 Welcome everyone. Thank you all for coming here and thank you to those we couldn't accommodate wherever you are. We have an overflow facility somewhere and a chance for people to access the program but it drew a full house as you can see and we're grateful to each of you. Many of you have come to these in the past and this series is meant to try to bring interesting people and noteworthy people and different ideas to Purdue University. Very receptive to any ideas any of you may have when we resume the series next year and please just email them to me and there's no one we won't ask and pursue aggressively. If a central ambition of this little series has been to bring provocative thinkers and people who might offer insights that are not common or that are different than those we hear most of the time then I think tonight we'll satisfy. Our guest is someone I have admired a long time and I'm not alone in that. I had to write down some of the rankings in which he has recently appeared. Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers, Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World, Esquire's 75 Most Influential Thinkers of the 21st Century, the UK Guardian's 50 People Who Could Save the Planet and moving on down to more exclusive territory his organization was found in the top 20 think tanks in the world among a universe of 7,000. But still more exclusively he is the one person that at least I can name who was able to gather over 100 of the world's top economists led by seven Nobel Laureates to assess in this book the Nobel Laureates Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World those things that might be done through collective action to make this a better and safer and more humane and sustainable planet. And in so doing he has brought some original insights and some challenges to conventional wisdom and that's the sort of thinking that we appreciate the chance to listen to and perhaps challenge back here at Purdue. So with gratitude for all of you for coming let's express our gratitude to tonight's guest Bjorn Lomborg. Thank you. So Mitch to ask me so we basically work on all the big problems in the world and how to fix them and Mitch to ask me to basically do this in 25 minutes. Of course you can do that. So I'm going to do three main points. First one is to recognize that things are generally getting better not worse. That's crucial because that's the only way we can get out of this panic mode where we often are. It seems like everything is falling apart. If we can get to a point where we realize things are getting better not worse we can start asking rational questions where can we do the most good to make even better worlds for the future. I'm going to then talk about climate change partly because this is probably where there's most of the interest here and it's also one of the things that get a lot of people excited and interested in that kind of conversation but it's also great example of how we don't do the smartest things in climate but how we could do it and then at the end I'm going to talk about all the other things that you can do and I'm also going to show you a folder that you can take when you leave. I don't want you to sit and read it now but that can perhaps help and and satisfy more curiosity. So first things are getting better everybody believes things are getting worse. Let me just take the three main points that the UN talks about. So welfare and economics and environment and if you look at all three things have gotten better. If you look at economy we've seen since 1820 a dramatic decline of poverty. So basically we started in a world where more than 90 percent of everyone was poor. Today for the first time in 2015 we have less than 10 percent who are absolutely poor. That's a phenomenal outcome and we should be very very thankful for it. If you look likewise on society and social benefits we have a situation where we live longer and longer. We used to live about 30 years an average today we're about 70. So phenomenal outcome we basically have two lifetimes. That's an amazing achievement and if you look at the third one environment I want to just talk about it because you know these are kind of obvious measures for economy and for society but what's the obvious measure for environment. Well that requires us to answer this other question. What's the deadliest environmental problem or in some ways the biggest environmental problem in the world. Almost everyone gets this wrong. People think it's water or it's climate change is none of the above. It's actually indoor air pollution and a lot of people are like what. What is that even. It kills 4.3 million people. This is because about 3 billion so 2.8 billion people almost half the world's population cook and keep warm with dirty fuels basically wood carbon cardboard dung whatever they can get their hands on. That's how they cook and keep warm and that means for 2.8 billion people they have so much air pollution that the pollution inside these homes or huts or whatever they are are typically 10 times more polluted than the outdoor air in Beijing. The World Health Organization estimate this is the equivalent for each one of these 2.8 billion people of smoking two packs of cigarette every day. The second one second largest is outdoor air pollution and lead which is mostly a legacy issue then water and sanitation then ozone then global warming and then radon and of course people will then say but global warming surely gets worse in the future yes it does but still by 2050 this is World Health Organization they estimate we'll see about 250,000 people die each year so yes it's a bigger problem but it's important to keep the scale. So remember indoor air pollution means this is how almost half the world's population live. As you can see it's probably not a good thing to be inside that house yet that's where 3 billion people live and if you look at the air pollution the outdoor I'm not sure why my microphone does this but it's not me so if you look at the outdoor air pollution this is the relative risk of dying each year per person in the world. Outdoor air pollution has been been pretty constant and of course it covers up the fact that we've cleaned up but at the same time much of the developing world has gotten more polluted but that's why on a global level it's been pretty stable but if you look at indoor air pollution because we've gotten rich we've seen a dramatic decline so overall we die a lot less from the world's by far biggest environmental problem so overall things have gotten better. We live longer we have many fewer people who are poor and we have less of the world's biggest environmental problem. Of course I'd love to go on but I know that time is clicking so I just wanted to show these three things. This is important because if the world is getting better and remember this does not mean that there are no problems there are lots of problems I'll get to those but it means that we're moving in the right direction then we can stop being scared witless and start talking about so of all these problems that remain what should we do and that's where I would like to spend a little bit of time talking about global warming because in many ways is the centerpiece for a lot of conversation in the rich world I'll get to where it is for the rest of the world afterwards so fundamentally global warming yes absolutely it's a problem it's real it's significant negative impact we estimate that the impact right now is probably about zero percent is very little net impact on if you measure it against GDP but by the 2007 is the international climate panel the IPCC estimate that the cost will be somewhere between two point zero point two and two percent of GDP that's a real problem that's a significant problem and something that we need to fix also of course remember it's not a hundred percent which we're sometime led to believe so yes it's a problem we need to fix unfortunately it's often dramatically exaggerated notice how everyone talks about we're gonna see more hurricanes we're gonna see more dramatic deaths and all kinds of stuff everything you see in the news can in some way or another be connected to global warming again with 25 minutes and I want to get to a lot of other problems I can only give you a sketch of the argument I'm sure we can have some conversation afterwards and some of the questions on on on how this works but this is and the Philippines one of those very much talked about places where you had hurricane come in and a lot of people died about 5,000 people died and it was really seen as a flashpoint for see we're gonna see more and more of this we're gonna see more and more death of destruction because of global warming but again let's just remember if you look at the numbers these are the numbers from the international disaster database for climate related deaths it has seen a dramatic decline since 1930 and so this is floods drought storms wildfire extreme temperatures and again look you can have a conversation about what exactly the numbers are how well are they how well are they measured but fundamentally we've gone from a world where on average almost half a million people died each year to much less than 50,000 and actually this decade is the lowest on record this does not mean that global warming is not actually making this worse that's possible I I don't think we have good strong data for it but it's possible but the argument here is that many many