The worlds in question being politics, economics, and science: Bjørn Lomborg’s think tank is busy setting global priorities.
CVM examined the partisan correlates of scientific skepticism in his post “The Politics of Science“. He wrote
Obviously Republicans are much more likely to question the scientific consensus about global warming and its causes than are Democrats…. My guess is that Republicans have a sense that academics, including scientists, are generally Democratic and have liberal leanings. This is actually correct.
Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, is something of a bête noire in environmental extremist circles, so despite the occasional Congressional hearing you won’t likely see many Democrat congressmen listening. But because his worldview is rational and economic, he has been embraced by partisans on the right. I suppose this is one of the ironies of our time, since Lomborg is unabashedly leftist in orientation, supporting “a strong welfare state”, “strong redistribution from taxes” and so forth. In the ReasonOnline interview, he says
I’m trying to recapture much of what the left stood for-when we believed in progress, when we believed that scientific understanding could lead us ahead and not just rely on tradition. I think that’s the original sort of background for the left. Unfortunately, I find that a fair amount of the left has turned towards a romanticized view of the world.
But the mere fact that Lomborg has been unwilling to endorse the hysteria about global warming means that conservatives give his views a fair hearing. I wonder how CVM might explain this phenomenon in terms of the “left=smart=AGW-is-gospel” theory.
I should explain that I have long held an “economic view” of the environment. That is, a clean environment is not a political right like freedom of speech, but rather an economic good that is procured in greater extent as affluence increases. (This makes it a “normal good” in the jargon of economists.) I should also explain that I have long held the view that “conservation is conservative” – that is, “Waste not, want not” is a Puritan credo that political conservatives embrace and is entirely consistent with stewardship of resources. These statements strike me as obvious and unexceptional beliefs, but I have noticed that some folks on the left have more absolutist, not to mention megalomaniacal, beliefs about the environment.
Lomborg’s main contribution, I think, has been to focus attention where it belongs, which is: what is the best way to expend limited resources to ameliorate global problems? This is an economic question, which naturally infuriates those who take a quasi-religious view of environmental issues.
Lomborg is director of Denmark’s national Environmental Assessment Institute. In 2004, and again in 2008, the EAI convened meetings of prominent economists dubbed the “Copenhagen Consensus Conference” (not to be confused with the Copenhagen interpretation). The question the cognoscenti ponder is how best to allocate a hypothetical multi-billion-dollar budget to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.
In 2004, the CCC put the mitigation of AIDS and malaria high on its priority list. The Bush administration had already begun a massive increase in AIDS funding to the third world, but it is rumored that the CCC report was influential in getting the administration to push for malaria funding as well. These recommendations are reflected in Bush administration priorities. (However, politics being what it is, NPR has criticized the initiative.) The fact that CCC economists, among others, estimate that Al-Gore-style carbon-reduction projects, and in particular the Kyoto Protocol, have poor benefit-cost ratios, may also help explain why CO2 mitigation is not a higher priority with the current administration.
In an ideal world, I suppose, there would be some political benefit to making such important life-saving investments as malaria and AIDS mitigation. But unfortunately, we live in a world where the political class is obsessed with tanning beds and plumbing licensure requirements. The Left (even leftist scientists, apparently) is also obsessed with the idea that Bush is the Worst President Ever™, and saving African kids doesn’t fit their narrative.
So I despair that politics will ever allow us to set priorities rationally. And this despair is of a piece with my belief that there is little value in mixing politics and science.
One of the conclusions the CCC appears to have reached this year is that supplying micronutrient supplements to children in the developing world is probably one of the best investments that can be made. I can map out contradictory scenarios about the political battle over such funding. The more likely one, I think, is that the Democrats will see little advantage to helping reduce Third World disease, and will once again engage in class warfare, portraying any such initiative as corporate welfare for Big Pharma. But I could be wrong.
An interesting aspect of the CCC report is their treatment of terrorism, which they considered in a separate category from “Conflicts“. [Small-world note: Daniel Arce, co-author of the CCC challenge paper on terrorism, was my next-door neighbor from 2002-2007 – indeed, his son and mine were in the same Boy Scout Troop.] The authors acknowledge that terrorism is distinct from the other CCC challenges, in large part because the cost-benefit ratios are “adverse”, in the sense that terrorist attacks to date have taken relatively few lives, and suppression or opposition measures are extremely expensive. But one has to wonder whether any economic analysis is worth a bucket of warm spit when it aims to address an existential threat like the one posed by the followers of Hitler, Marx, or Sayyid Qutb. Consider what the world would look like had Franklin Roosevelt decided the invasion of Europe or Japan was too costly, and that surrender to Hitler and Tojo had a better benefit-cost ratio. Of course, Al Gore thinks the internal combustion engine is an existential threat, too, so the debate continues.
UPDATE: As usual, ahead of the curve. Sir Bob Geldof is lavishing praise on the Bush administration for its aid to Africa:
“It’s no small legacy,” he added, and Bush has “set the bar quite high” for Barack Obama or John McCain.
Instapundit commented:
The press will tell the story eventually. But not until after the election.
UPDATE2:
While we’re on the subject of partisanship and science, I thought I’d point out Bill Maher’s peculiar feelings about vaccines. Larry King interviewed him back in 2005 and explored his worldview, which resulted in this exchange:
KING: You wouldn’t say the Salk vaccine was a bad idea.
MAHER: That’s somewhat of a different case, yes.
KING: Polio was eliminated.
MAHER: Yes but, you know, there are many books out that will — that will — and I’m not well enough versed on it to talk about it that will indicate that there are other reasons why it was. And a lot of diseases that have been they say, whoa, this was eliminated because of a vaccine, they find out well no actually the country got toilets and that’s what happened.
You can also read his opinion that flu vaccines are just another way for Big Pharma to con us out of our paychecks. So it seems like Bill Maher doesn’t think vaccines had much to do with eliminating polio. Funny, I thought he was a liberal.