Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.
I'm Felix Amon of Axios.
I'm here with Elizabeth Spires of New York Times and various other places.
Hello.
I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.
Hi.
We have a very special episode this week, all about making the world a better place.
We have Mr. Bjorn Lombog.
Welcome Bjorn.
I can say hi or hey.
You can say hi or hey.
You can be Danish or English.
I think for this purpose, you will be English.
Danish is a little bit rusty around these parts.
Introduce yourself.
Who are you?
What is the book you have just published?
So my name is Bjorn Lombog.
I'm Danish.
As you mentioned, but I'll speak in English.
I run a think tank called the Copenhagen consensus where we bring together tons of the
world's best economists.
We work with seven noble lords and economics to basically try and find out if you want
to spend an extra dollar, where can you do the most good?
We've done that for the world.
We've done it for Bangladesh and many other individual countries.
But now we're doing it for the world again, but for a specific purpose, the world has
decided it's going to do all good things in the world called the sustainable development
goals.
We're not actually achieving it.
So here is a book that suggests 12 amazing things that the world could do.
Very low cost.
They'll deliver amazing benefits.
So we're going to talk about a few of those things, about the whole conceptual underpinning
behind the book.
A few of the different ways it can work and how it would work in practice, whether it
would work in practice, is all coming up on Slate Money.
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Let's start with the central concept of the book, which is basically if you're a government
or a philanthropist or anyone who wants to change the world, there is this very quantitative
lens, which you should use before doing anything, and you call it a benefit cost relationship.
Is that pretty much the very big overarching message of the book?
It is.
You just summarized all my 300 pages, so benefit cost analysis.
So fundamentally, we focus on a lot of things in the world, and there is a lot of issues.
And we often tend to get slightly derailed by the causes that have the cutest animals,
or the most crying babies, or the groups with the best PR.
And that all makes sense.
But what we try to do is to say, well, actually, there's possibly a lot of fairly boring things
that would have huge impact at very low cost.
Should we know about that?
So we're basically making, if you will, a priceless for some of the best things you can do in the
world.
Let's talk a little bit first about the concept of measuring what you call the sizes and
the prices using the same measuring stick, which is dollars.
Every idea in your book, even something like we should switch to e-procurement, or we
should do more trade, it comes with a price, this is the cost of it in dollars, and then
it comes with a benefit in dollars.
And even if the benefit is, you know, kids get better education, you put a dollar price
on that.
And I know that people can feel a bit uncomfortable with just saying, like, how do you make all of
these very incommensurate things, commensurate by reducing them all to dollars?
Is that really possible?
Remember, we do this all the time.
So when you go into supermarket, you really do put into dollars very, very different things,
not just apples and oranges, but, you know, all the things you buy, they all have price
tax on.
But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be concerned about, are we doing the right thing
here?
What economists try to do is to say, well, what's the cost, typically most of the cost
is actually going to be dollars.
If you want to get kids better education, you have to pay for, you know, more schools
or better teachers or better teaching equipment, that kind of thing.
If you want to save people from tuberculosis, you need to pay for, you know, the drugs
and have staff and medical people and all that stuff.
That's sort of understandable.
But the real issue and what I think you're aiming at is, how do we measure the benefits
in terms of dollars?
Because that's sort of obviously, that feels wrong, right?
Because it's children flourishing more, it's children knowing more, it's people not dying.
Those are obvious things that we shouldn't be putting into money.
But remember, we do all the time and let me just give you one example.
So when the Department of Transportation in the U.S., and pretty much everywhere else
in the world, decides we have this road, should we make it more safe?
Should we make a middle divider or something?
They essentially make a trade-off between saying, if we make it safer, it means fewer people
will die in this road, but it also costs more money.
And typically what they do, and this is not unsmart, because they've also given
this a lot of thought, right?
They think if we can do it really cheaply and save a lot of people, it's a good idea.
If it'll cost a lot of money and you can only save very few people, maybe we won't do
it.
Turns out that the U.S. government consistently, not totally consistently, but reasonably consistently.
