Next-Generation Development

Aug 13, 2015 Bjørn Lomborg

A panel of 82 eminent economists analyzed the proposed Sustainable Development Goals to establish which targets are likely to be most effective. They found that the world's energies and resources would be best focused on improving the lives of children.

PRAGUE – Over the next 15 years, some two billion children will be born, 90% in the poorest parts of the world. Providing these kids with a better start would be one of the greatest achievements that humanity could make. Doing so also would be one of the most efficient uses of the resources that the world dedicates to development.

Next month, world leaders will gather at the United Nations in New York to agree on the Sustainable Development Goals: the targets that will succeed the 18 set in the year 2000 by the Millennium Development Goals. The list of potential targets is impossibly long: 169 in all, toward which trillions of dollars will be spent. How they are prioritized will be profoundly important to the lives of billions of people.

The Copenhagen Consensus, a research organization that I head, asked 82 eminent economists from around the world to carry out a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed targets, in order to establish which are likely to do the most good for people, the planet, and global prosperity over the next 15 years. It turns out that one of the best ways to help is by focusing on improving the lives of children.

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Bjørn Lomborg

Writing for PS since 2005
181 Commentaries

Bjørn Lomborg, a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School, is Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. His books include The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, The Nobel Laureates' Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World, and, most recently, Prioritizing Development. In 2004, he was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people for his research on the smartest ways to help the world.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 6 Comments on this article

Paul Daley Aug 16, 2015

Lomborg seems to write basically the same article every month. The points are well-taken, but the repetition is tedious.
- Robbie Jena Aug 18, 2015
  
  It happens...why these people forget how China rose with Engineers supporting it and Engineers at the top of Political system. Then this happens.
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Aale Hanse Aug 15, 2015

The targets put forward are good and morally right and suspect the full list will be the same. It does not take much education to come up with them mainly because they have been around for some time now. The world leaders will endorse them with hubris and a glass of red in hand for sure. Not to mention forty to fifty years time frame.

What is missing in action is the implementation of the schemes in a sustainable way. It is one thing to drop in and vaccinate a few before leaving as quickly. It is another to build schools and hospitals that work effectively over a long term. The world is full of failed project like that due to short term thinking. When it comes to subsidies /aid money, the big corporation can smell it a mile away and flock in to grab as much of the low hanging fruit they can before deserting and leaving the place worse than before.

I really fail to see how people especially in the developed countries can hold their head high when making decisions like these because they have these same problems in their own back yard. Once they get their own house in order then maybe they will have the will do what is good and right.
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Curtis Carpenter Aug 14, 2015

I guess I'm very surprised that making family planning available to everyone didn't have the greatest return on investment, and would be interested to understand why it did did not.
- helmunt hincapie Aug 14, 2015
  
  another article of the professor Lomborge shows you are right, the return on investment is family planning is 100 to 1, better than the options of this article, it's the best investment without any doubts.
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Michael Public Aug 13, 2015

No - this is completely wrong - the thing most needed by the poor is meaningful local law enforcement. Food or medicine are almost meaningless things when you are essentially a slave to those with (illegitimate) power enforced through threats of violence.
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