why would we not prioritise this path? Because, instead, we are endeavouring foolishly to please everyone, and failing to think carefully and clearly while doing so. We spend too little too unwisely on everything, and ignore the most effective solutions. We are therefore depriving the world’s poor, and humankind as a whole, of the result of the intelligence and productivity that would otherwise be available to us.

Consider as well what we could (and should) accomplish on the education front. The world has ­finally managed to get almost all children in school. Unfortunately, the schools are too often of low quality, and many students still learn almost nothing. More than half the children in poor countries cannot read and understand a ­simple text by the age of 10.

Schools typically group children by age. This is a significant problem, because age and ability are not the same thing. Any random group of 20 or 60 children of the same age will be very diverse in their domain knowledge. This means that the struggling children will be lost and the competent children bored and restless, no matter at what level their instructors pitch their teaching. The innovative solution, research-tested around the world? Let each child spend one hour a day with a tablet that adapts teaching exactly to the level of that child. Even as the rest of the school day is unchanged, this will over a year produce learning equivalent to three years of typical education.

What would this cost (and, of course, what would it cost not to do it)? The shared tablet, charging costs (often solar panels) and extra teacher instruction cost about $US26 per student, per year.

But tripling the rate of learning for just one year makes each student more productive in adulthood, enabling them to earn an additional $US1700 in today’s money. This straightforward and practically implementable solution means that each dollar so invested would deliver $US65 in long-term benefits. Why in the world would we fail to so invest, given that return?

There are many other areas where small, careful, wisely targeted investments can deliver truly transformative change. We could, for example, forthrightly tackle the terrible but still too-invisible disease killers of millions such as tuberculosis and malaria.

We could address the problems of corruption that still bedevil far too many countries, particularly in the developing world.

We could focus on formulating and co-operating on trade deals that would enable the economic growth that is a proven antidote to absolute poverty.

Ending poverty should be a priority. Picture: Supplied

What are we doing, instead? We are fragmenting our attention by attending to far too many goals, each with their own noisy constituency, whose reactions to necessary prioritisation make us afraid. We are, simultaneously and paradoxically, focused instead on problems that have simple solutions and make us feel virtuous (like recycling). We insist on spending trillions on inefficient climate solutions – witness the $US400bn Germany is about to have spent since 2010, delivering an underwhelming reduction in fossil fuel use from 79 per cent to 77 per cent. We alarm ourselves with unwarranted apocalyptic prophecies, ignoring the fact, for example, that increased wealth and resilience has actually reduced death risks from climate-related catastrophes like floods and storms by more than 99 per cent over the past century.

Our excessive focus on some problems and our scattered attention in relationship to the rest means we are dooming people who could have been efficiently lifted out of their terrible poverty and ignorance.

Instead of concentrating on what we could and should do, with laser-like precision, we demoralise our young people, carelessly portraying all expansive economic activity as intrinsically damaging to the planet (which it is not) and typifying their ambition as nothing but the latest manifestation of an endless pattern of universal oppression.

Imagine, instead, that we determined to act wisely. With a comparatively minor investment, we could dramatically reduce hunger and improve education. The newly secure and informed people so produced would now have the ­capacity and opportunity to adopt the long-term view.

This is exactly what happens when poverty is reduced and schooling provided; people who no longer need to worry about their starving children can turn their attention to such comparative luxuries as broader-scale environmental management.

Let’s resolve to do the best things first. We could make that our resolution for the future, striving to do better than we have in the past – as our young people express their desperation for a more compelling vision of the path forward, and instead of dooming the poor to their misery in our insistence on attending to all problems, often with poor and inefficient policies.

The world will not deliver on the promises made by its too-­careless leaders in 2016, but it is by no means too late to do better. What world might we collectively strive to bring into being if we ­resolved, as we contemplate the dawn of 2023, to help the poor and desperate in the manners we know to be most efficient, effective, and morally compelling?

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.
Jordan B. Peterson is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and the author of three books, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.