More urgent tasks need more attention

The meaningful exchange of truly diverse ideas and perspectives has withered over recent decades. Unorthodox thinking is increasingly trashed or disregarded, even as the chattering class's fear- and force-predicated approaches repeatedly prove inadequate to cope with the true complexities and crises of the modern world.

Therefore, we need to foster and promote critical thinking and constructive discussions. We are making every effort to ensure that our new Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, an international coalition of politicians, business leaders, public intellectuals and cultural commentators, helps ensure that a broader range of perspectives can be heard globally.

A broader consideration of policy proposals could have been helpful during the pandemic, for example. As a result of lockdowns in many places in the world, we saw an increase in inequality in income distribution and wealth, widespread loss of employment, substantive declines in spending, and general deterioration in economic conditions; serious declines in mental health and well-being, delayed and diminished access to healthcare, and record high levels of domestic violence.

The education of children was particularly affected: school closures on average robbed children of more than seven months of education. The huge impact on children's knowledge could end up costing $17 trillion in lifetime earnings according to research by the World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF. Children from poor families, and children, especially girls, with disabilities suffered the biggest losses.

The international community needs to have a serious conversation on our manner of response before the next crisis — pandemic or otherwise — to ensure that the cure is not worse than the disease.

Consider the alarmist treatment of climate change, for instance. Campaigners and news organizations play up fear, in the form of floods, storms and droughts, while neglecting to mention that reduction in poverty and increase in resiliency mean that climate-related disasters kill ever fewer people: over the past century, deaths have declined by 97 percent.

Heat waves capture the headlines. Globally, however, cold kills nine times more people. The higher temperatures arguably characterizing this century have resulted in 166,000 fewer temperature-related deaths overall.

Fear-mongering and the suppression of truly inconvenient truths are pushing us dangerously toward the wrong solutions: politicians and pundits call en masse for net-zero policies that will cost far beyond $100 trillion, while producing benefits of a fraction. We need to have an honest discussion on costs and benefits — a true reckoning with the facts to find the best solutions.

We also need to conduct a more mature conversation on how to better help the 4 billion people who live in the poorer half of the world. The United Nations promises everything imaginable in the form of its Sustainable Development Goals: the end to extreme poverty, hunger, and disease; reduction of inequality and corruption; cessation of war; amelioration of climate change; universalization of education — even ease of access to urban parks. But a plan that makes of all the problems the same compelling crisis without prioritization is no plan at all, merely a recipe for the appearance of action and virtue.

This year sits at the midpoint between the start of the goals in 2016, and their hypothetical attainment in 2030. We are now at the halftime, but nowhere near close to halfway there. Even UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres admits that the SDGs are "far off track".

We must zero in on the most efficient solutions first. More than 100 economists and several Nobel laureates working with the Copenhagen Consensus think tank have identified the most promising and effective SDG targets. We could, for example, virtually eliminate tuberculosis, which still kills more than 1 million people every year, by spending an additional $6.2 billion a year. We could invest $5.5 billion more in agricultural research and development in low-income countries to increase crop yield, help farmers produce more and consumers pay less, reducing the number of hungry people by more than 100 million per year.

There are a dozen areas where much could be done by spending comparatively little money. We could efficiently and quickly boost learning in schools — vital after the pandemic-induced lockdowns — save mothers' and newborns' lives, tackle malaria, make government procurement much more efficient, improve nutrition, increase land tenure security, turbo-charge the effects of trade, advance skilled migration, and increase child immunization rates.

These 12 sensible and implementable policies could save more than 4 million lives per year, and generate economic benefits worth over $1 trillion (primarily in poorer countries) for an outlay of $35 billion a year for the next seven years.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship can help us envision the future in a positive manner, emphasizing the ability of the properly competing and cooperating people of the world to solve whatever problems confront us, as we have so often and often so effectively done in the past.

We can focus on what is truly important and attainable, initiate and reward a more nuanced global discussion on the problems that will always beset us, and look forward to a world more abundant, more laden with opportunities, more sustainable, and more hopeful.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus.

Jordan B. Peterson is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

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