other factors are countering that and so we're not heading towards a future where the world is just gonna be one big death place if anything we're heading towards a place where we'll be much better off in the long run so that means we need to start talking about why are we so bad at fixing global warming we need to fix global warming but fundamentally we get it wrong a lot of people tend to think well you know if CO2 causes more warming CO2 comes from fossil fuels why don't we just stop using fossil fuels it seems like an obvious thing and a lot of campaigners will tell us that but of course the problem is we don't burn fossil fuels to annoy Al Gore right we burn fossil fuels because it basically powers everything we like about civilization it gives us heat cold transport food electricity everything we like and so unless we can find a way to get all of this good stuff but without the fossil fuels we still haven't found that we're not in a place where we're gonna be willing to give it up and so just to give you a sense of proportion this is from the International Energy Agency so the OECD for energy this is commonly regarded as the best estimate this is the latest product prognosis from late 2016 and they look to 2040 so basically a quarter of a century out if you look at what is the energy consumption over a wide range of different things so coal gas nuclear hydro biomass and so on these are the things from last number where we have the last year where we have numbers for the whole world and basically as you can see it's coal oil and gas and then a little bit of nuclear and a little bit of hydro and a lot of biomass this of course is to a very large extent exactly what drives all the indoor air pollution people believe that solar and wind is the future but remember wind makes up almost nothing wind makes up about 0.5% of global energy today and solar makes nothing you know 0.1% we believe that it's a huge number and it's not we're seeing a lot of these beautiful pictures of wind and solar but it's not it's a trivial matter right now but then we also believe that certainly in a quarter of a century it'll be a huge impact no it will not and this is just a common this is just a matter of this is what the most respected Institute is telling us what will happen over the next 25 years this is assuming that we all do what we promised in Paris so essentially the the treaty that will solve global warming I'll get back to how that's not true either but let's just take a look this is if everyone does all the stuff that we would like this is what happens we use more coal we use more oil we use more gas more nuclear more hydro more biomass yes more wind and yes more solar but notice how small these numbers are we go from 0.5 to 1.9 and 0.1 to 1.0 so we still have less than 3% of our energy in a quarter of a century from solar and wind the only thing that drives renewable energy is as is biomass and then a little bit of hydro so to put it differently this is the graph for how much do we get of our energy in the world from renewables not surprisingly when you think about it from 1800 in 1800 we had 95% of our energy from renewables we've been spending two centuries to get away from that now of course we actually trying to turn it up notice we've been hovering around 13% for the last 40 years and so if everyone does what we promised in Paris again we'll see a increase so we'll actually get up to 19% from 13.5 now and more realistically we'll probably get up to about 16% but let's just get a sense of proportion we are not anywhere close to solving this problem in the next quarter of a century and solar and wind will play an almost trivial part in this it doesn't feel right it doesn't feel nice we would love the world to be different but I think by telling ourselves stories that are not true we're not actually helping the world and also we are not doing very good in our policies so look Rio Kyoto Paris those kinds of treaties have done virtually nothing I'm gonna show you something that you don't see very often but I think everyone should see this and it's gonna be a little complicated but I think it's also incredibly helpful so if you look at the temperature impact of Paris remember Paris was this treaty that everyone agreed to and Trump is threatening to throw it you know throw it out but but you know fundamentally everybody agreed that we were gonna do something in Paris and it was hailed as this oh we've solved kind of global warming if you look at this so I'm gonna show you over here how much CO2 we emit and then I'm gonna show you over here I was hoping I'd show you over here but maybe I will in just a second so these are the historical emissions that we've seen from 2000 until 2015 obviously we don't know more than that this is the business as usual scenario so if we didn't do anything and obviously there are lots of different business as usuals this is the average of all the major business as usual scenarios over here you see the output of the one of the main symbol UN climate models so it's totally totally uncontroversial it's called magic it was partly funded by the EPA if you do plug this in you get a sense of what is the temperature gonna be and you can see the temperature both in degrees centigrade and degrees Fahrenheit over here so basically we're gonna see a temperature increase by the end of the century but almost four degrees or almost seven degrees Fahrenheit this is if we don't do anything alright so take a look this is what happens if we do Kio sorry Paris and this is the official estimate from the UNF triple C so the ones that organized Paris for the UN they estimate that we will cut this much this is the promise if everyone does everything they promise of course remember this would be a first in the world if we actually managed to do that but let's assume that we do that this is the Paris promise we estimate that's 56 gigatons accumulative over the next 15 years so I'm just gonna put 56 gigatons in there if you run this in the model this is the temperature outcome that you get oh wait you can't actually see the difference can you see there's a black line there it's just you know as Thomas Schelling one of our Nobel's like to point out if you don't have a very very fine pencil he was a guy from back then right if you don't have a very fine pencil you can't see the difference right the difference is 0.04 degrees or 0.07 degrees Fahrenheit but you could imagine that not only are we promising this remember Paris only goes to 2030 but if we assume that we're gonna keep this promise all the way through the century so basically this that is Paris extended and that gives us 540 gigatons of CO2 that we cut well let's run that through the model that gives us this graph so we get a slightly thinner line we actually reduce our temperature output by 0.18 degrees or about 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit very little you do get some but very little now this is not what you heard because what you've heard is that we're gonna cut a lot more this is what you know the most quoted one New York Times a lot of other publication users it's called the Climate Action Tracker they estimate that this is what will come out of Paris notice not only are they assuming much much more than what the UN themselves think is the maximal output of the Paris Agreement but they're also assuming that we'll just continue to dramatically reduce this is about 3,000 gigatons of CO2 so they're assuming you know basically 50 times more than what Paris has actually done and that would give us a reduction in temperature of about 1.1 degrees so a significant reduction it would still be above 2 degrees which is sort of the international climate target and that's the last thing I just wanted to show you this is what it takes to cut to get to 2 degrees which is what everyone talks about and remember this is the higher end target of Paris they actually talk about 1.5 degrees nobody has any idea of how we would get there but this is the two-degree target and there's different ways you could get to it but this is one of the except ones is the UN environmental protection a sorry environment program their their estimate and this reduces 6,000 gigatons and then we actually stay you can see that up here then we stay below 2 degrees so notice what we've talked about here this is what the world has promised at very best this was a world without Trump and all that other stuff then we would do this and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference this is the most ambitious one and we can just tell the difference this is what we mostly talk about and this is what we've actually promised so and this is worth pondering just notice this that the Paris agreement is less than 1% of what it takes to just get to 2 degrees so it's a little bit like going on a diet and then you know eat the first salad and say hey done right no and this of course is phenomenally hard this bit is phenomenally hard this bit I don't know how we're gonna do that anytime soon and quite frankly very few people have any good sense of how we would do that because it's very costly so there this is you know just the subsidies that we're paying notice this is again the latest IEA right now we're paying about 125 billion dollars and we're scheduled to pay another about $3,000 billion over the next 23 years right so we're paying a huge amount of money and remember this is what's going to get us to the 3% solar and wind