Not an easy read, but well worth the effort. Part of the difficulty in reading are the detailed explanations of the methodologies used to analyze policy alternatives: dry and repetitive reading, but does provide transparency needed to defend the policy choices.

a better use of finite resources than a few making millions off a People TAX

I've been in and around development for 44 years, including 5 as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Latin America and 13 more working with NGOs in 60 developing countries. I look for forward to each Copenhagen Consensus report. Clear, concise and practical....things almost always missing from others in the development industry (and development is an industry), like USAID, World Bank, IMF, UN etc. Alleviating or even ending world poverty isn't rocket science and Lomborg and company show us how and where an affordable amount of money can be spent to get the best results.

How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place (2013) by Bjorn Lomborg is a short summary of The Copenhagen Consensus project that got experts in various areas to work out the cost benefit ratios of various forms of aid and then got a panel of economists including multiple Nobel Prize winners to judge them. It's a great idea and remarkable because cost benefit analysis seems to have been little used when thinking about aid spending.

The book is not a good read. The solutions are presented, the conclusion described and then five Nobel Prize winning economists present their ideas. Then the cost benefit ratios for all the options are briefly described. The book is a collection of essays with the most important parts being the cost benefit ratios that are essentially just presented.

The best options for spending have been, in order, micronutrients for children, fighting malaria, immunisation, deworming, fighting TB and R & D spending on agriculture.

The idea behind the Copenhagen Consensus is a really good one and the basic idea, that of applying standard accounting and economics practices to evaluating aid is a really valuable contribution. Micronutrient spending seems to have benefited from people reading the conclusion.

The weaknesses of the approach are in the accuracy of the cost benefit analysis and trying to apply it to things like reducing corruption and increasing free trade. These things would increase wealth substantially but are very difficult to achieve in practice.

The book may be worth having as a reference but it's not nearly as interesting or as well put together as Lomborg's other books.

It is not a book. It is a collection of articles chosen to support the authors arguements. The author also makes a huge assumption that everybody wants to have a world population in excess of 10 billion, and that we should utilize marginal lands, using genetically engineered crops to feed them. Didn't we learn anything from Bob Geldof's Food Aid which ensured the survival of a generation of African children only for these people 20 years later to starve and go to war. The Author also talks about geoengineering as the solution to climate change in an inevitable fashion. Man made algal blooms and shooting particulate matter into the atmosphere are fanciful ideas which would require world wide agreement, and would have unknown results. The limits to growth have always been, and always will be, War, Famine and Disease.

In this book Lomborg and Copenhagen Consensus Center writers attempt a utilitarian approach to global problems. Lomborg, several Nobel Laureates, and professors look for the areas with potential for high return on health and happiness for dollars invested. This approach, circumscribed to $75B and the short-term, is the kind of thinking that one could imagine occurs at board meeting for large, multi-billion dollar charities.

However, this project is undermined if two conditions arise: 1. the priority order of goals cannot be agreed upon, or 2. if the set of goals contain individual goals that contradict other ones. First, from the divergence of priorities among the Nobel Laureates the reader sees that experts disagree. The Nobel Laureate's list of 25 or so priorities generally include immunization, fresh water, sanitiation, or solar radiation management (i.e. dispersing sulfates into the upper atmosphere for climate stability), but in different rankings. So, from the outset one can witness serious disagreement even among the highly credentialed panel. Could the problem be even worse than different funding levels for different goals? The answer is, "Yes."

The deeper problem is whether the goals not only can't be prioritized well but whether they contradict. It could be said that immunization without family planning is like driving fast but not wearing a seat belt (there were days before Ralph Nader's campaign that this was commonplace). One cannot work well without the other. To put it more directly, Lomborg's plan will take the world population up to approx. 9 billion, at which point population must be stabilized and levelled to prevent another doubling and near certain mass famine (which is a polite way of saying there will also be mass violence and unspeakable crimes). Lomborg leaves me wondering what measures will come into play at that point, of his projected goal or helplessly accepted assumption of world population of 9 billion. If there is no clear and fair plan now - in 2014 as the world's population is growing at approx. 200,000 people per day - why would there be a revelation or breakthrough in family planning when the world population is at 9 billion? Or how about at another doubling, at 18 billion? No one wants to genuinely contemplate the privacy and reproductive rights (but the Chinese did, or had to, with a One Child Policy). Given Lomborg and CC's utilitarian approach and support of human health and happiness for the greatest overall numbers and greatest quantity, a thoroughly 19th century Bentham-Mill approach, this would seem to lead to a calculation that prioritizes family planing. It also needs to be said that a thoroughly civilized family planning approach instead of a brutal one is more viable now than when population becomes so large than another fifty percent growth or doubling of population would lead to mass famine. There will be an existential point of decision about world population, for the total plant mass or phytomass on the planet is limited by the Sun's energy and nutrient availability. It is a mathematical certainty that if human population exceeds the carrying capacity (in total figures, a dire prospect with little room for other mammals, land and ocean animals) then calorie reduction per person (on average) would ensue.

It is so overwhelming that policymakers have decided, in the speeches about world population of 9 billion or 14 billion (who knows where it will be in the late 21st century) that it is a problem that will solve itself. The reasoning is that we'll be on average so much wealthier by then that people will on average choose to have one or two children per family, and then a magical global population plateau will occur. The truth is that there will always be pockets of low population and high population growth -- unless family planning on a global basis occurs. It is a matter of responsibility taking on equal importance to personal freedom. Personal freedom that nearly always results in poverty or starvation (in parts of the world of 14B or more people) is not authentic freedom after all.

At least Warren Buffett was thinking this way - of making family planning the number one goal - before he decided to send most of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, partly out of his belief that they were better managers of his assets than he or his successors would be. The population question could overwhelm world policymakers if its resolution is delayed. This is also the opinion of the exceedingly high IQ author Christopher Michael Langan, who speaks about this challenge in part of his book "The Art of Knowing" and in a "First Person" series interview with Erroll Morris.

If anyone doubts that human population is not a problem, please publish a paper on how a world with one more doubling will feed itself well: that is, how to properly provide food for 14 billion people. Just remember, many readers near retirement age have already seen the world population double once in their lives. Consider yourself from a high school student's perspective, growing up with 7 billion world population. Doubling is conceivable and may well be likely. What will the world look like as today's high school students near retirement and there are 14 billion who need quality food every day?