Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast. I have the honor today of

sittering, there's no such thing as sittering of sitting with Bjorn

Lomborg, who is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus, and the author of the

excellent book Best Things First. Bjorn, Welcome to Dark Horse.

Thank you very much, Pat.

So maybe I should just set the discussion in motion this way.

I don't know if you know Bjorn, but my training

is in evolutionary biology, and I focused heavily on complex adaptive systems.

My two favorite principles are probably diminishing returns and opportunity cost.

And your book is predicated on the intersection between these two things.

And in fact, you can see it in the title.

The idea is we can't do everything as you explore in the introduction to your book, which

means that every dollar we spend somewhere we're not spending anywhere else so we should probably

be hard-headed about deciding how to allocate our efforts so that they give us the highest return on investment. Is that a fair summary?

It totally is. I should have had you right in the foreword.

Well, in any case, it is it is exactly the way we ought to approach things.

Of course, I also know from the study of complex adaptive systems

that nothing goes the way you expect it to do when you intervene in such a system because of the

complexity at its heart. And so I do have to ask you, when trying to identify, and in your book you put forward 12 policies that you argue

should be at the top of the list because they give us the highest bang for the buck as interventions go.

How concerned are you that what one attempts to accomplish with these interventions might produce unintended

consequences that are outside the range of what we've thought to measure in

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