and we're gonna pay a lot more for the rest why is this well cutting CO2 has real cost because cheap and readily available energy gives you extra so if you take the GDP growth out by this axis and CO2 growth out that axis there's a very strong correlation and yes you can have less CO2 growth but you also get lower GDP growth that's the basic outcome of all these macroeconomic models so when you promise to cut carbon emissions it has a real cost if you take a look at the cost of Paris promises and this is based on all the major energy economic models from Stanford typical reduction GDP growth and I'm just going to show you very briefly for the US again if we actually did the Obama promise of cutting 26 I'm only looking at the lower end 26% and did it most effectively it would cost 154 billion dollars a year that's not the end of the world by any means but it's not a trivial cost if the EU does what they're promised in the most effective policy would cost 305 billion China 200 billion Mexico 80 those are the only countries that we actually have good data for and so I'm just going to estimate the rest which is about 20% so I'm just going to add up that and say that's 20% of the cost and that leads you to a little less than a trillion dollars I'm just going to say a trillion dollars for ease of this but of course remember this is if everyone does all the right things effectively if there's anything we've known is that climate policies are phenomenally ineffective so the European policies for instance we have very good data that shows that twice as costly and so the most likely policy is that all of these are going to be double so we were talking about almost two trillion dollars so a cost of one to two trillion dollars per year for the rest of the century will buy you a reduction in temperature of something that's almost immeasurable that's not a good way to help right so which climate policies do work well we know a good recession is really great at cutting carbon emissions had the 2008 crisis been a little longer and been a little more expensive we would actually have achieved the Kyoto agreement goals of course most people don't actually get elected on that sort of thing and if they if they try they will probably get booted out of office so this is not a good way but you know it's important to recognize this is the main way that we know how to cut carbon emissions if you look at what really works well the EU wind and solar has cut about a hundred megatons of CO2 annually if you look at US shale gas and remember these these are hugely controversial numbers their order of magnitude right but there's no way that they're absolutely right but order of magnitude US shale gas has probably caught about three times that amount basically because shale gas has made it so cheap that you've basically stopped using a lot of coal power power plant and switch to gas and that matters because gas emits about half the CO2 per energy unit produced so remember the EU pays 40 billion dollars a year for its wind and solar and you guys make about 300 billion dollars a year from the shale gas revolution it's not hard to see what would you rather have and rather ineffective policy that you have to pay a lot of money for or a very effective policy that makes you a lot of money this is not a hard question right but again it's one of those things that has a huge contract controversy but I think fundamentally we know that it's about getting shale gas out getting China to switch to gas to a very large extent that's the only way we're gonna manage to cut carbon emissions dramatically in the short run but in the longer run we need to invest a lot more in R&D so we did a whole commitment consensus on climate with 27 the world's top climate economist and three Nobel laureates looking at what are the smartest ways to do this basically what they said was we need to invest a lot more in energy R&D green energy you know basically make future green energy so cheap everyone will want to buy it also the Chinese and the Indians and everybody else and that will only happen if you invest a lot more this is one of the things that Bill Gates have been driving Obama was also on the forefront of this and so pretty much all nations have signed up to doubling it we're saying we should increase its six-fold and that would unlike the present-day policy actually fix global warming in the long run because it would enable technologies with a very high percentage obviously we can't guarantee but with a very high percentage to actually fix it and just to show you we estimate the EU climate policy for every dollar spent will probably do about three sets of avoided climate damage so that's good you spend a dollar and you do some good but not very much but if you focused on green R&D you could actually do 11 dollars of good you could do thousands of times better so spend the money on green energy R&D and this goes to show and that's my third point and then I'll shut up or or we'll have another file on so remember that there are many many other problems in the world climate is one of them and it is a legitimate problem that we need to fix but there are many many other problems like poverty hunger disease and so on do you remember this I showed you the biggest the most deadly environmental problem in the world well what's the most deadly problem in the world if we drop the environmental that's poverty really notice how all of these suddenly became rather you know unimportant global warming of course but even indoor air pollution yes because poverty and this is very very crude poverty probably gives about 18 million people each year about a third of all that die in the world so obviously poverty in many simple respects is the biggest environment is the biggest problem in the world well what is the big issues what is it that we should focus on well the UN actually and it's run up to the SDGs the sustainable development goals where they wanted to set new targets for the world for 2016 to 2030 they went out and asked about about 10 million people what do you think are the most important issues remember this is not a representative so people are self-selected to do this but it's the biggest survey and it does accord very well to pretty much everything else that we've seen and this is the UN's own survey you can see the the the link down there you can no longer find it on the main pages of the UN because it didn't give the answer but this is what they said you know education is by far the most important than health jobs no corruption nutrition and those are the most important things not surprisingly right and then no violence clean water support for people who can't work better infrastructure equality reliable energy no discrimination political freedoms protects forest rivers ocean phone and internet and then action on climate action on climate came 16 of 16 and by a pretty far margin and it probably wouldn't help much if it got just about phone and internet right the point here is to recognize it for most people in the world they want you know when my kids are dying on poor they don't get a good education they die like flies obviously those are the things that really matter and so we got to ask what could we do and that's what we've tried to do this doesn't mean that we shouldn't also you know we're at civilization we can chew gum and walk at the same time we can also do something on climate so it doesn't mean we shouldn't admit whether we should just neglect it but it means that we need to recognize we can't just talk about climate change as if it's the only of the main thing that matters there are many many other things that matter and so what we tried to do was to ask a lot of economists we work with 82 of economists and several noble lords to look at where can you get the biggest bang for your buck across all these areas and i'm just going to share a few of them and and then you know please feel free you i'm going to show you can get a folder with all of these and i'd love to you know invite you to take a look we have much more on our website and all these people who've been participating so i'm giving it very short shrift but basically on climate and energy we showed that there's some of these things that are not very effective for instance double renewable energy it'll probably cost about so double renewable energy or really getting more energy to the poor and the world would be a great thing because they really need energy so the benefits of getting them double the amount of renewable energy would probably be about 400 billion dollars the problem is the cost of doing that would be about 500 billion dollars so spending 500 billion dollars to do 400 billion dollars worth of good it's not a very good idea and that's why we say the benefit cost ratio is 80 cents you get 80 cents back in the dollar likewise the two-degree target probably not a good idea as i also showed you it's going to be phenomenally expensive or probably incredibly hard to do but there are some other things to do climate adaptation double energy efficiency electricity to everyone will actually give you five dollars back in the dollar more energy research as i just showed you will do 15 dollars modern cooking fuels so basically get rid of some of the indoor air pollution is a phenomenal idea of 15 dollars face out fossil fuel subsidies would be an incredibly good investment at more than 50 dollars you know the the biggest subsidy to fossil fuels is in