the Evil Line

The 2008 Copenhagen Consensus is out. The most cost-effective way to make the world a better place is vitamin and mineral supplements for the world's poor:

The cost is $60 million per year, yielding benefits in health and cognitive development of over $1 billion.

Number two is free trade, number seven is expanded access to education for women. At the bottom of the list, at number thirty, is global warming:

Nobelist and University of Maryland economist Thomas Schelling noted that part of the reason for the low ranking is that spending $75 billion on cutting greenhouses gases would achieve almost nothing. In fact, the climate change analysis presented to the panel found that spending $800 billion until 2100 would yield just $685 billion in climate change benefits.

I'm a big fan of the Copenhagen Consensus, at least the idea of it if not always the conclusions. Turning human misery into numbers seems a bit heartless, but it can turn our attention away from the sexy topics that bother us rich Americans and toward more mundane but truly life-saving possibilities.