‘You can’t spend on everything’

There used to be 14 head-on collisions and two deaths on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge every year. In 2015, the authorities installed a central barrier and traffic deaths fell to zero.

Why not install a median barrier on all roads in America? The answer is it would cost too much. The decision about where to put safety features, says Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and high priest of cost-benefit analysis, reveals society’s willingness to pay for an extra life. In America, a human being turns out to be worth $10mn.

Though Lomborg is most famous as “the sceptical environmentalist” whose 1998 book of that title and subsequent ones such as False Alarm outraged climate change activists, his core interest is the seemingly dry but actually riveting field of cost-benefit ratios. His Danish think-tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, spends its time crunching numbers and sifting academic papers, looking for the best ways societies can spend their money.

“I hope to provide a tailwind to good ideas and a headwind to bad ideas,” he says, advocating, for example, more spending on heart disease prevention, which is cheap, and less on curing cancer, which is expensive.

Not surprisingly, Lomborg stirs fierce emotions. He has been accused of cherry-picking data, flouting scientific methodology and of wearing T-shirts in inappropriate settings. He has been cast as a heartless rationer and a peddler of false dichotomies. At a book event in Oxford, someone shoved a baked Alaska pie in his “smug face”. A former head of the UN climate panel compared him to Hitler. Both incidentally ended up as his friends.

A blond pin-up for the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing think-tank, and admired by people like Joe Rogan, the Donald Trump-endorsing podcaster on whose show he recently appeared, Lomborg is hard to pigeonhole. Bill Gates consults him and Lomborg spends his time worrying about how to spend aid in poor countries. He is pro-trade and pro-immigration, not exactly typical rightwing positions.

So who is he, I wonder as I walk through the crisp blue light of London’s Docklands. He has chosen the Bonnane Restaurant & Pizzeria, a large glass and chrome affair with a view across the Thames of the spiky, hedgehog-reminiscent O2 Arena dome.

“I love pizza and we could incorporate this into the conversation,” he had written somewhat unpromisingly, though at least he’s entering into the spirit of Lunch with the FT.

He arrives dead on time. Though he’s just turned 60, he wears tight-fitting clothes over a lean physique and retains the shaggy mop that gave him his edgy look when he burst on to the staid statistical scene.

He turns out to be pretty clean-living. He doesn’t drink and drive. In fact, he doesn’t drink or drive. He doesn’t smoke. As a child growing up in Aalborg in North Jutland, where he lived with his mother, a teacher, and his stepfather, a New Age priest and professional double-bassist, he was known as “the monk”.

There is still something of the proselytiser about him. He arrives with a little pamphlet bearing his 12 best ideas.

His unusual childhood, he says, gave him a thick skin. “Something I learnt very early on was that it doesn’t matter if you don’t quite fit in.”

Lomborg is in London to attend the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) gathering, a three-day “rightwing Davos” and a festival of Christian nuclear-family values. Lomborg, who is gay and is in London with his Swedish boyfriend, was invited to join Arc’s advisory board by Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and culture warrior.

What is a man who describes himself as a “left-leaning Scandinavian” doing with all these conservatives? If these are not his people, isn’t he just being “a useful idiot” for the likes of Elon Musk, who wants to put US international aid “into the wood chipper”, and for fossil fuel companies who lap up his message that oil is not the enemy?

The Arc gathering “has a bit too much God for my taste”, he concedes in his American-tinged Danish accent. “But I want both the right and the left wing to be better informed. I’m just saying, there are incredibly smart things to do if you want to help. I don’t think I’m a useful idiot. I think I’m a useful smart guy.”

I want to talk about the abrupt suspension of US aid, which left American food rotting in African ports and patients without their HIV meds. But first we should order.

“I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 11,” he says, another trait that marks him out from militant carnivores such as Peterson and Rogan. “But I’m the kind of vegetarian who doesn’t like vegetables. I hate cooked vegetables, soft squishy things. I’m like, ‘why, why?’ Italians know how to cook vegetarian cuisine properly.”

I turn to the assault by Trump on US aid, suspended through an executive order that declared much money is wasted on projects “antithetical to American values”. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has said that from now on every dollar spent must be justified by three questions: “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?”

Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, also announced this week that the UK would cut its already diminished overseas aid budget to 0.3 per cent of GDP, in order to fund an increase in defence spending.

I wonder how this sits with Lomborg, much of whose writing is underpinned by a utilitarian philosophy of creating the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism has been criticised as coldly calculating. Think of Charles Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind, the fact-grinding industrialist. But it also prioritises the greater good.

“It’s actually a very humanistic worldview. Where is the world’s low-hanging fruit, the biggest bang for the buck? That’s typically the world’s poor,” he says. A dollar spent in a poor country tackling basic problems such as preventing malaria or providing children with educational materials goes much further than a dollar spent in a rich country. That is precisely what he is advocating.

The waiter, a mild-mannered fellow, returns with the Caprese. Lomborg’s long legs are stretched out to the side of our table and I have visions of an accident involving flying mozzarella. The salad, safely delivered, turns out to be excellent, with top-quality cheese, olive oil and succulent slices of tomato.

Lomborg’s latest book, Best Things First, presents 12 policies, costed at $35bn, that he claims would add $1.1tn to developing world output and save 4.2mn lives a year — the equivalent, he says, of preventing a jumbo jet full of passengers crashing every hour.

That sounds like a bargain, I say, but would it pass the Trumpian test? If there were no Americans on board those jets, how would stopping them from crashing further US interests?

“I don’t imagine Trump would say, ‘I don’t care at all about other people.’ But he cares less about other people — and frankly so does everybody else.”

To illustrate his point, Lomborg elaborates on a story from Adam Smith, the Scottish economist and philosopher. Someone who cuts their finger on a newspaper while reading about earthquake victims in a distant part of the world is more likely to be worried about their finger, he says, and Trump is acknowledging that basic truth. If we really valued all human life equally, rich countries would send most of their tax dollars to poor countries where it would do most good.

“Do I wish it had been done differently?” he says of Trump’s slash-and-burn approach. “Probably. But we’ve tried to reform how aid works for decades and failed. So now I’m more or less thinking, ‘It’s happened. Let’s get the best out of it.’”

Lomborg’s underlying assumption, I say, is that aid is not working, something you could easily dispute given big advances in child mortality and the like. He also assumes resources are stretched. But aren’t we quibbling over tiny amounts here?

Take US spending on aid, which, at roughly $70bn in 2023, works out at less than 0.3 per cent of GDP. As one person in South Africa put it to me, “Whatever happened to Christian compassion?”

“Most people want to do a little bit of good,” Lomborg says. “They want to spend something, and that’s why we should spend well.”

Our mains have arrived and Lomborg begins to twirl heavily peppered spaghetti around his fork. My fish is flaky, with a buttery lemon sauce.

I say I’m surprised at how relaxed he seems to be about the destruction of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Musk’s “wood chipper” analogy, with its echo of the body-disposing scene in Fargo, struck me as purposefully cruel.

That may be, Lomborg counters, but finite resources should be spent efficiently. “It’s like a menu. We’re not saying you can’t have the most expensive stuff. We’re just saying if you order the caviar and the champagne, you won’t have as much money left over,” he says, motioning to the waiter for a second glass of bubbly (Sprite Zero).

In his drive for efficiency, Lomborg seeks to identify policies that, according to his think-tank, generate returns of at least $15 for every dollar spent. Some aid passes his test, but most does not. A small proportion is frivolous, he says, citing German funding of Peruvian bike lanes and a £200,000 British grant for all-female Chinese opera.

“It’s not that I’m against female opera in Shanghai, it’s just that, given children die of malaria and some are getting terrible education, I think we need to have a sense of priority. I think we’ve kind of lost that in the development community. What Trump is saying is ‘Let’s cut back on the crap.’”

That strikes me as a fantastically generous interpretation of what Trump is saying. But first I want to hear more about Lomborg’s big ideas. Could he really save 4.2mn lives a year for $35bn, which is, as he points out, less than a quarter of the amount the world spends on pet food?