venezuela well right now i'm not sure anyone really knows but it used to be that they subsidized it 92 percent of the cost of gasoline and and the argument in most developing countries remember almost all fossil fuel subsidies are in developing countries the argument is that it's for the poor but of course it's not because you need a car in order to really enjoy the the gasoline subsidy so it's really a subsidy to middle class and higher incomes and so you're basically spending in venezuela used to spend about 20 of your government budget on subsidizing gasoline that's ridiculous it leads to higher air pollution more you know traffic jams and it leads to worse outcomes in climate and it's a really really stupid way to spend money so absolutely get rid of fossil fuel subsidies but remember there's a lot of other things you can do on infrastructure for instance get sorry get mobile broadband to developing countries we estimate that it's going to be fairly expensive but it's going to drive a little bit of economic growth and that will probably mean for every dollar you spend you'll do 17 dollars of good that's an amazing outcome if you look at biodiversity we find that there's a lot of things you can do in biodiversity that are actually pretty good but the best thing is half coral reef loss again notice we're not saying you know we're not promising unicorns to everyone we're not saying let's get more coral reefs or not let any coral reefs disappear we're simply having the somewhat depressing argument of saying half at least the loss of coral reefs over the next 15 years but that turns out to be really cheap because a lot of the loss of coral reefs come from dynamite fishing and cyanide fishing bad ideas and very very simple to teach people not to do and then some of the cheap runoff problems from agriculture if you do that not only will you get better biodiversity which is great but you'll also because the reefs act to hatchlings you'll get higher fishery incomes for these people and you'll get more tourism so you'll get a triple win and that's why we estimate for every dollar spent you'll actually if you evaluate all of this you'll get about 24 dollars worth of good food security nutrition reduced child malnutrition is an incredibly good investment we estimate it gives you 45 dollars back in the dollar because if you get better nutrition to small kids sir to two year olds not only that is that morally right it also turns out that it really helps their cognitive development we know this for a fact from a lot of studies but the best study or and also a little bit the scariest study is one they did in guatemala in the late 1960s when they went to two small rural villages in guatemala and gave the kids their good food then they picked two other rural villages nearby you can hear where this is going right and and they gave the kids their bad food that's of course a terrible thing but our researchers have now gone back and re-found those kids they're now in their late 30s or early 40s and the difference between having good food and not having good food is amazing you have better marriages you have better jobs you have happier marriages by the way your fewer kids of your woman you have fewer miscarriages but crucially your brain developed more and so when you get into a school which is often a crappy school you learn more you stay longer so you learn more per year and you stay longer in school and so when you come out you're more productive and so we estimate if you avoid being stunted which is one of the best markers of having been malnourished you on average get 60 higher pay so you're simply a much much more productive member of society that's why giving food to really small kids is a phenomenal investment but that's not the only one in health there are lots of great interventions half malaria infections $36 cut tuberculosis death by 95% $43 immunization we've managed to immunize a lot of the world we've gone from about 20 coverage to about 80 but there's still more things that we can do so the global alliance for vaccines estimate if we spend about a billion dollars a year on extra vaccines especially on cutting down diarrhea we could possibly save about a million kids each year so every dollar spent would do about 60 dollars of good now remember this is not some this is not an investment guide this is not money you can take home that would be wonderful if it was but this is how much good you can do so this is if you will an ROI for philanthropy this is why you should spend your money if you want to do good in the world and then the top two things is gender universal access to contraception 215 million women don't have access to contraception if we gave them that access not only would not 150,000 women die in childbirth every year but they would also be able to better space their kids and that means they would be healthier so fewer of them would die so about 600,000 fewer kids would die each year that gives you alone a benefit of about 40 but also when you have fewer kids and they're better spaced you have what we call demographic dividend you have fewer people in the that are dependent so your fewer kids you still have very few old people so everyone is in the working age so you get a higher growth rate slightly higher but because it drives over generation to generation and a half you actually get about 80 more dollars back for that so in total every dollar spent will do 108 sorry 120 dollars of social good and the best thing is basically get more free trade yes you have to pay off especially agricultural interests but the benefit would be phenomenal you simply make the world much much better off you'd actually be able to make the in every person in the developing world about a thousand dollars richer you'd be able to pull about 160 million more people out of poverty and for very little money basically paying off the people who are against free trade which now is also trump but used to be mostly farmers so the fundamental point here is to say yes there are smart things to do in climate and there's smart things to do in all these other areas and so what i would love to engage in and what we'll have a have a chat about now is really just look the world is not going to hell in a hand a handcart what is the expression god you guys said it all at the same time so i couldn't hear but but you know what i mean so it's not going in the wrong direction it's generally going in the right direction that doesn't mean that there are no problems there are lots of problems still and we've i've noticed some of them but let's focus on where we can do the smartest things so when it comes to climate you know please focus on phasing out fossil fuel subsidies get more energy of research get electricity to everyone some of those things that would do an amazing amount of good and stop at doing the stuff that doesn't do very much and also remember there are lots of other stuff and actually i'm just i've just show you a little bit of it so this is all the stuff that we've looked at and i'm not going to go through it but you can get we have a book we have a long book coming out with Cambridge University Press but this is the one that we give to politicians because it's just one page and this has all the research in here and i hope you'll find it interesting and stimulating and the amazing thing is i i also gave this to Mike Bloomberg he he was late for my talk and so i said did you get this he was like oh yeah i already got it i went through and i penciled in where we spent all our money and i i sent it back to my research department and said why aren't we spending more in the long lines right so that's exactly the conversation i would like thank you if you even knew this until he's tripped over hell in a hand basket you might have forgotten that his english is so perfect you might have forgotten he's danish i was going to have him give the talk in danish but then only i would have understood him and so he was gracious enough to switch to his second or third or could be eighth language i'm not sure how many i do four but this is definitely my second um so i think if by your leave uh we're already past the appointed hour but you're here thank you and we uh we'll go straight to the questions from our students some of our faculty have chosen some of our students uh to ask uh whatever questions they have formulated so let's let's do that i think we'll run another 20 minutes or so and then we'll have captured the full hour if that sounds all right i hope we'll not uh invade anybody's dinner hour so um let's uh mark why don't you go first is this on come on here all right so i'm mark g student college of agriculture looking at the long lines that you put up there there's quite a long line next to free trade but the world hasn't adopted it yet that might imply there are some hidden costs not included in your calculations is wondering if you could talk about what some of those might be yes so so i i'll probably tend to say it could be that they're hidden costs it could also just simply be that some of these things are really hard to do politically because there are some very strong interest groups that are that are blocking it i'll probably tend to be more in favor of that but but but absolutely they're they're cost to free trade so they're cost uh environmentally you know the more free trade you have the more pollution you're gonna have the more transport you're gonna have we try to take that into