One thing I thought that was interesting in your book is you had these great charts,
and you would chart all these problems that have improved in the rich world incredibly.
The incidence of infectious diseases or the literacy or education, and I thought, you
know, the rich world didn't set out as the primary goal to solve any of these particular
problems.
The rich world just got rich, and the problems got solved.
And so nitpicking, or not nitpicking, but choosing based on this very complicated, cost-benefit
analysis, which problems to go after, maybe obfuscates what would be an easier solution,
or maybe a harder solution, which is for the developed world to get richer.
Because that's what's going to solve all these problems in a much bigger way more quickly.
If you look at the numbers on China, China didn't set out to solve infectious disease or
child wasting or anything like that, China decided to do more capitalism than they got
richer.
And then a lot of these problems went away.
So you're absolutely right.
For the developing world, for the poor part of the world, if you get rich, you will solve
many of these problems.
That's absolutely true.
The problem is it's not very obvious how do we go about getting richer now.
You could say, well, everyone should do like China.
That's clearly hard because only China managed to do that right now.
So it's not that that's not a good other idea.
And we should certainly recognize the fact that if you get more economic growth, you lift
out a lot of people from poverty, and that's one of the biggest problems in the world.
So absolutely we should be focused on that.
We actually address that partly in the book with trade.
We know that one of the things that made China rich is that they got to be the world's
workshop.
They basically got to trade a lot.
And that's one of the ways that you get rich.
You don't have a tremendously high wage, but you actually have pretty well educated people.
You sell to the US and everybody else.
We pay them good money and they get richer from it.
That's a good idea.
We should make sure that more people get that opportunity.
In the rich world, we've become sort of slightly disillusioned with trade because it leads
to the rust belt and all these other problems, and those are really issues.
But we should still remember how good this is for a lot of the poor part of the world.
So let me ask you the same question the other way around, which is you have a chapter at
the beginning, which basically said we, you know, a few years ago had these wonderful things
called the Millennium Development Girls, and a lot of them came very close to being met.
Some of them actually were met.
And I think most of us will remember things like the global fund to fight, you know,
AIDS and other diseases in Africa.
There was Gabi, the vaccine alliance, also in Africa.
Literacy rates, especially for girls in Africa, have gone up enormously.
The mortality rate for kids under five in most of the South of South Africa has really
plunged.
There's been a lot of sort of humanitarian successes.
And these are precisely the kind of things that you are saying we need more of and you're
trying to sort of quantify in this book.
But like looking backwards, using the same methodology that you use in this book, you know,
you would conclude as a result of these successes, you know, the fact that Africa was not wiped
out by AIDS as everyone thought it would be in the early 90s.
But Africa is now, you know, however many hundreds of billions of dollars richer as a result
of what the global fund did.
Have you done this sort of benefit cost analysis on things that have actually worked in the
past, on those kind of things, and have we managed to do incredible things in the past
that we're just not singing loudly enough about?
So we've done a little bit of back of the envelope kind of argument on those things.
I think the main reason why we haven't done it is because it's sort of, you know, it's
intellectually interesting, but we're past that.
We've done that.
It doesn't actually help policy.
But the main point here is, again, to say that most of what we've done is looking ahead.
And what you rightly point out is we were very good at the Millennium Development Goals,
which ran from 2000 to 2015 to say, let's do a very few specific, mostly really smart stuff.
And we achieved a lot.
But then, you know, the UN said, oh, wow, this went really well.
Let's do this again.
But the problem was that these Millennium Development Goals literally were set by six guys
in a back room in the UN.
You know, Kofi and Anne, five others.
And the story is that they met the environment, the guy who ran the environment agency a couple
of days before they were going to launch, and they were like, oh, we don't have any environment.
So they put in an environment target as well, which was, uh, and, uh, water and sanitation.
And, you know, that's probably not the way you want to do global goals kind of thing.
So this time around, they said, let's ask everyone what they think should be in these global
goals.
