Sunday, January 28, 2007

Getting Our Priorities Right

Bjørn Lomborg, the controversial author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, representing the Copenhagen Consensus.
The idea is simple, yet often neglected. When financial resources are limited you need to prioritize your effort. Everyday, from policymakers to business leaders, at all levels, priorities are made between investing in one project and not another. However, many times, and particularly at the political level, decisions on priorities are made not based on facts, science or calculations but on which issue gets the most media coverage or is most politisized. The Copenhagen Consensus approach works to improve the foundation of knowledge, to get an overview of research and facts within a given problem, so that the prioritizing of efforts to solve this problem is based on evidence and is comparable with solutions across problems.
Global warming appears not to be the highest priority.

6 comments:

annom said...

/ends incoherent rant....

cybrbeast said...

It's a good rant and I agree.
I just really hope that this project goes beyond just making this list. I hope they can get governments to listen and take them serious. But if they want to do so they should probably first start to educate the plebs.

annom said...

So the actual top priority is educating the plebs? :)

dekus said...

agreed, I haste plebs

Kamiel said...

interesting things,
think making a priority list will help the most in the end. but i believe it will never going to happen.

Example: a poor family got a twin, on there 10the birhtday there mother wanna take them to a theme park, but she can pay for only 1 ticket. so she decide to not go there because she couldn't explain it to take only 1 kid, instead of the theme park she takes the kids for a walk in the park so both kids got a fucked up birthday party.

In the same way i believe there wouldn't come an priority list. People wanna do only good and don't wanna make a choice. because in the end we don't help them because we like them so much, we only help them because we wanna sleep nice.
Making a priority list makes us all feel bad and that are not the intentions of the world problems

cybrbeast said...

That's a kind of crude example, who says a walk in the park can't be nice :)
I believe it might be possible for a priority list to be used if the UN gets its shit together and acts smart.