$50 Billion Question: World, Where to Begin? What would you do with $50 billion? (Assuming that the goal was the benefit of humankind as opposed to owning a personal Lear jet or a tropical island.)
To answer that question, Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and environmental iconoclast, brought eight economists, including three Nobel Prize winners, to this harbor city last week to rank the world's 10 worst problems. Forget politics, they were told, just look at how to get the most bang for the buck. After studying all the contenders and running the numbers, the economic "dream team" decided that the best of the worst was controlling the spread of AIDS (worth $27 billion), followed by $12 billion for malnutrition and $13 billion to combat malaria. Spending money on other scourges, like global warming or government corruption, by contrast, would be a bad investment.