And not surprisingly, when you ask everyone, you get everything in there, they, we ended
up with an enormous package of stuff, uh, ranging from, uh, going from 2016 up to 2030,
where we basically promised everything.
We promised to fix hunger and malnutrition, sorry, hunger and poverty and, uh, uh, uh,
war and corruption and climate change and, uh, uh, jobs and, and, uh, education and,
you know, get urban, uh, more urban parks and, and, uh, more sustainable, uh, uh, to
risk them.
You know, there's literally not anything in there that's not, you know, promising something
for whatever field you're in.
Uh, we promised everything to everyone.
And so this year, 2023, the world is at halftime for the, uh, STGs, the Sustainable
Development Goals.
And we're nowhere near halfway.
We're just basically failing even the Secretary General is now saying, uh, we're far off
track on the, on our promises.
And so what we're trying to say is, look, if you're promising everything, you're not going
to get anything done.
You'll have no priorities.
Let's focus on some really simple, smart stuff, but they're not that simple, Bjorn.
I mean, I, I, I, I, I have a bunch of things I want to sort of respond to here, but like,
the first thing is the, with the vast majority of your 12 simple things, uh, the kind of
things that really can and must only be implemented by domestic governments in various developing
countries.
I think probably the malaria one is, is the exception.
Um, but most of the rest of them, especially things like, oh, we, you know, governments
should move to e-procurement or we should implement more trade or even stuff around
education, you know, but perforce must wind up being done through government departments,
through the political system, through whatever, you know, authoritarian or democratic, you
know, system you have in any given country.
And it strikes me that that is never going to be simple and it's never going to be something
you can just magically make happen with by writing a check.
So look, and this is very, very important.
So what, what I mean by simple is, this is something that we've actually demonstrated
how to do in many different circumstances.
So let me take one example, uh, which is education, uh, we both say how you shouldn't do
education.
So there are lots of things where government has spent enormous amounts of resources on
education and gotten very trivial or no, uh, output, for instance, Indonesia, uh, famously
in the early 2000s, uh, you know, very well intentioned decided they were going to spend
twice as much money on education.
So they hire a lot more teachers.
They doubled the, uh, the wage of each teacher, uh, and, and because of the way it was, it
was, uh, rolled out, it actually happened in different regions at different times.
And so, uh, you can make a, a pseudo randomized controlled trial study and they did, uh, and
it's a very famous paper.
It's called double for nothing.
Uh, so basically, the Indian Asian spent twice as much money.
They have one of the lowest class size, uh, class sizes in the world.
And you could not measure the impact on, uh, educational outcome.
Now, the teacher is a much happier, which is great, but presumably not the main goal of,
uh, of educational policy.
So fundamentally, you can spend a lot of money and achieve nothing.
So this is not what we should be doing.
Yeah.
And your analysis, how do you weigh cost effectiveness against urgency in time sensitivity?
We don't.
We only look at what is the cost, typically the cost is right now, but sometimes it'll
be over, you know, a number of years.
For instance, if you try to fix tuberculosis, it doesn't help just try to fix it one year.
You actually need to fix it a lot of years before it sort of sticks, uh, the same thing
with many other infectious diseases.
But most of the cost is right now.
The benefits, depending on which kind of problem you're looking at come right now.
For instance, if you, if you give, uh, immunization, uh, most of the kids that you immunize will
survive just that year when they get the immunization.
Now, some of them will, you know, dribble in 60 years later, but most of it is right now.
Uh, unlike, for instance, education where you, uh, teach the kids better now, but the
benefits really only come in 10, 20, 30, you know, 50 years when they get into the employment
market all the way till, uh, they retire.
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So this raises one of the two big questions that I have about the whole like
underpinning of the book, which is it's based on on two numbers.
One of them is the discount rate that you're talking about.
And the other one is the value of a life here.
And it strikes me that where you end up with all of these 12 different chapters
is incredibly, is very, very deeply a function of where you set those two
numbers like in the appendix at the end of the book.
The fact that you're valuing a life per year.
