The Problem of Priorities

Apr 13, 2012 Bjørn Lomborg

This decade has witnessed remarkable progress in addressing humanity’s greatest challenges, from eradicating polio in India to cutting extreme poverty in half. But how should the world determine which big challenges to tackle next?

COPENHAGEN – This decade has seen remarkable progress against humanity’s greatest challenges. Consider the declaration of victory over polio in India, which seemed impossible ten years ago. January marked one year since the country’s last reported case. Or look at the strides made against malaria: over the past decade, the number of cases has been reduced by 17%, and the number of deaths has dropped by 26%.

Despite global population growth and economic crisis, absolute poverty – the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day – is falling in every region of the world. In fact, the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty in half has been achieved five years ahead of time.

Just a few years ago, the use of male circumcision as a tool in the fight against HIV/AIDS was largely unknown. Today, UNAIDS and the World Health Organization recommend it as a means to combat HIV/AIDS, and more than ten African countries are implementing strategies to increase its availability. Similarly, the concept of using geo-engineering to respond to climate change has moved from science fiction to an area of serious research.

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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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