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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Bjørn Lomborg
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Consensus Center and Copenhagen Business School
Bjørn Lomborg
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
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Summary

The Costs of Human Challenges

The human race has always faced a wide range of challenges and, despite great progress, continues to do so. This book aims to produce a 150-year view of some of humanity’s biggest challenges, and to present these in a new and thought-provoking way. The research presented here uses in-depth economic data analysis to establish the cost to humankind caused by its biggest challenges, and how the impact of these challenges evolved over the twentieth century and will continue to change until the middle of this century.

Understanding the change in impact of the different problems across centuries or even just their relative sizes at a particular moment is fraught with difficulty, since our understanding of world problems and progress is to a large extent shaped by vocal interest groups, the length of the media’s attention span, and our perceptions – shaped by personal experience – of what matters and what does not.

In the developed world, the challenges that we hear the most about are not necessarily those that cause the biggest problems to humanity. Issues come and go from the front pages of newspapers: an African famine can be news one day, superseded by a terror threat in the developed world the next. Issues like the Y2K bug can create considerable alarm, and then fade away to nothing. Other times, there might be a perception that we have solved an issue – malnutrition, or the HIV epidemic, for example – because we hear a lot less about it than we once did.

Type
Chapter
Information
How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?
A Scorecard from 1900 to 2050
, pp. 1 - 25
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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References

Maddison, A. (2006): The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (vol. 1), Historical Statistics (vol. 2). Paris: OECD.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ehrlich, P. (1968) The Population Bomb. Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer BooksGoogle Scholar

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  • Introduction
    • By Bjørn Lomborg, Copenhagen Consensus Center and Copenhagen Business School
  • Edited by Bjørn Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School
  • Book: How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139225793.001
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Save book to Dropbox

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  • Introduction
    • By Bjørn Lomborg, Copenhagen Consensus Center and Copenhagen Business School
  • Edited by Bjørn Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School
  • Book: How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139225793.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
    • By Bjørn Lomborg, Copenhagen Consensus Center and Copenhagen Business School
  • Edited by Bjørn Lomborg, Copenhagen Business School
  • Book: How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139225793.001
Available formats
×