Results in a bunch of interventions for children and infants because those
lives are worth much more than if you saved the life of a 40 year old and half
their life has gone already.
So, you know, so that's one thing you do.
And then also because you actually mention this in the book like there's this weird
cut off that if you, if you prevent a stillbirth that is considered much less
beneficial than if you prevent a baby from dying, you know, like one week
because that's not a life here, you know, saved these kind of weird paradoxes.
At one point, you mentioned like saving children's lives is worth billions of
dollars, but at the same time, if you get women to have fewer babies,
that's also worth billions of dollars.
And it's like, well, which one do you want?
Do you want more children?
Do you want fewer children?
So there's like a lot of this just comes from like that one life you think.
And similarly on the on the discount rate thing, you have a relatively high
discount rate, which means that you do wind up pushing things like
immunizations and, you know, bed nets which save lives relatively quickly at the
expense of, say, climate interventions that we could take decades and decades
to get moving.
If you set a very low discount rate, that is you basically say the future is
incredibly important, everything becomes much, much better deal, especially
things that are far away, but remember, and we've actually tried to get our
researchers to do this, but it turns out that this is, this is almost impossible
to do.
If you start thinking about, for instance, you know, people in the climate
conversation will say, but surely the very far future where climate policy will
have a much greater impact is hugely important as well.
But remember, if the future is hugely important, then helping people with
malaria today, not just means that these people will survive, but that their
kids will be much better off because not only will they actually have a mom
instead of not having a mom, but they will also have much more opportunity to
give them, you know, capital support and give them education and they'll have
huge impacts and possibly incredibly large impacts in the far future.
And then you very easily get to this very paradoxical outcome that has also been
remarked in the climate debate.
If you put a very low discount rate, that is the future is incredibly important.
The outcome becomes, you know what, all of us should just eat porridge and then
leave all the rest of the money to future generations, which of course should
also just eat porridge and leave all the money to future generations.
And so on, because the indefinite future is just way too important.
And there I think the important point is just to recognize nobody actually does
this, you know, we typically, we know where that logic ends up,
you know, because we saw the headlines, ends up with Sam
Pengman's read trying to buy the island of Nauru.
Who with his long term, I'm not sure that's true, but I got the funny point.
Look, I know it ends up with us saying, we care about the world.
And I think this is an important part.
I love the fact that a lot of people really do want to help the world.
And so we're willing to, you know, spend, I don't know,
two, three, four, five percent of our income to try to make the world better.
But we're not willing to spend, you know, say, 50 or 75 or 97.5 percent,
which is one famous climate outcome.
We're not willing to spend that much money on the rest of the world.
So what we do do is we try to say we're going to set aside non-trivial,
but not an enormous amount of money for the rest of the world.
How do we best spend that?
And that's the answer that we try to deliver.
The message of the book is like, here's how we can spend money to change the world.
So it seems like it's like a guide for the richer countries and the richer
people in the rich countries to give to the developing world.
How much input has the developing world had on these ideas?
Or how involved in they are saying, like, these are the problems we want solved.
Because it seems kind of colonialist.
Colonialist. Yeah, it seems colonialist, basically, to be like,
this is what we think you should do, because we want to feel better
about having a lot of money and being better off than you.
I actually address that straight up front in the book.
I say what we means, namely, that we means
every one of goodwill.
So it is philanthropists who want to do good.
It is developed government.
So the USAIDs of the world.
But it's also developing countries.
These are great investments for all three of them.
And we're trying to argue for all of them.
So I've actually presented this in a lot of developing countries.
We work with a lot of developing countries.
So all of these inputs into the sustainable development goals,
which is what we take our starting point from,
comes from basically making sure that you have everybody's input.
So both rich and poor countries.
But what we're trying to do is then say, what does the
the period literature tell us?
Where are the best deals?
And those are presumably not something that matters whether you're rich or poor.
This is simply about saying, where are the best deals in the poor half of the world?
And this is true both for poor countries or for development agencies from the rich world.
