Rob Wiblin: belief

Transcript context

…Public health is the biggest breakthrough. By no means is it all or even mostly economists. But economists and economic ways of thinking have played a big role in allocating resources. The general notion that economy should be relatively free and capitalistic — economists have been the major carrier of that notion. Maybe some sides of that have been overrated. But on the whole, it’s been a massively positive development that you’ve had a Hong Kong and a Singapore and a Japan and a South Korea. It’s because of the longer-term influence of economists. And in turn, those led to having a China. The general level of expertise in emerging economies — again, by no means is it all or even mainly economists — much higher than it was a few decades ago. And those are much better-run places. Foreign aid is better allocated. So general technocratic means of thinking, economics being a part of it — it’s had a very strong track record over the last century. You mentioned earlier the fact that particulate matter from coal and cars kills way more people than we imagine — or that most people think — and causes all kinds of other health issues. My view is that the US should be racing to eliminate coal, even setting aside climate change, just because of the public health gains. Why doesn’t that happen? Why aren’t people shouting in the streets about this? Most people don’t care. Most people don’t know about it. It’s not a politically divisive issue where there’s one side motivated to do a great deal for it. But also, where most of the deaths come are in poor economies, and it’s hard to substitute away from coal. And a lot of it is indoor burning of fuels. There is a great amount of low-hanging fruit there, limiting that. But it’s not easy for anyone to get their paws into manipulating those decisions. So I don’t think it’s an easy problem. If it were an easy problem, we would have a much stronger movement to fix it now, the way you do with some of the public health issues like, “Let’s stamp our malaria, polio.” Polio’s gone further than malaria, but I think malaria will come about, as well. I wouldn’t say it’s an easy target, but it’s easy to identify. You more or less know what you have to do. We’re mostly doing it.…

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