Customer Reviews

Global Crises, Global Solutions

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This report is an excellent, controversial and refreshing approach to global problems. Daily, the news media and politicians declare that another crisis is urgent. Often, loud, public resolutions accompany these pronouncements. Political blocs form to push through agendas based on those resolutions. The only thing missing from the process is a dispassionate analysis of whether the solutions make economic sense and, if so, which ones make the most economic sense. This book of compiled essays from the Copenhagen Consensus - as documented in The Economist - provides that missing element. The conference drew from United Nations documents to assemble a list of the most urgent problems facing the world and identified those that presented opportunities for solutions. Then it set the task of identifying solutions that would provide the biggest benefit for the cost, examining 38 proposals for spending $50 billion over four years. Surprisingly, some of the most economically rational projects never make headlines and never turn up in public exhortations. When was the last time you saw someone climbing onto a platform to demand mosquito nets to prevent malaria in Africa? That may not come up nearly as often as adherence to the Kyoto Protocol, which provides a far weaker cost vs. benefit scenario. According to the analysts from Copenhagen, the former seems to be a very sound use of the world's problem-solving resources, but the latter costs a lot and seems to deliver relatively few benefits. We highly recommend this intriguing, sweeping conversation.

This book talks about ten of the most serious challenges facing the world today:

climate change
communicable diseases
conflicts and arms proliferation
access to educationfinancial instability
governance and corruption
malnutrition and hunger
migration
sanitation and clean water
subsidies and trade barriers.

You certainly can't accuse them of taking on minor issues.

Each issue is introduced by an expert in the field who defines the scale of the problem and describes the costs and benefits of a range of policy options to improve the situation. After that two additional sets of alternate perspectives age given for each proposal.

The one complaint I have is that in the section on conflicts it talks only about civil war. While civil war is not minor (21 major conflicts in 2002 alone) the prospects for the future of conflict between the muslim world and the rest seem to be worthy of a category by itself, and may involve many more people than all 21 civil wars. Perhaps this is another book in its own right.

Global Crises, Global Solutions is an anthology of scholarly essays by learned authors directly addressing problems facing the world today, such as climate change, financial instability, communicable diseases, conflicts, cooruption, malnutrition and hunger, trade barriers, water access and more. Each problem is discussed from the point of view of an expert skilled at analyzing the problem's scale as well as cost-and-benefit policy options for improving the situation. Shorter pieces from additional experts with alternative positions provide balance in this superb springboard for debate and understanding key issues. Especially recommended reading for government employees, non-governmental organizations, students of public policy and applied economics, and any individual with a direct personal or professional interest in global development issues.

I enjoyed Bjorn Lomborg's latest work as a thought provoking alternative to conventional wisdom on different aspects of globalisation. Unfortunately, much of the scientific and political community have become prisoners to theories which have dubious merit. They are followed more out of political correctness and the prevailing winds of public opinion, than research and testing.

By including other experts who provide alternative opinions and challenge each other, Lomborg has followed the true spirit of scientific method - development of a theory and testing it through falsification. It is a shame that some purported scientists have tried to silence him in a similar way to Galileo. Poor science leads to inadequate policy.

The book is a worthy successor to the Environmental Sceptic and reflects a growing concern in the scientific community about the need for more rigorous research and debate on key issues. It's content is well laid out.

Clearly, the amount of material is not designed for reading in one session. However, it is a valuable resource book suited to those interested in entering into the debate on key global issues. You can pick an individual topic and obtain a good grounding in it.

I look forward to Bjorn Lomborg's next offering.

This book appears at the first look about economy. It is not. Its starting premise is the question: if you have limited resources and have to prioritize, what would you do in our global warming situation. It is a hard
headed treatment of the subject matter by a multitude of subject experts. Their complete set of policy proposals then evaluated by eight of the world top economists.
It is interesting, how fast the discussion veers off after discussing the economics into the very conditions enabling or blocking the desirable economic developments, such as conflicts, communicable diseases, sanitation and trade barriers just to mention a few.
The book can be read on two different level.For casual reader and policy maker most the numbers are avoidable and still be a very readable and very thoughtful and interesting material. For those, who want hard numbers and hard details, that is provided too, but not necessary for understanding.
This is the multicolored, multifaceted work of many dedicated individuals who - by the work they are dedicated to perform - are forced to set priorities in expending limited resources. I was surprised by their reasoning, and I trust, so will you be.

why arn't global politics based on these arguments? it's a pleasure to read the scientific arguments that lomborg uses to validate his claims. it's a shame that we cannot organise the solutions to make this world a better place for a lot of people at no expense to our own prosperity. all the hard (econometrical) stuff is almost easy to read.
next year i'll read it again and see how far we are...

The leftists hate Bjorn Lomborg because he comes up with sensible lower cost adaptation solutions to the alarmist theory of run away global warming rather than the massive government control over everyday Americans the alarmist favor.
He does believe that CO2 is causing some warming but lays out a cogent approach to address the issues.

I was among those who considered Lomborg discredited when he produced The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, and I now retract two thirds of my rejection in light of The Resilient Earth: Science, Global Warming and the Fate of Humanity and Lomberg's work in creating the Copenhagen Consensus as reported on in this book--37 serious people considering alternative perspectives and ranking remediation options in relation to real cost-benefit analysis, something Al Gore and other hysterics do not do.

This book is NOT recommended for the general reader--it is way too heavy, too many charts, not enough of a flow, a lot of this stuff has to be taken on faith. Instead, I recommend Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (Vintage) for the general reader, and probably How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place which I may order in a few minutes.