And so I'm trying to tell both.
I'm actually trying to tell everyone, this is where you get the biggest bang for your buck,
whether you're a poor country government that wants to do good for its citizens,
or whether you're a rich country that through development aid wants to do good in poor countries.
I just can't imagine a philanthropist telling the United States government,
these are the, I mean, I guess it happens a lot.
These are the programs you must do.
We know better than you.
You know what I mean?
It's just, I mean, they do that.
It's incredibly new.
I am not, and I hope I'm not coming across that way.
I'm not saying we know better than you.
What we are saying is that this is what the literature shows are some of the best deals available.
So we work with the Indian government, NTIOG, which is their central think tank to look at
where you spend resources.
We've done the same thing for Bangladesh, for Ghana, for Malawi, for a number of other countries,
including Uganda and Eswatini.
We're right now working with Tonga and the South Pacific.
We're working with them all and saying, what does the literature say?
And these typically period-published economic estimates of how much did an intervention cost
and how much good did it do.
And then we try to advise them to say, here is what the evidence say, if you do this,
the evidence seems to check.
You're going to spend a lot of money and get no educational outcome.
If you spend it on tablets, however, it costs much less and you get a huge outcome.
That is one of the reasons.
This is not by any means the only one that convinced the Malawi and government to actually say,
we want to get tablets into all of our primary schools, which is, you know, I think great.
And they're working both with their own funds, but also trying to get developed country funds.
So both philanthropists and from USAID and others to actually fund this.
So I think this is not, this is not, it's certainly not meant as colonial colonial or whatever
that word is. But also, this is really just about what does the evidence say.
So let me ask you when you go to these countries, how much
into country differences there? Because you present most of the solutions in this book as basically,
if not one size fits all, at least solutions that basically apply pretty much everywhere.
Maybe, you know, in the case of malaria, mostly just in Africa, but even so, Africa is an enormous
continent. You know, I'm thinking for instance, let you go to India and I am aware that like right now,
there's a big debate over there building a big, you know, water pipes everywhere and everyone's
saying, well, for a hundred million extra dollars, we can put inline chlorination into these water
pipes and putting inline chlorination into these water pipes is going to save millions of lives.
And it's going to be, it's that this one off like opportunity to do a lot of good for a relatively
small amount of money. But this is not something that would necessarily read across to say,
Tonga. So how much difference is there between, you know, the paperback version of this book that
people are reading after listening to say money versus like the more sort of concrete recommendations
that you give governments when you visit them on the ground.
So there's a significant difference in two things. So first of all, the book that we're talking about
is sort of a conversation to the sustainable development goals, which presumably is something
that all countries in the government and the world have decided. This is the same
same sort of cookie cutter that we're going to put down over every country in the world.
So it's in that sort of spirit that I write. Here is some here 12 amazing things that you could do.
Yes, then all equal in all countries. And yeah, we've tried to make a global estimate here,
which is not an unreasonable kind of conversation, but obviously it changes when you go to an
individual country. It changes in two ways. Partly, you know, all the setups change, you know,
some things, if you're outside of Africa, you don't have malaria pretty much. And you know, a lot
of other things, which obviously change the factual circumstances. But the second thing is,
it also matters where your politics is. In every country, there are some things that you discuss a lot.
So when we went to Ghana, it was very much about, because the government had just one on promising
free secondary school for kids. And that was the big thing. And so that was obviously one of those
things that we had to analyze. And how do you do that and turn out that there was way too few
teachers and two little schools and how do you do that? All that kind of stuff. With India,
we've spent a lot of time talking about, because this has been one of Modi's big things to get
clean drinking water and sanitation. And I actually briefly alluded to it in the book, because I say
that it turned out, they didn't like that very much, that this is not the best investment. As a
pretty good investment, but it's not by any means the best investment. And yeah, I think, I think
you need to say that. One of the things that India loves to say is, we built all these toilets,
and that's great. But unless you actually keep them clean every day, people don't use them.
