Rearranging the collective priorities

Most humans, as individuals, have their priorities screwed up a lot of the time. Thus it’s not really surprising to find that humanity as a whole also has its priorities screwed up. But individuals often have at least momentary instants of clarity, when they realize what is really important and what in turn doesn’t really matter. Humanity, as a whole, doesn’t often get these moments of clarity – perhaps the latest fleeting one was after the Tsunami last year but that faded away pretty quickly too.

Here’s one example of exactly how screwed up the priorities are: in 2004, the worlds military expenses were a whopping 1,035 billion US dollars. Over a trillion dollars. And that’s every year! That is a lot of money. So much, in fact, that it’s really unfathomable. Now think how much good comes out of world military expenses. Not much. For comparison, below are some estimates of what certain truly beneficial projects would cost:

• The World Food Summit proposed in 1996 that world undernutrition be reduced 50 percent by 2015. The total cost would be $60 billion over 15 years, or $4 billion per year in increased spending.
• The UN estimates the overall price to bring low-cost safe water and sanitation to all those who need it today (and will in the next decade, given population growth) in rural and low-income urban areas at $23 to $25 billion per year over eight to 10 years.
• UN Labor Agency study states that child labor could be eliminated and replaced with universal education by 2020 at a total cost of $760 billion.
• The costs of implementing nuclear weapons dismantling and processing of plutonium and enriched uranium into non-weapons grade material would total $7 billion per year for ten years.

For the price of last years’ military expenses alone, we could do all of the above! Instead, we do things like this. Inspiring, eh? I mean really, let’s do some real cost-benefit analysis for a change!

One interesting source for different strategies is “What the World Wants” at World Game Institute. UN is another good source.

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