RedBear Rides: Smart Aid for the World's Poor

This is one of the most important articles I have read in years. Matt Ridley is a UK Parliamentarian with an outspoken attitude and often right-on ideas.

Context: Since 1990, the number of the world's extreme poor has decreased by 50% because of globalization, free markets and the spread of easy to access energy and technology.

To continue this trend, Ridley asks what are the five most important things people can do to continue the improvement. He suggests the United Nations needs new goals that are discrete, quantitative and achievable. He suggests using a method from Bjorn Lomborg, who has brought together 60 economists and asked that very question.

Ridley picks his own list of five, which I can agree with. However, I would add number zero: A massive improvement in sanitation, especially in countries like India, where malnutrition caused by chronic diseases is endemic and cultural.

The entire article is at the WSJ for July 26-27, 2014.
Smart Aid for the World's Poor, How can rich countries best help poor ones?
See article here at WSJ: smart-aid-for-the-worlds-poor

Ridley proposes these five ideas:

"What would my own list of five 2030 goals look like, based on the work of the Copenhagen Consensus group?

1. Reduce malnutrition. When children get better food, they develop their brains, stay in school longer and end up becoming far more productive members of society. Every dollar spent to alleviate malnutrition brings $59 of benefits.

2. Tackle malaria and tuberculosis. These two diseases debilitate huge populations in poor countries, but they are largely preventable and curable. In the most harshly affected countries, two people often do one person's work because one of them is sick. Benefit to cost ratio: 35 to 1.

3. Boost preprimary education, which costs little and has lifelong benefits by getting children started on learning. 30 to 1.

4. Provide universal access to sexual and reproductive health, which would save the lives of mothers and infants while enabling women to be more economically productive. It would also lower birthrates (when fewer children die, people have fewer children). Benefits could be as high as 150.

5. Expand free trade. This isn't considered sexy in the development industry, and it may seem remote from humanitarian issues, but free trade often delivers phenomenal improvements to the welfare of the poor in surprisingly quick time, as the example of China has demonstrated in recent years. One of the discoveries of the Copenhagen Consensus process is that incremental goals such as expanding free trade are often better than supposedly "transformational" goals. A successful Doha Round of the World Trade Organization could deliver annual benefits of $3 trillion for the developing world by 2020, rising to $100 trillion by the end of the century."