One of the things that we've tried to do with this book is simply to show people, there are
these 12 amazing, it'd be amazing if it was really just 12, right? I mean, but roughly 12,
amazing things in the world. How about we start doing some of those? I would love everybody to do
all 12, but yeah, I'd be happy if we can just do three or four of them. So on a superficial level,
a lot of your argument sounds like what effective altruists argue for, but they tend to have a long
termist bias. How would you distinguish between the way you prioritize and the way they think about it?
Effective altruism is fundamentally the exact right idea is to say, I want to do good in the world,
and I want to do it effectively. That's exactly where we agree. I think they tend to like more
interesting things. They also go a little bit out more in the sort of philosophical area. And as
you point out, they very often go for very, very long term thinking. One of their big things is that
if humanity is worth preserving, and this is our long term future, nothing else really matters.
I love reading them. I love talking to them, but I think it's a totally sort of detached from what
most people think, which is really the next year is incredibly important. The next four years
are incredibly important. We work with Haiti, and as one of the governments that we work with,
when it still only didn't work, but not totally fell apart as a has now. And, you know, honestly,
nobody in Haiti really cared about stuff that happened four years from now. I think the development
also showed that they were right. You care about making stuff work next year.
Sometimes, things in the world of technology are complicated and need careful,
licks blaming. Sometimes, they just need a little hard truth. I don't think anyone is going to
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Let me ask you finally just about how individuals play into this because a lot of what you're
talking about is things that are enacted either by like the health ministry or the education
ministry or something like that in a government somewhere or at the you know one step removed
where you have a big powerful Western agency like USAID that is able to go into those ministries
and twist arms and say like we're going to write you this checklist as long as you spend this
money on this thing and they can earmark the money and they can shepherd it along and they can
bring it out in trenches and make sure it's going to wear it's intended to go or at least in theory
that's how it works. You know me as a guy writing a you know $100 check like I have no ability to talk
to the Bangladesh education minister. How do I what what's the best way for like a little old
me to make a difference and like in my mind it really all it's it's just malaria but maybe I'm
wrong about that. The big thing I think is to say look you're clearly a person of good will you
want to help the world you presumably also you know care about the rest of the world you certainly
read the book so you know you now you want to do something I think it's about getting that message out
because one of the things that I find constantly so when you go talk to USAID for instance
they're incredibly encumbered by the fact that a lot of Congress people have put all kinds of
guardrails and no you cannot spend it here you must spend it this way and yeah honestly it feels
like a lot of people have just put up these regulations because they met with someone who said
that you should do this or you shouldn't do that and and so help the USAID to actually focus more
on the smartest things and likewise ask you know make it make it not okay to just do something
that sounds good but actually do something that that does good a lot of the money that we spend I
I sort of semi facetiously make these arguments a lot of money in the in the development sphere
and philanthropy sphere goes into you know picking up straws in the in the Pacific Ocean that kind
of you know plastic straw and clearly that's bad but you know in the big scheme of things probably
not the main issue if you care about these things about what 80 90 percent of all plastic
garbage in the ocean comes from fishery equipment maybe we should be more concerned about that if
we actually you know want to care about it but but it's also like as long as you know
at least a half a dozen a million kids die each year from easily careful infectious disease and
maybe that's our a slightly bigger issue and so let's make sure that we don't just you know
applaud everybody who spends money but let's also sort of gently push them what's spending it
really effectively in some ways they'll actually have a huge impact so I think that's this is not
a great answer because there is no great answer but this is exactly the answer that I that I was
kind of coming to myself which is basically the answer that it's all it's all political the
ability that I have as a U.S. citizen is basically the ability that I have to influence
congress which in turn can influence USAID and like you know work out how much money
was spending on foreign aid whether we do things like you know pepfo and gavi and the global fund
the and and for me you know it's political one layer on as well that the influence that