account so one of the important things to recognize is when you try to get you know 82 uh researchers from a lot of different disciplines notice they're all economists but they're still you know from very very different disciplines they measure cost and benefits in many different ways typically as their literature tends to do that means they measure some things and they leave off other things we try to get them to do all of these things they don't do all of them and some of the things that they then bring back in we at least try to get them to give a sense of of of magnitude so there's no way you could sort of derail this this outcome on on on free trade even if there was some you know significant things that we'd left off but one thing that we do need to talk about is there's no there's no distribution in there so we're all about efficiency efficiency is good but it's only one part of the answer and very clearly you know some of the things that a lot of people who feel very uncomfortable about free trade today is about distribution that some people actually get left in the in the lurch they they don't get the benefit of of more free trade and that's not something that you know economists have a good answer to so again i i i should warn you when we when we put up this list of priorities we're basically informing you you know what works and what works phenomenally but it doesn't mean that that's how you should pick you shouldn't just put it in excel sheet and click sort and then we've done what the world should do think of it as a as a menu for the world you know you get a menu you get a lot of different options you get some prices and sizes you get a sense of what works but it doesn't mean you pick that right we'd be the kind of guys that that if you were looking at your menu we'd say you know what spinach is really cheap and it's good for you so you should buy more of that but you know you might end up going with a caviar instead you're in a what might be a uh a necessary clarification for some and it was implicit when you talked about the ROI on philanthropic ROI and so forth but as the book makes plain you're economists but these are not purely financial calculations you're making you're measuring social somebody is making and it's some calculations of social benefit as well as directly financial sorry yes that's very very important we're not just talking about financial benefits we're also talking about social benefits and environmental benefits so you know we're both measuring how much higher economic outcome will you have how many fewer people will die and how many more wetlands will you have sort of thing so we try to estimate all the but make it in one dollar estimate yeah Samantha hi my name is Samantha leta I'm a senior in the College of Science my question is we've seen over the past year or so that in this election and political climate that facts aren't always facts and it's difficult when people are educated at different levels obviously a lot of us sitting in this room have been lucky enough to be in this higher education setting but not everyone is like that and often these goals that you're saying you want to accomplish are being held back by people who may not have the access to the same education or see the world in the same way how do you think is the best way to act upon this disparity in education and how we can all kind of come together to see the same facts and not different facts which shouldn't be different they should all be the same but you know it is a good question I think we have to be careful not because you know probably almost everyone in here are very well educated so we think that we're really smart right but you know a lot of people who are not all that well educated have good reasons for a lot of the things that they talk about so some of the things that we talk about as as dispute in facts is really dispute on policy and you know impact so when we talked about you know a lot of a lot of people with low income who works in in sectors that are subject to that are basically challenged by trade will possibly say no we shouldn't have this although for poor people in general free trade is a great thing it's not for everyone and so so I think we have to be careful about this so my my sense is again when we try to present this and try to present look there's these you know 76 different things you can do some of them are incredibly good some of them are not I would love to have a world where people would just be like you know what you sound smart we're going to do all of that but you know but that that's just not how the world works right at best we might be able to slightly sway a few people because they already have interest in some of these long lines right and that's exactly how it works you know people whose outcomes are at the top of the list think we're amazingly smart and people who have things that are towards the bottom of the list think we're idiots and that's fine you know because essentially we make it a little easier for the people with smart ideas to argue for theirs and a little harder for for for the for the low for the low outcome so the way we see it we we provide sort of tailwind to the good ideas and headwind to the bad ones and that probably means that we make a tiny change in how the world spends its money and that's all you can do with information I think a lot of this comes down to policy but if we can you know change it a little bit we've certainly done well so you know the way I see this it's it's about making the world slightly less wrong you got a chance to move a little money if you told me in a month or so you're going to be visiting with a rather interesting group who's going to hear this message yes so oh so actually two things because that's that's in two months in one month we're doing this for Haiti and so we're we're meeting with the president and with the the finance minister and everybody else in Haiti talking about specifically for Haiti with Haitian researchers where can you spend money but of course also with USAID and all the others that are spending money in Haiti and trying to see if there's a smarter way to spend that money and again there'll be lots of political reasons why they're not going to listen to all of these outcomes but some of them will and we've done this in Bangladesh and actually you know the finance minister loves some of the things that we proposed because it gets them extra revenue you know there's lots of you know possibly slightly wrong reasons for why they do the right things but that's fine you know so our goal is simply if we can change it a little bit and so yes the thing you're alluding to we're meeting up with the the giving pledgers so you know the Bill Gates that have promised to give at least half their their their money away and their lifetime that are billionaires and you know basically I'm going to try and tell them yeah try and pick the long lines you know and and you know they'll do some of that and some of it won't won't won't happen and again remember yes they have lots and lots of money but it's trivial money compared to how much money governments spend around the world so our prime interest is really in getting governments to change and that's about getting all of you and everybody else convinced that they're actually smart and less smart policies out there and let's focus a little more on the smart ones nick hi i'm nick i'm a senior in the college of science what are your thoughts on spending money on something like your thoughts on spending money on something like space exploration rather than directly on researching alternative energy sources in the hopes that by by way of researching something else you see benefits in other fields well i i think there's a general argument for spending money on general r&d because we seem to have found that in a lot of other areas we just end up making discoveries that we never thought were possible and that was probably a good idea i think we should also be careful not to think about everything in a cost benefit term you know sort of like so what's the benefit cost ratio of this opera sort of thing and and you know it's fine to say that we're just spending money because we thought it would be fun or it'd be beautiful or something like that so so i think i'm i'm looking at the sort of efficient part of government you know the or the thing that would you know presumably try to be efficient so maybe the 80 percent or yes but yeah the thing that implements uh you know certainly you know fire fire squads and military and build roads and and tries to do education and all those kinds of things where it's kind of clear that you have an output in mind and that you would like to find a way to make more output for less money if you could do so and then there's also some things that have you know little obvious value but just you know we want to do for for a variety of other reasons and i think that's that's fine so you know but but again so we're just doing a an analysis for diffid the the usa id in in britain they have decided to spend five billion pounds on research and development into developing country problems and this probably shouldn't leave the room but it probably will and it's no big secret but but i don't think anyone really knows what that means or what how they're going to spend that and the real worry is that because the universities have starved they're basically just going to say yeah we'll take that and just