Economics

Problém priorit

Apr 13, 2012 Bjørn Lomborg

KODAŇ – V tomto desetiletí došlo k pozoruhodnému pokroku v oblasti největších problémů lidstva. Vzpomeňme na vyhlášení vítězství nad obrnou v Indii, které se před deseti lety zdálo nemožné. V lednu uplynul jeden rok od posledního hlášeného případu obrny v zemi. Anebo se podívejme na pokroky v boji proti malárii: počet případů se v posledních deseti letech snížil o 17% a počet úmrtí klesl o 26%.

Navzdory globálnímu populačnímu růstu a hospodářské krizi absolutní chudoba – tedy podíl lidí žijících za méně než 1,25 dolaru denně – ve všech regionech světa klesá. Rozvojového cíle tisíciletí OSN v podobě snížení extrémní chudoby na polovinu se podařilo dosáhnout s pětiletým předstihem.

Ještě před několika málo lety byla mužská obřízka coby nástroj v boji proti HIV/AIDS do značné míry neznámá. Dnes ji UNAIDS a Světová zdravotnická organizace doporučují jako prostředek boje proti HIV/AIDS a více než deset afrických zemí zavádí strategie na zvýšení její dostupnosti. Podobně i koncept využívání geoinženýrství k reakci na klimatické změny se přesunul z oblasti science fiction do oblasti seriózního výzkumu.

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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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Zsolt Hermann Apr 13, 2012

Such collaborations, cooperations in between professionals studying our living system can give us hope in tackling our global problems, especially now, when we evolved into this integral, closed network where we all depend on each other.
As the article describes Humanity has this schizophrenic nature, we are capable of the most incredible things, while we can cause the worst destruction imaginable at the same time.
So far in our history unfortunately we exploited in a negative way most of our breakthroughs, inventions, and while our development raised us to previously unthinkable heights, we are also very close to destruct the whole system we exist in.
The problem is that despite all of our achievements, scientific discoveries we still lack the system of coordinates that could point to a common nominator, a mutual purpose we could unite around, harmonizing all our activities, balancing our human system.
In the absence of such a common point we carry on satisfying our own self-centered needs and desires as we ourselves see fit, and since all of us perceive the world, the values, moral codes, "truth and false" subjectively we stumble again and again, and cannot understand each other.
Thus the hope is from this and similar scientific, or even public discussions, from further analyzing our living system and our own role in it, that we become successful identifying a mutual ground, a mutual purpose for all of us, and if we can direct all our planning and activities through that mutual, common prism we can start solving all our problems, and start building a sustainable future for all of us.
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