France or the Netherlands or Norway has on Malawi or Espatini or Tonga is again going to be
mostly political and you know you get to West Arms and maybe France goes up to you know
Botswana and says you should put tablets in schools and it will provide all the money just
long as the tablets are made by a French company you know this is the kind of thing that always
winds up happening and and it's my just a big picture here is it's politics all the way down and
especially when you know you're enumerating the costs so assiduously in dollars I think we
kind of lose track of the fact that the real obstacle here is not actually financial it's
inevitably political both at the developing country level and at the developed country level
yeah that's what I was trying to say before we're talking about China like China has a strong
autocratic government that's able to implement policies to enrich itself to make the
lives of its citizens better if a country has a strong government that's if not well-resourced
but resourced and efficient a lot of these problems can be solved within that country and that
local government right it is a political and government issue more than a money where do you
spend it issue I think you're saying slightly different things Felix and Emily because I I feel
like yes if if the country's a richer they can fix a lot more but feel like if they have a strong
government yours are your argument as more that we it's not actually about allocating more money
it's just about politics I think I think there's certainly an argument for partly that politics
needs to be clear and more honest about what it is they're trying to achieve and part of what
we can do is to make sure that we help them accountable that you know when when government say
oh but you need to buy French tablets we actually say what what the you know I don't know I'm
not even sure there is a Frank French tablet but it's probably not effective so no I'm kidding
but you know but you know that we actually say well don't we want to do the most effective stuff
first but there's still a lot of money that is not allocated that could go to these amazing things
and where we can help and that's basically what this book is about look if I had this solution
you know if I just wrote the book and now we have the blueprint and and all we need to do is to come
up with 35 billion dollars well good to go that would be wonderful but that probably be too easy but
I do think we're in some way also lacking the blueprint and the good example of that of
course is the world decided on these sustainable development goals we decided to promise everything
to everyone and then we end up with just you know nice sounding of sort of canned responses but not
really what will make the world a better place and so I'm trying to sort of inject a little bit of
this yeah no I definitely I feel you're on that one that the the number of you know impact investors
who I talked to who are like I judge myself by like is this company I'm funding going to help
the sustainable development goals it's like every single country company in the world you can
find an SDG somehow that's helping but yes we should move on and have a numbers round I think
Elizabeth do you have a number this week uh yeah my number is 44 and that's dollars
and this is what you would pay for three ounces of sardines at a new store in Times Square called
the Fantastic World of Portuguese sardines yes what wait say that again 44 dollar can of sardines
in Times Square people you know you want to do it because you know why they do it they have literally
taken out every single bone from inside the sardines so that you don't have to taste the bones which
are perfectly fine to taste I'm sorry they made a sardine store a sardine store in Times Square they
only sell sardines and it's it's a two stories store and they have 30 different kinds of sardines
and then they have this gimmicky thing where they put can I just jump in and say I've been to this store
in in Lisbon Airport and it is a great store and I'm a massive fan of canned fish in general
and can sardines in particular and I'm all in favor of can sardines but yeah the 44 don't eat the
44 dollar can that's they put like gold for you that one comes in a yeah it comes in a can shaped
like a gold ingot and what's the name of the store again the Fantastic Sardines? The Fantastic
world of the Portuguese sardine Emily has not convinced her at this I'm pretty sure I know what
is to get Emily for her birthday well I wouldn't want to eat a 44 dollar can of sardines I don't
think you know because it was too expensive you want to save it for special occasion yeah what's a
good occasion the what is a special sardine occasion I don't even know Emily you have this wonderful
look on your face I'm just going to force you to change the subject what is your number my number
is 24 as in August 24th which and this is from a study you guys is the day of the year that
people are most likely to call in sick and this was published in Bloomberg so I know it's true
and factual August 24th is the number one day to call in sick and it comes from a study from
a company that you know manages employee absences and medical leaves and they looked at
when people take sick days and August 24th was just a couple of days ago