His proposals include reasonably standard — if precisely laid-out — interventions on how to prevent malaria, treat tuberculosis and implement childhood immunisation programmes. But they also include less obvious ones: use e-procurement to reduce corruption; screen for high blood pressure; strengthen land tenure to encourage farmers to raise yields; facilitate skilled migration and (good luck with this one) reduce tariffs.

Each has a body of academic research behind it and detailed calculations. His favoured educational reform, for example, is to improve outcomes in countries such as Malawi by teaching children according to their level, not their age. Many children, crammed into massive classes, fall hopelessly behind. Lomborg’s solution is to teach for one hour a day using tablets with adaptive software, giving children the benefit of a good curriculum delivered at their own pace. Implementing it, according to his think-tank, would cost $9.8bn and deliver a $604bn boost to income through better-educated children.

“This is spinach for the world. I want people to know about it.”

With all these food metaphors, I say, perhaps he considers himself the minister of low-hanging fruit? He likes the idea. “But definitely not of cooked vegetables,” he laughs.

I want to quiz him on his methodology, which seeks to make simple numerical calculations about complex things like human life and educational outcomes. A Norwegian aid expert had told me that Lomborg undervalued the systems required to deliver his magic-bullet solutions. How, for example, could you roll out vaccines effectively without roads, cold storage or a functioning health system?

In his methodology, I point out, building infrastructure, which is very expensive, does not come out as cost-efficient. Yet weren’t roads and ports a prerequisite for China’s explosive growth, which has done more to lift people out of poverty than all the world’s aid combined?

He concedes that cost-benefit analysis might miss some important factors, but he defends his turf. “We use the best knowledge we have right now. It doesn’t mean it’s true, but it’s certainly better than not using the best knowledge we have right now.”

Another obvious problem, I say, is tipping points. It was cost-benefit analysis that led him to argue against spending money on cutting carbon emissions. “If you want to help poor people in poor countries, you’re better off worrying about tuberculosis than you are trying to make them marginally cooler in 100 years’ time,” he says.

But doesn’t that assume linear change? Surely the fear about climate change is that we’ll cross a threshold when, say, the Gulf Stream collapses, sending the planet into a horrible feedback loop? Similarly, Lomborg is fairly relaxed about the pace of extinction. But what happens if nature suddenly snuffs out some element of life — a plankton or a microbe as yet unknown to science — setting off a trophic cascade with cataclysmic consequences?

He nods enthusiastically while I’m talking, but then pushes back. “Tipping points are good bogeymen. There’s a lot of potential things that can go wrong,” he says, mentioning meteors that might crash into Earth, cell phones that might rot our brains and bioterrorists who might paralyse our cities. “But you can’t spend on everything.” Potential catastrophes are fundraising tools, he says. “I make up a scary scenario. Now give me all your money.”

The sun is streaming into my eyes and I’m getting terribly hot. Lomborg asks the waiter to lower the blind, which immediately solves the problem. He does not deny man-made climate change, but thinks we have exaggerated the impact and should spend our money on more immediate problems while we await technological innovation. This leads to a discussion of his preferred geoengineering solutions to climate change, including something called marine cloud brightening, which purports to use clouds to reflect the sun’s rays.

For dessert, Lomborg is vacillating between apple pie and ice cream. He eventually settles on two scoops of strawberry and one of pistachio. “I’m like a 12-year-old. I love candy, I love soda,” he enthuses. I’m prioritising my blood-sugar levels and opt for a cappuccino.

Numbers, he concedes, do not always capture reality. One of his 12 best policies is to encourage high-skilled immigration. The maths are fairly simple. If a person moves from a low-wage economy to a high-wage one, their income can go up 15 times or more for doing the same job — whether it’s working in McDonald’s or as a brain surgeon.

But the maths run into real-world political and cultural problems. “If you bring two billion more people to the west, that will probably change the west — and not all for the good. That’s why a lot of democracies are going to say no.”

Still, Lomborg remains convinced about the logic of his message. “I want people to know there are amazing things we can do. But we have to do the best things first,” he says, cheekily working in the title of his book.

“This is on the FT, right?” he says as he stands to leave.

I confirm that this is indeed a free lunch. Cost-benefit wise, it’s hard to beat.

David Pilling is the FT’s Africa editor

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