use as as our regular your revenue i i don't know if you can recognize that sort of thinking but but but you know fundamentally so so what we're trying to do is to make a basic case for what's the benefit cost ratio for a lot of different r&d and there hasn't been a lot of studies on r&d but in general sense seems to be that there's a very very large social benefit why because private companies systematically under invest in long-term r&d why because it's really hard to recapture that gain if you make up something that's phenomenally useful in 50 years say you invent the laser right you you can't make money off of it because by the time it actually becomes something you can use it's gone out of your pattern has run out and so companies dramatically under invest in long-term in r&d that's why we need to have universities in other places where you invest in this because the social benefits of us discovering new knowledge is incredibly large erin pole hi i'm erin i miss sophomore in the college of science so you discussed the importance of food security and growing up with access to good food from an economic perspective how important do you think gmo's are do you think there are best solution to solving this problem so so gmo is one of those funny things right where where people get very very upset and and i've always found it you know so so if you if you talk to most people you know if you look at at um what is pew uh uh uh did a study of of what a lot of scientists believe you know they looked at vaccination yes all scientists tell you that it's not dangerous that you should have your kids vaccinate it they looked at climate change yes all experts pretty much say it's a real issue and you should do something about it and they looked at gmo and yes all scientists almost all scientists say it's not dangerous and i i think i'm not i'm not a natural scientist so you know i basically listen to all of these guys i think it's uh it's very clear that it's not a hugely dangerous thing it doesn't mean we shouldn't you know regulate it i think we have uh if anything certainly regulate it very well you could also argue that we've over-regulated it i think also if you look at the impact so far you know for instance look at uh golden rice which was this promise that we would be able to you know feed kids uh with lots of vitamin a vitamin a you know basically lack of vitamin a kills about half a million kids every year so it would have been huge help but it's certainly been lacking behind its promise so i think it may have been somewhat oversold i i think it has great potential but i think we also need to be careful not to oversell some of these things because then we end up in a situation where people feel a little cheated on on on some of these things but i think you know the the fundamental answer is you know if if people and and it's often the same people who are very worried about global warming who are also very worried about gmo you know if you're very worried about global warming because most scientists tell you this is actually a real problem then you should not be worried about gmo's because most scientists tell you it's not a big problem how about adam hello i'm adam and i'm a senior in the college of science and so my question is a little bit more on the environmental side of things um so there are certain countries in europe and the one that's mine is germany who are promising by like you know 2050 they're going to switch everything over to renewable um energy right and it's costing them a whole lot so do you think this is worthwhile should they be spending all that money on something else and if that is uh which of those things do you think would be the best um investment so i i think there's a couple of of things to uh uh realize almost all of these problems have you ever noticed how almost all politicians promise stuff that's only going to happen when they're dead uh you know that that's incredibly convenient right uh because you know everyone can promise something in 2050 uh if you guys will probably have to be careful about that right but but you know the rest of us can just you know promise away uh and and and so so it's not going to happen uh by any means at the current rate and at the way that germany is doing it so germany has to a very large extent said we're going to have this in a give end so the energy change where we're basically going to go for solar and wind uh and and you know solar and wind makes up a fairly trivial power so germany still gets 81 percent of its energy from fossil fuels and of course then at the same time they made the phenomenally stupid decision of saying we're going to get rid of nuclear power now you can have a lot of different conversations about nuclear power my my sense tend to be that nuclear power no it's not dangerous but it's it's not economically efficient in the current form we know that most you know most nuclear power costs a lot there's a huge cleanup cost at the end so the actual cost of producing a kilowatt hour is actually fairly high that's that's why i'm sort of reserved against nuclear power but remember that was not the conversation that the germans had they'd already built the nuclear power plants so they already committed to cleaning them up so basically while they're just running they're producing incredibly cheap energy entirely clean and what did the germans say they said let's get rid of that you know let's make sure we need to have the cleanup cost right now instead of in 40 years and let's get rid of all the clean energy that we could have produced very very cheaply that was just you know triple stupid uh and i think you know pretty much everyone knows that i mean the real reason why they did it was political reasons right and that goes back to your question on free trade that you know there's a lot of other things that that play in here at the same time wasn't it the germans that gave us that brilliant diesel decision yes that that's that's another first they subsidized then it jacked up air pollution to ridiculous levels now they're going to pay people to take the diesels off the roads yes yes and it is a good example of of just focusing on one thing that you focus on co2 where diesel is more effective and you didn't focus on on on on air pollution which was actually much worse for diesel to to these guys defense you also have to say that you know they were helped by a lot of mendacious companies that told them oh yes it actually is possible and they're not polluting very much except out in reality how about mackayla hi i'm mackayla vogui and i'm a junior in the college of science thank you for your talk it's all been really interesting and i know that you've received a lot of criticism for your work how has this influenced your actions and views and has this hurt or helped you yeah so uh yes there's a lot of people who are critical and i i think this is you know this is entirely fine um uh in some ways if if nobody you know if nobody's paying attention it's probably because you're not saying something that's very interesting i mean you can say something that's outrageous and still be wrong right but but i but i think in some ways uh uh you know when when i first got started on this i had a totally different research agenda i was actually doing a computer simulation and game theory so you know something that like a hundred people in the world would appreciate um so i but i had this plan and i i still have you know i think uh university can be a little boring uh you know you you sort of expect to come in and and experience play dough and are stoddily and you know you get like these multiple choice tests instead um and so i i want it to you know make it more exciting in my in my home college in or his in demark and so i got students in and a lot of different uh areas and i wanted them to do interesting stuff and so what is essentially what i'll present you here is some of the stuff that we started out doing and you know we were just like really is the numbers this different is it you know is it all air pollution and indoor air pollution all that stuff you know sort of realizing wow and then we wrote up stories we thought this is important to share with people and then a lot of people got very upset that how dare you say that my thing is not the most important thing in the world uh and and i've always taken great comfort and i don't i've been told that this is a standard saying at harvard law school but i'm sure it's you know something that they say a lot of places you know if you have a good case you should pound the case and if you have a bad case you should pound the table uh and and so i i find that a lot of the criticism that i get is really pounding the table and in some sense i find that very reassuring uh but but you know if if if people have and i'm you know i'm i'm happy to also have those questions you know if if there are real you know disputes that's absolutely what we should have a conversation on and i i don't think i've ever shied away from this but i also i i think you know fundamentally it's incredibly important that we have someone who also dare to say look this is not how most of the world's people think you know the the uh the the uh priority list that i showed you from 9.7 million people it's probably we we have some surveys that are reasonably representative and this is probably pretty much how most of the people in the world think you know it's about food it's about health