and the intrigue is they don't say what the why August 24th is the day the second most popular day
is the day after the Super Bowl Bjorn that's a big football big sports game in the United States perhaps
so that one we understand like people watch it they go to bed late whatever but I don't why
August 24th so if people have ideas please write in to slate money at slate.com and tell us your
theories I just want someone to do the the same survey but do it in Australia or New
Zealand or somewhere and if it's January 24th we'll be like okay now we're getting we're getting
somewhere here but if it turns out to be the people of 16th or something then you're like okay it's
not what we think yeah we need further research can you're can your team we need to
interact like the Copenhagen consensus can yes this is going to be our to the most interesting
things Bjorn the most important thing we ask the big questions I'm going to stick with
something foodie my number is 18 million which is the number of dollars that subway recently
spent subway Bjorn again this is something you won't know if you have been spending a lot of time
America is it's like the anti tin sardines it's like it's fast food sandwich thing which is
incredibly popular there are 20,810 US locations it has been owned by the same two families basically
since it was founded and now it is to sale because the two founders have both died and a bunch of
private equity companies were lining up to buy it and they've tried to it went to a sort of
fallow patch a few years back and they brought in a new CEO one of the things that the new CEO did
was he put meat slices in every location for the first time and this cost 80 million dollars
and because I am considerate I did this maths for you that works out at $3,844 per location
to install a meat slicer and I think I mean obviously that's worth it right
that's too much that can't you can't cost that much to buy a meat slicer and what do you mean
install it don't you just like put on the counter put it on the counter I mean for me
I just had this question of like how long did the meat slicer last true some some guy in like
Shiboygan somewhere who runs a meat slicer factory gets a phone call one morning saying like I
thought I'd like to order 20,810 meat slices please and he's like this is this is the phone
been waiting my whole life for yeah well anyway you're on ringer phone what is your number
I'm not surprisingly going to pick something which we've just talked about so my number is 52
and it's basically the bang for the buck for all these 12 things that we're talking about
so we're talking about you know basically when we try to fix tuberculosis and maternal
newborn health malaria and nutrition chronic diseases the whole Shiboygan that we've been talking
about it'll cost about 35 billion dollars a year but it'll save 4.2 million lives each and
every year and it will generate 1.1 trillion dollars in in higher economic benefits for the poor
part of the world so that's a part of the answer to you Emily and on how you actually get people
richer if you take all of that into account it ends up to being about 2.1 trillion dollars
or for every dollar spent you've done 52 dollars worth of good that's one of the best things that
we could possibly do in the world so that's less money than than Elon spent on Twitter right
didn't he spend 40 something yes he's 34 billion dollars on Twitter yes that's about how much
value he's destroyed the Twitter so yeah he's destroyed over a trillion dollars of value he could
have spent on Bjorn's 12th thing I think I'm right in saying that it's less than the annual
budget of the New York City schools department and what that goes to show is just yeah doing really
smart stuff can be very very cheap and it'll be fantastically transformational so again all the
things that we've discussed and yes this is not easy and certainly it seems unlikely that you can
just use this 52 number a little bit like the 42 number from from uh what's his name
Douglas Hitchhike is going to the galaxy yeah Dr. Fatton yeah you can't just you know put out one
number and say oh that explains the whole world but it does give you a great sort of uh uh uh uh
base from which to have this discussion with that Bjorn Longborg thank you so much for coming
on the show it's been brilliant having you here thank you everyone for uh for listening thanks
for raising in sleep money or sleep calm thanks to Patrick Booth for producing and we'll be back
next week with more sleep money
hey drag fans please listen up i'm alaskan and my name is Willem and we are the hosts of race
jacer the premiere and preeminent RuPaul's Drag Race recap podcast and if you aren't listening to
this podcasting behemoth yet start right now because it's 2023 and we have weekly coverage of the
all new episodes from the season 15 of RuPaul's Drag Race every Wednesday we will discuss dissect
and disseminate all of the juiciest moments while this runway looks and the shadiest reality tv
twists of the best show on television drag race race jacer with alaskan willem is the ultimate
backstage pass for both drag obsessives and new fans alike so don't wait find us on your podcast
saps and listen check out new episodes of race jacer every Wednesday and Friday wherever you get
your podcast thank you