One of the healthiest aspects of Lunch with the FT is the fact that several times a year it makes for very salutary reading.
A case in point was David Pilling’s lunch with Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg (“‘You can’t spend on everything’”, Life & Arts, March 1).
Over the last quarter of a century, Lomborg has managed to garner a very good living publicising his own unique brand of smoke and mirrors applied to the dark art of cost-benefit analysis.
He argues, as he has for 25 years now, that money is ill-spent on decarbonisation in poor countries as it will only “make them marginally cooler in 100 years’ time”. This sort of advice is of course music to the ears of all those who back the development
of fossil fuels, particularly the current administrations in the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia. It is also scientifically obtuse.
Coincidently (or not?) Tim Harford’s piece in the same weekend’s magazine (“The selfish guide to decarbonising”, Spectrum, Life & Arts, March 1) fortunately points out what for many years has been the extreme uselessness of cost-benefit analysis in providing any sort of a policy-relevant estimate for the social cost of carbon. As Harford argues: “Those costs are uncertain, unknowable until it is too late, and endlessly contested.”
Happily, however, for the sake of all of us, Lomborg manages perhaps unwittingly to blow up his fragile reputation as a statistician during lunch, when — describing his idea to improve educational outcomes — he says “this is spinach for the world. I want people to know about it.”
What most people know — whoever did statistics at school — is that spinach’s claim to have 10 times the iron content of other green vegetables is in fact due to a decimal point error, made (and subsequently identified) over a century ago.
As Lomborg himself says over dessert: “I’m like a 12-year-old. I love candy. I love soda.” Pity he doesn’t care as much for statistical, economic or political literacy.
Patrick Finnegan
Dublin, Ireland