care it's about education it's about jobs it's about nutrition uh those are the things that really matter to most people and yet if you read the papers they're almost nowhere to be found and so you know i try to give a voice to that i try to give a voice to a lot of smart solutions and yes some people are going to get annoyed um i was at a meeting earlier today uh where where you know uh one of the women who were there she was she was you know a little myth that the thing that she was doing was not you know it was actually pretty far down uh towards the bottom of the list and i totally understand that yeah that that would be upsetting to anyone but somebody needs to point that out uh because otherwise we'll just end up you know doing equally all of these all of these things and so you know i i actually uh when mitchell he was the new development minister in britain when cameron first came in in 2010 um they were very eager to do exactly what we were doing for the usa id in in britain so this was a great opportunity everybody wanted to do it everybody thought this was a great idea how could you not want to spend more money on doing the most good you could until it's it started dawning in everyone that wait a minute i have you know i have more good shy of two kids i need to put through college what did they figure out that the stuff i do is not the most effective way to spend money that's no good right so suddenly everybody really oh no no no let's not do that let's do an internal survey so they basically booted us and they did an internal survey and they came out and said everybody is doing sterling work you know i think we can i think we can appreciate the you know the conviction and and the uh even now and then the the sanctimony of people who are passionate about a given cause but they sooner or later work like yours confronts us with the reality that resources being finite if you miss spend a dollar on something that doesn't do much good you have foregone an opportunity to do a ton of good you may have cost someone their life and that's not a very moral position to take so making smart decisions is my way of thinking has implications that are beyond simple wisdom we got a little bit of time and two or three questions left and we have a statistician on the panel who i believe is margaret hi my name is margaret and i'm a junior in the college of science you've discussed some of the world's largest problems tonight and nearly all of them will be affected by the political system before change is enacted how do you think corruption will affect your models and how do you suggest we combat it so corruption is a huge problem we work with susan roast ackerman who's an economist at Yale university she was the originator that corruption probably cost the world about a trillion dollars a year so it's a huge problem unfortunately there the standard saying is huge problem no good solutions and so we're all about good solutions and so if there's no good solution you know focus on something else you know don't try to fix stuff that's really hard to do when there's a lot of stuff that's really really easy to do but it actually turned out one of things we found in bangladesh i was very very excited about that was we found a good solution to one part of corruption so a very large part of spending in developing countries goes to procurement and almost all of that goes to infrastructure so it's almost half the public budgets in developing countries so about 880 billion dollars globally in the developing world and it's obviously hugely corrupt in bangladesh you have to hand in this is old british legislation you have to hand in a sealed envelope in a particular government office for a particular bid and then they'll decide and you know probably find the one that's the cheapest but of course the problem with that is that the ruling families in those local in that local area have already decided that you're going to get the bid and so what they do is they put up goons outside that office so you physically can't get in with your envelope and so you know you get the bid but you know we all end up paying more so we had a researcher do two years they they convinced bangladesh to change four percent of their procurement spending and do it on e-procurement instead so essentially ebay for procurement so you could do this from all over bangladesh so you get better offers you get many more offers typically also high quality but it also becomes a lot harder to you know manipulate now it doesn't become impossible i'm sure there's full corruption but what we found was there's 12 percent less corruption or what's the equivalent of 700 million dollars almost for free so you have to have some computers you have to have computer software and you have to re-educate about 115 thousand uh bangladesh employees cheap cheap cheap compared to 700 million dollars per year which is why i as i mentioned the finance minister loved us because you know that's basically 700 million dollars for free so they're instituting that now in bangladesh so basically we found a very cheap way to get more money or to get more more government services almost for free so there are solutions they're not a lot of good solutions i should just mention all the stuff that you saw up here that we've analyzed take into account a standard amount of corruption so we're not being idealist we're saying if you spend a dollar for instance in tuberculosis some of that medication is going to go awry both because of of corruption because of incompetence because people don't want to keep taking the medication when they get well you know that when you get you know your pencil and pen insulin from your doctor you don't take the last pills that's a big problem in the world if you have to do this for half a year or a year as you have to do with tuberculosis it's really hard to get people to do it and so a lot of people stop doing it we take all of that into account and yet there's a huge benefit so we assume all the standard corruption in there if you find a better way to corrupt to to clear up corruption you know we're going to listen to you and we're going to make updates in 2020 on what's the smartest target so you know anyone who has good ideas you know please get into the period literature and it'll be part of the of the next update to what should the world be focusing on. Ben. My name is Ben Callis I'm also in the College of Science I'm a senior and my question kind of pertains to a lot of what we talked about which is the benefit per dollar spent and one of these you mentioned in one of your papers was malaria versus HIV so from malaria you estimated about a thousand dollars per life saved whereas HIV was about ten thousand and on your chart it showed up HIV was more yellow as opposed to malaria green at what point do you propose that we remedy a massive problem like HIV AIDS. So just great Ben and just to give the background it's it's much cheaper to save a malaria incidence than an HIV incidence and it's basically because malaria medication is much cheaper and you just need it for a couple weeks whereas HIV medication is more expensive and you need it for life. This is incredibly uncomfortable to talk about right because we really want to save both depending a little bit the the the stuff we have up there is not saving everyone from HIV but only the high high incidence HIV countries and because high incidence countries are better per dollar spent because you actually save more people because they are not going to reinfect other people that turns out to be a little more effective than the other numbers that you were that you were suggesting but very roughly you can save 10 people from malaria every time you can save one person from HIV we don't like to hear that because we want to save both all the people with HIV and all the people with malaria but the problem is we don't there's 600 000 people that will die this year from malaria there is 1.4 million people that will die from HIV this year we don't save these people and so the simple problem that i sort of confront people with is to say well if you would like to save 10 people or one first with the amount of money that you're going to spend on on medication and my simple answer is you should save 10 lives before you save one that means leaving people dying from HIV that does not feel good but remember most people's way out of this is to say well you know here is 10 people that are dying from malaria here's one guy dying from HIV which would you pick they'll save both but of course that's just copying out of the the the argument so okay so you just came up with twice the amount of money that we had but you're spending on one guy whereas you could have found 10 other people that have malaria and saved them so you're basically deciding to not save nine more lives and you know there's no way out of this moral dilemma we don't confront it and typically we don't talk about and that goes back to your question on you know uh how do i feel about being the the annoying guy that points out stuff we don't this is the kind of thing you shouldn't mention at any cocktail party right because nothing good will ever come of that but we should because not talking about it doesn't make that choice go away it simply means and this is how we typically solve it we spend some on HIV and some on malaria and that's not a good answer um now i would argue that there was probably a lot of other places where we spend