CAN WE SAVE MANKIND WITH A TRILLION DOLLARS?
How To Spend A Trillion Dollars Rowan Hooper
Profile £14.99 ★★★★★
Atrillion dollars is a lot of money. Imagine you have a billion dollars. Now, imagine you’ve got that billion a thousand times over. Rowan Hooper calls the figure ‘truly incredible’ at the beginning of his thought-provoking guide to the most constructive ways we might spend such a sum. But trillions are, at the same time, increasingly part of the calculations we live by. At a rough estimate the USA has spent over $3trillion on Covid-19 relief measures since the start of the pandemic. Economists might argue over how much of that is fiscal conjuring and how much hard cash, but someone, in the end, will have to pay the bill.
That’s the point of Hooper’s thought experiment. There are some costs that are too expensive to dodge. But we still need to think hard about priorities. His own rules for what he calls Project Trillion are simple: spending must be directed to saving humanity and the planet, and the money can’t be spent on political or media projects. What he’s interested in – he’s a senior editor at New Scientist – is getting the most bang for his buck, with projects that have a practical chance of repairing or improving our world.
There are a lot of numbers here – dizzyingly large numbers that are frequently multiplied or divided by other colossal numbers – but Hooper’s prose style is clear and direct and he breaks down the choices into ten discrete projects. Some of his proposals are altruistic; his chapter on world poverty divides the trillion between simply giving the poorest people in the world a lump sum (surprisingly effective, the evidence shows) and a global education drive.
Others are a little more nerdily self-indulgent (‘Let’s make the Moon the eighth continent’) or self-focused; Hooper is a vegetarian and makes an ecological case for turning the world vegan, though it seems unlikely that anyone will be persuaded to give up their Sunday roast by his argument that ‘eating high up the food chain is simply a poor decision from a systems engineering point of view’.
That question of human difference, of cherished human habit, is the rub. At a time of pandemic pessimism about the intractability of the world’s problems virtually every page of this book carries a heartening reminder that there are solutions available and that some of them are relatively cheap. You could, for instance, fund a two-year trial on using seawater vapour as a form of global sunshade for the cost of Neymar’s transfer from Barcelona to Paris St-Germain.
If you prime the pump of human ingenuity, extraordinary things are possible. But getting people to agree where to start, when they can’t even agree if the problems are real, is a harder question.
Like Hooper, I think I’d spend a big chunk of my trillion on education, in the hope we might recognise a shared reality before it’s too late. And this book would be on the curriculum.