Stop the panicked fearmongering if we want to make the world better

The meaningful exchange of truly divers💦e ideas and perspectives has withered o🤡ver recent decades.

Unorthodox thinking is🐽 increasingly trashed o🍬r disregarded, even as the chattering class’s fear- and force-predicated approaches repeatedly prove inadequate to cope with the true complexities and crises of the modern world.

We need instead to foster and promo🍬te critic🌳al thinking and constructive discussion.

We are making every effort to ensure that our new , an international coalition of politicians, business leaders, public intellectuals and cultural commentators, will help ensure🎃 that a broader range of perspectives can be heard globally.

Consider the world’s response to the pandemic.

A panic-sജtricken lockdown orthodoxy far too soon took hold, and those whose policy proposals deviated quickly were labeled “COVID deniers”.

Governments that wꦍent the farthest were feted by public intellectuals and in news🅰paper opinion pages.

The obvious downsides t🍎o universal lockdowns were ignored by th🎃ose striving to garner credit for simple-minded immediacy of response.

Thus, w🤪e saw , ; serious declines in  and wellbeing, delayℱed and diminished access to  and record high levels of .

The education of children was particularly affected:  on average robbed chi⛄ldren of more than seven months of education.

The huge impact on kids’ knowledge could end up costing $17 tri꧂llion in ♍lifetime earnings, per research by the World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF. Poor children, girls and children with disabilities suffered the largest losses.

We need to have a serious conversation about our manner of response before the next crisis (pandemic or otherwise) to en꧟sure that the cure is not much worse than the disease.

Consider, too, the alarmist treatment෴ of climate change.💙

Campaigners and news organizations play up fear, in the form of floods, storms and droughts, while neglecting to mention tha🧸t reductions in poverty and increases in resiliency mean that climate-related disasters kill ever fewer people: Over the past century, such .

Heatwaves capture the headlines.

Globally, however, cold kills .

The higher temperatures arguably characterizing this centu♔ry have resulted in &nbs⛄p;overall.

Fear-mongering and the suppression of truly inco🌳nvenient truths are pushing us dangerously toward the wrong solutions: Politicians and pundits call en masse for net-zero policies that will cost , while producing benefits .

We need to be able to have an 🅰honest discussion of costs and benefits — a true reckoning with the facts to find the best solutions.

We also need to conduct a more mature conversation about how to better help the four billion people who live in the poorer half of tꩵhe world.

The UN promises everything imaginable in the form of its  (SDGs): the end to extreme poverty, hunger, and disease; reduction of inequality and corruption; cessation of war; amelioration of cli꧂mate change; universalization of education — even ease of access to urban parks.

But a plan that makes of all problems the same compelling crisis without prioritization is no plan at all, merely a r🃏ecipe for the appearance of action and virtue. 

This year, 2023, sits at the midpoint between the start of the goals in 2016, and th♌eir hypothetical attainment in 2030. 

We are now at halftime, but nowhere near close to halfway ▨there. 

Even the UN Secretary-General ꦿadmits that the Goals are “”.

We ⛎must zero in o𝓰n the most efficient solutions first.

More than 10♊ಞ0 economists and several Nobel laureates working with the Copenhagen Consensus think-tank have .

We could, for example, virtually eliminate tuberculosis, which needlessly still ki🔯lls more than a million people each year, for an additional $6.2 billion a year.

We could invest $🎃5.5 b♓illion more in agricultural R&D in low-income countries to increase crop yields, help farmers produce more and consumers pay less, reducing the number of hungry people by more than a hundred million per year.

There are a dozen areas where much cou🤡ld be done for com🥂paratively little money.

We could efficiently and quickly boost learning in school🍌s — vital after COVID lockdowns — save mothers’ and newborns’ lives, tackle malaria, make government procurement much more efficient, improve nutrition, increase land tenure security, turbo-charge the effects of trade, advance skilled migration and increase child immunization rates.

These  could save more than four million lives per year, and generate economic benefits worth over a trillion dollars (primarily in poorer countries) for an outlay of $35 billion a year for the next seven yearsဣ.

The🃏 new ARC forum can help us envision the future in a positive manner, emphasizing the ability of the properly competing and cooperating people of the world to so🏅lve whatever problems confront us, as we have so often and often so effectively done in the past.

ARC thinkers are gathering from around the🦩 world to do precisely that.

Enough panicked fear-mongering.

We can focus on what is truly important and attainable, initiate and reward a more nuanced 𒅌global discussion regarding th♕e problems that will always beset us, and look forward confidently to a world more abundant, more laden with opportunity, more sustainable, and more hopeful.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is “Best Things First.” Jordan B. Peterson is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto and the author of “Maps of Meaning”, “12 Rules for Life” and “Beyond Order.”