Bill Gates and Bjorn Lomborg tell us that we're not meeting the Sustainable Development Goals -- therefore we should trim them a bit and make sure we can reach those that are worth meeting. They're right, but timid -- so timid that they are becoming wrong. The correct answer is simply to abandon the SDGs altogether.
Yes, yes, I know, this is heresy and yet sometimes that voice crying in the wilderness is in fact correct.
Gates and Lomborg -- both of whom I admire by the way, colleagues have worked with both of them over the years -- are entirely correct when they say that the SDGs include 169 targets to meet 17 commitments. There's simply no way that a global society of 8 billion people can be managed to meet 169 targets. Nor, to be honest about it, 168 targets, 128 or whatever number we can shave the bureaucrats down to thinking about.
One of the grand lessons from economics is that the larger the group the fewer targets it's possible to even think about. In a village we can think about the fair distribution of labour, even the fair -- as opposed to efficient -- distribution of the production. But among 8 billion people? We're really dependent upon a few signals from the only management method we've got, prices.
Do note that this isn't an argument, or not necessarily one, for capitalism as against socialism. It's a shouting of a basic truth -- the only method we've got of coordinating the activities of those 8 billion of us is through prices and markets. Bureaucrats -- and 169 targets -- just won't cut it.
Just a little appeal to personal experience here. We all know a bureaucrat, have had interactions with at least one. Our driving licence, ID card, the guy at the ration shop -- someone. Now, observe that individual. They're competent to manage 8 billion people are they? And no, there is no special race of human beings who become more competent at stamping documents just because they do it for more people at a time. Actually, they just end up having even less information about what they're doing as they do so.
OK, this is all very negative so far, now for the positive. The SDGs are the successors to the MDGs, the Millennium Development Goals. One of those MDGs was to halve global absolute poverty by 2015. This was just about the only one of those MDGs that was actually met. In fact, it was beaten into that traditional cocked hat and early too.
The reason this was true is that making the poor richer is one of those things we can do -- this must be possible because all of the inhabitants of the currently rich countries were once poor. Or at least their Grannies were. Economic development is something that can happen, we have the proof that some places are economically developed.
So, what happened? Free market capitalism, red in tooth and claw, spread across this wondrous world of ours. In Bangladesh it was the growth of the RMG industry, but that's only the specific. Not the general. Economic growth happened, therefore there were fewer poor people, that's just how this works.
Now, from the point of view of the United Nations, of the assembled bureaucrats of the world, this is a disaster. For one of those grand global goals was reached without the intervention of that priestly caste of United Nations bureaucrats. Reached early and beaten into that hat.
That's why none of the SDGs are in fact about economic growth, or even poverty. Because for the global economy to show, again, that the directors of activity are not needed would be a terror for the wages and pensions of those directors.
The thing is though, all of those SDGs are corollaries of just basic economic development and growth. Say, gender equality. Well, when we're not working with our muscles in the fields and instead with our brains in offices then women get that equal break. Or as any husband knows, outperform the masculine simply by the obvious superiority of the skill under discussion.
So, abandon the entire idea of those SDGs. Go for the only one that matters, the abolition of poverty through economic growth. Everything else will fall into place once that happens. Simply because we can observe that pretty much all of those SDG goals have fallen into place in those countries which are economically developed, which are rich.
As I said, colleagues have worked with both Gates and Lomborg. Decades back one worked with Gates and said that it was scary -- he was clearly the most intelligent man in any room he entered. The sheer force of intellect was frightening.
Fortunately there is still a place for us more dismally stupid like myself. No, no, don't try to plan the global economy, let's just get people rich first and it'll all be fine. As the Australians say, free markets and she'll be right. After all, everything those SDGs are trying to achieve are the things that already happen in those countries that are economically developed. QED.
(QED means quod erat demonstrandum, the Latin for see, see, it's obvious!)
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.