money at development at very low benefit and we should probably cut that and then we could probably save both malaria and HIV but remember that's also a little bit of a cop out because until we actually do that we should spend most of it not all of it but most of it on malaria will you get the last word hello my name is will i'm a sophomore in the college of engineering excuse me college of agriculture and college of science um i was curious about i don't know how i got college of engineering out of that but uh long day yeah thank you yeah will any who i was curious about um if we invest in the issues discussed in your cost benefit analysis would that be treating the surface level issue considering that climate change is often closely linked um to these other factors would investing in climate change have a hidden monetary benefit that we're not seeing right now it's a it's a very good question so so in principle we should have taken that into account so when you look at most of the benefits that stem from doing something about climate those benefits we estimate with integrated models that basically try to look at you know what are the reduction in people that are going to be influenced by storms and what are the reduction in in sea level loss sorry sea level rise and hence loss of of coast land area and you know how many more you know drought incidences will we avoid and all that kind of stuff so they've really done a good job on on looking across all these areas and actually if you look for instance on on on you know we were just talking about hiv and malaria these are typically health economists they don't look a hundred years into the world they don't look at a lot of other things they just look at the dead people so you know so they typically just look at 10 years of dead people from hiv or dead people from malaria and they say see there's a huge problem here we should do something about it so in some ways you could probably say our malaria and our hiv estimates are underestimated compared to climate because climate has pretty much everything incorporated whereas malaria and and hiv only has the next 10 years of death but of course there's a lot of other things that happen first of all you know if if your parents die from hiv you probably are screwed in a lot of different ways there's a lot of you know fallout both in you know in in more crime rates there's a lot of a problem in productivity of loss of continuity in many companies for instance malaria because malaria is so pervasive most people the a large part of the problem with malaria is actually not that you die but it is you're repeatedly sick so in many countries you have two people working one person's job because at any one time one of them will be sick with malaria which of course is terrible for productivity so a lot of these things are not actually in the models and would increase the benefits there so if anything we're probably a little good to what's climate compared to the others but your your main point is well taken remember a lot of people will say if you do something about climate not only will you avoid you know higher temperature rises but you'll also avoid more you know malaria for instance I think that's a slightly 10 years but let's just go with it and say you know if there's higher temperatures you'll have more malaria because there's more places where the mosquito will survive and so if you reduce the temperature increase you'll probably have slightly less malaria that's you know are certainly in the margin it's it's probably true but it's probably a fairly small benefit but so the argument is if you invest in climate you also get benefits on malaria but remember if you invest in malaria you also get benefits from climate because why if you make people less dying from malaria if they are less sick they get more productive so they are less vulnerable to a lot of other things like climate change but of course also all other things we know typically that rich people are much much less vulnerable you know the simple way to look at that is what happens when a hurricane hits you know Guatemala lots of people die you know the infrastructure is wiped out what happens if a hurricane hits Florida yes it's costly but you know very few people die and they're back pretty much to normal after a couple weeks so fundamentally if you're rich you're robust towards a lot of other things so I think we often focus on the idea of saying if you do something about climate you get other benefits those are in we've incorporated those in the answers but likewise if you get rid of for instance malaria or some of these other things you make people richer you make them more robust so they're better able to deal with with climate change and better able to deal with all the other horrible stuff that will happen or can happen to them so yes we take into account all these things and and and I think if anything we've probably done it in in a way that uh that overemphasizes climate not under emphasize it so will's question and your answer prompts me to ask this last thing the book points out that seven times more people die from cold than heat yes now there wasn't a bar for cold I saw I saw a bar for it said warming yes there wasn't a bar for cold why not well so it's important to recognize that when we talk about global warming there's a tendency to focus on all the bad things that will happen with global warming I don't know if you know back in the 70s some people worried a lot about global cooling now this is not actually a big trend or anything I'm not making that argument but I'm simply pointing out that you know a significant number of people in you know New York Times and many others wrote about this that probably is not a good idea if it gets really cold which is probably true but I'm always curious about you know people were saying well we'll actually have lower productivity in agriculture and that's going to cause us a great deal of problems and these things are probably all true but it's amazing that nobody said but at least they'll be less malaria right nobody said that because we only focus on the things that are going to get worse and to a certain extent that's reasonable because remember we have a civilization that's stabilized at exactly the temperature and a lot of other things that we have right now which is why Finns are not you know people from Finland are not very concerned about it being cold and why you know people in Athens or in Florida would probably be terrified if it was really cold and so you know we have a lot of our expenditures focus on a specific temperature outcome and any deviation both colder or warmer is likely to create more problems but we should also remember is likely to create some fewer problems and you know cold is a good example I'm always astounded in Britain every year in Britain and these are official figures about 25,000 people die somewhere between 25 and 50,000 people die from cold every year why is that not a news because it doesn't happen in one day right whereas a heat wave happens in one day but these are just simply they're mostly older people but that's also true for heat deaths that you know that it's cold for a long time and they simply expire sometime before they would otherwise have done so but that's still something that ought to outrageous there was a point two years ago when morgues were about three months behind and handing out the bodies because there are so many people dying yet I defy I don't think anyone in this audience heard about that right had this been because of global warming that would have been a big story right but it's not and and in some ways you could argue that the global warming would probably slightly alleviate that now again that's not to say that global warming is good I'm not making that argument I'm simply pointing out that there's both negatives and positive global warming just like there is to pretty much everything else in the world and we're not well served by only focusing on the negatives you know it's enrollment season here at Purdue and we have learned as others have that along with a great academic records and so forth a key quality if you can identify it in in what will make a successful student is they call it grit persistence this audience has shown a lot of grit tonight therefore I I know you're all good learners and I think we all learned a lot through the good offices of our graduate student government we had another great speaker on campus Jonathan Roush very eminent scholar and writer for a long time and for 25 or 30 years the earliest probably one of the most eloquent and certainly most persistent and courageous advocates of gay rights in the whole country gave a wonderful talk about what that march of civil rights was was like here are just two lines from Jonathan Roush though that sort of bridge that topic in this one he's written a very dangerous principles now being established as a social right thou shalt not hurt others with words this principle is a menace and not just the civil liberties at bottom it threatens liberal inquiry that is science itself and elsewhere in liberal science the community discovers what it thinks through criticism and its members never do all think any one thing if they did intellectual progress would stop well we don't intend that intellectual progress stop at Purdue University and thanks to Bjorn Lobborg it took a couple steps forward I think tonight thank you all for coming