This book I had to work hard to glean take-ways useful to me--in no way does that disparage this excellent work, but it is of, by, and for economist academics.

The simplified list of its conclusions, money best spent on:
+ Communicable diseases
+ Conflists and arms proliferation
+ Access to education
+ Financial instability (reduction of)
+ Governance and corruption
+ Migration
+ Sanitation and access to clean water
+ Subsidies and trade barriers (ending)

Although Climate Change is listed in the book as being at the top of this list, a thorough reading actually takes it off the list as not cost effective in terms of human and natural benefits.


What impressed me most--and the point is made much more fluidly in Cool It--is the compelling array of so many other better ways to spend money, and the compelling evidence that clime change, while a real problem, is a traffic accident in comparison with malnutrition, disease, education shortfalls and so all, all of which can be dramatically improved at relatively low cost which climate change remediation is not only grotesquely expensive, but yields very little return on investment.

Early on the editor (Lomborg) points out that the Copenhagen Consensus had to overcome obstacles including hard to compare alternatives, institutional regidities (within which I would include over-specialization and the fragemntation of knowledge in a reductionist society), and resentment of the idea that climate change might not be the "silver bullet" Al Gore would have us believe (I suspect at this point the Nobel Committee is flinching inwardly at their ill-considered award--Herman Daly and several others remain vastly more deserving).

The editor points out that the UN Millenium Goals are achievable at a cost of $40-70 billion a year (i.e. less than what the US pays for secret intelligence that produces less than 5% of what the US President needs to know, and nothing for everyone else), but are unlikely to be realized because the financial resources are simply not forthcoming.

I glean a few notes from across the various contributions:

+ Time discounting (future benefits at future costs versus current costs)

+ Risk of catastrophe as a separate category

+ Climate change meriting special status because it is a multi-generational problem

+ Macroeconomic literature is severely lacking (this is huge, what it really means is that no one is doing whole system or system of systems thinking--(see my images at Phi Beta Iota, I no longer load images here as Amazon destroyed over 350 images to get rid of 12 portraits of Obama-Bush sharing the same face).

+ Foreign aid and internal transparency are complementary (seems obvious, but worth noting the tie)

+ Reducing the intensity of a conflict can be easier and cheaper to do than ending the conflict

+ Education by radio WORKS and yet has not been adopted nor really understood--this ties in well with the Earth Intelligence Network of educating the five billion poor "one cell call at a time"

+ Education contributors ASSUME that only 9-18 years of "butts in seats" rote education will do, they have not conceptualized Internet and radio and cell phone based incremental and situation-relevant education

+ Governance and corruption are covered but only as a Third World problem. Although there is a literature on Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids and The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back I believe that we must encourage much more research on the costs of the structural corruption resident in the Western countries, and the USA in particular, as this corruption has not only bankrupted the USA, but cascaded across the world with unilateral militarlism, virtual colonialism, and predatory immoral capitalism all done in the name of the good people of America (and at their expense) but actually being a form of global looting of the many by the few.

+ The "cure" for failed states is said to consist of citizen oversight; procurement reform; improved revenue raising; improvement in business environments (end of red tape and delay); and global asset recovery and transparency. For me that boils down to ubiquitous computing and "true cost" visibility everywhere.

+ The section on water is fascinating and one of the best in terms of general reader comprehension. I learn that in the past 100 years the population has tripled while water use has gone up six times. I learn that beef requires 13 times more water than vegetarian foods.

+ There is not as much focus on legitimacy as I was expecting, and I recommend Max Manwaring's edited work, The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century--everything these authors address in this book is made possible by LEGITIMACY, which must be earned with honesty and transparency and integrity across the board.

I put the book down somewhat disappointed. Although in the aggregate there are connecitons made between water and nutrition and poverty and education and agriculture, the authors are lacking a strategic analytic model such as the Earth Intelligence Network had created, and I believe that a second round of the Copenhagen Consensus would benefit from adopting that model.

Another book with cost numbers that I recommend is The Future of Life. For a sense of how we are our own worst enemy, see The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters and Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America

Global Crises, Global Solutions; edited by Bjorn Lomborg, who brought us The Environmental Skeptic, has produced a collection of articles where experts attempt to prioritize which global problems should be dealt with, and how they should be solved. Although an excellent idea, the actual writing is extremely academic and not very easy to read. Essentially, the articles are a series of cost-benefit analyses on specific problems of global warming, conflict, communicable disease, etc. I am not an economist, and found the writing to be almost impenetrable at times, because the authors assume the reader has a very firm understanding of economics and economic jargon. Four stars for intent, only three stars for readability.

Most people never think about the unavoidable tradeoffs involved in ameliorating social problems. With opportunity costs in mind, may we must dedicate ourselves to a better world.

I have two respectful criticisms:

1. If people focused only on the problems that we could do most to solve then that would reduce the pressure to solve problems. However rational it might seem to shift all foreign aid from funding education to funding AIDS prevention, the result would probably be less total aid. The way politics works, one big problem is sometimes treated less seriously than two problems that are half as big.

2. It is difficult to quantify any of these problems, but some of them, like global warming, are much harder to quantify. The "worst case scenario," unlikely as it may be, has the potential to do such incredible damage, that we need to act on it. Reducing global warming might be conceived of as an insurance policy, whereas preventing AIDS is more likely an investment in mutual funds.