Getting Better

appreciate, and proclaim the value and comparative rarity of each of these.

The constant barrage of negative stories may lead us to imagine that our forward progress is about to end. However, the evidence at hand does not support this conclusion. The latest UN Climate Panel scenarios indicate that the average person will be 4.5 times richer by the end of the century than today. Climate change will merely slow progress, such that the average person will be ‘only’ 4.34 times as rich — by no means the end of the world. Yet, fear pushes many to demand an inefficient diversion of hundreds of trillions of dollars to steer the global economy abruptly toward zero carbon emissions.

We need to foster an environment that challenges fearmongering and promotes optimistic yet critical thinking and constructive discussion concerning the future. We hope that our new Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), which will host its first international conference in London next week, will be of aid in this regard, bringing people of goodwill and good sense together from around the world to formulate and communicate a positive vision of the future.

To drive progress for the world’s poorest, we should similarly focus on efficient, welldocumented policies with enormous benefits. Working with more than a hundred of the world’s top economists, one of us has helped identify the best solutions to many of the world’s most insidious problems: Basic tuberculosis treatment that will save a million people a year, land tenure reform that lets poorer people reap the benefits, education technology that can deliver three-times better learning outcomes, and more.

These policies don’t make for catchy headlines, but they can do immense good: for a cost of $35 billion annually, they would save an astounding 4.2 million lives and make the poorer half of the world $1.1 trillion richer every year.

If we stop being fear-driven and instead look to the data and the bigger picture, we can see that the world is better than it was and is likely to get better still. We have a responsibility to adopt the very best policies to move ahead.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, is the author of “Maps of Meaning”, “12 Rules for Life” and “Beyond Order.” They wrote this for InsideSources.com.