And why Stephane Dion should consider a similar approach to priority-making.
The Copenhagen Consensus, far from jumping on bandwagons and joining senseless scaremongering tactics, groups several prominent economists in order to determine global priorities. The peculiarity of this exercise is the focus on the economics of intervention, rather than other considerations. Cost-benefit analysis may sound insensitive, but it does yield a very commonsensical priority list. They're back, for CC2008.
The outcome of the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus can be found here. This year's topics are Disease, Water & Sanitation, Education, Women & Development, Global Warming, Air Pollution, Malnutrition, Trade Barriers, Conflicts and Terrorism. You can make your own ranking on the Times website.
What's so special about the Copenhagen Consensus? Its 2004 ranking sent the Kyoto accord rock bottom in the priority list, dismissing current climate change strategies as too costly for no benefit, whereas tackling diseases, malnutrition and trade barriers monopolized the top five. It is a politically unbiased recommendation for enhancing development while minimizing the costs associated with it. Rather than feeding dreams and delusions, the Consensus crunches numbers, which are less opinable than the IPCC's scaremongering.
The Times presents some of the criticism aimed at the Consensus:
Further criticism has been directed at the merit of considering these issues purely in terms of cost and benefit. Factors such as social justice, ecological stewardship and political acceptability are also important, but are exceptionally difficult to price.
These factors are also highly irrelevant. The best social justice is not dying of an avoidable disease and having food on your table, not being arrested for no reason and being free from the threat of conflict. Political acceptability, instead, relies on appeasing lobbies which currently set public policy, such as the farm subsidy and CAP lobby. Money speaks louder than politics, thus cold hard data from the Copenhagen Consensus is more likely to ring the right bells in the heads of policymakers than half-baked political arguments that stand no chance against the lobby powers.
Dion should get a bunch of Canadian economists together and let them set his priorities. Maybe then he wouldn't be committing the Carbon Tax political suicide.
Further reading:
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com
1 comment:
Great post! I'm bookmarking it for future reverence. On a personal level though, I'd much rather Dion continues to blunder away so that the Liberals don't get elected again for a very long time. He doesn't need good advisers telling him what to do, he needs more of Elizabeth May feeding him a script on environmentology.
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