WTH Should I Read This Summer? Best Things First by Bjorn Lomborg

What the Hell Is Going On

AEI Podcasts

News, Politics, History, Government

4.4 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It may not come as a surprise that in much of the developed world, money spent is not necessarily money used well. We have done podcasts on the ideological and political dangers of bad development policy, but the dollar-to-donuts, real practical bent of the conversation is just as important. Because at the end of the day, the international community has come up with many (169) development objectives, most all of them unreachable (we have only met one). Instead of looking at the trajectory of UN sustainable development goals and bemoaning their overreach and underperformance, Bjorn Lomborg presents a realistic re-orientation of priorities. He has whittled the 169 UNSDGs down to 12 actionable steps the international community can take to challenge today’s problems. The goals are straightforward, cost-effective, and good faith – for anyone discouraged by the constant backsliding and bureaucratic stagnation of today, this is a refreshing step forward.

Bjorn Lomborg is the president of the think tank Copenhagen Consensus Center and the former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute. He became internationally known for his best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). Bjorn is listed as one of Time’s 100 most influential people, and his most recent book is Best Things First: The 12 Most Efficient Solutions for the World’s Poorest and Our Global SDG Promises.

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute.
0:03.1	If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. Hotels gone on.
0:01.0	Who in God's name knows what it's all about.
0:23.6	Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.
0:29.6	And I'm Mark Tieson.
0:31.6	Welcome to our podcast.
0:32.6	What the hell is going on?
0:34.6	Mark, what the hell is going on this summer? Well, what the hell is going on
0:38.6	this summer is we're continuing our summer reading series. What the hell should I read this summer?
0:43.6	And we've scoured the world for the most interesting books for you to look at. And today, we've
0:49.0	got one of our favorite people on, Bjorn Lomburg, who has a fantastic new book called The Best Things First,
0:55.5	the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest and our global SGG promises.
1:01.6	Bjorn, as many of you know, runs the Copenhagen Consensus, which is a think tank.
1:05.6	And what he does, as his main body of work, is to go and find what are the things that out of a cost-benefit
1:13.7	analysis that we can get the most bang for the buck, that we could help the most people,
1:17.5	lift the most people out of poverty, educate the most people, create the most good for the lowest
1:22.9	amount of cost. He's gone through a rigorous process and he's come up with 12 great ideas about how we can make the world better for a very small amount of cost. He's gone through a rigorous process and he's come up with 12 great ideas about how we can
1:29.0	make the world better for a very small amount of money. So many of the nonfiction books that
1:33.7	we read about good solutions for government, good solutions for the poorest among us, good solutions
1:39.6	to do good things are preachy, expensive, dogmatic, and ideological.
1:49.1	This book is none of those things.
1:51.4	It's a great read.
	...

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