Solutions for the World's Biggest Problems

Solutions for the World's Biggest Problems
Author: Bjørn Lomborg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 19
Release: 2007-10-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139469231

The world has many pressing problems. Thanks to the efforts of governments, NGOs, and individual activists there is no shortage of ideas for resolving them. However, even if all governments were willing to spend more money on solving the problems, we cannot do it all at once. We have to prioritize; and in order to do this we need a better sense of the costs and benefits of each 'solution'. This book offers a rigorous overview of twenty-three of the world's biggest problems relating to the environment, governance, economics, and health and population. Leading economists provide a short survey of the analysis and sketch out policy solutions for which they provide cost-benefit ratios. A unique feature is the provision of freely downloadable software which allows readers to make their own cost-benefit calculations for spending money to make the world a better place.

Solved

Solved
Author: Andrew Wear
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2020-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1786079003

Denmark is set to achieve 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030. Iceland has topped the gender equality rankings for a decade and counting. South Korea’s average life expectancy will soon reach ninety. How have these places achieved such remarkable outcomes? And how can we apply those lessons to our own communities? The future we want is already here - it's just not evenly distributed. By bringing together for the first time tried and tested solutions to society's most pressing problems, from violence to inequality, Andrew Wear shows that the world we want to live in is already within reach. Solved is a much-needed dose of optimism in an atmosphere of doom and gloom. Informative, accessible and revelatory, it is a celebration of the power of human ingenuity to make the future brighter for everyone.

The World's Worst Problems

The World's Worst Problems
Author: Walter Dodds
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2019-12-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 3030304108

This book addresses the worst problems currently facing humanity and those that may pose future threats. The problems are explained and approached through a scientific lens, and categorized based on data involving global mortality, vulnerability, and threat level. The book presents indices of problem severity to compare relative intensity of current and potential crises. The approach avoids emotional argument using mainly empirical evidence to support the classification of relative problem severity. The author discusses multiple global problems and ranks them. He also explores specific solutions to each problem, links problems to human behavior from a social science perspective, considers international cooperation, and finally pathways to solutions. The book discusses confirmation bias and why this necessitates a scientific approach to tackle problems. The moral assumption that each person has the same rights to life and minimal suffering, and that the natural world has a right to exist, forms the basis of ranking problems based on death, suffering, and harm to the natural world. A focus is given to potential disasters such as asteroid collisions and super-volcanic eruptions, which are then presented in chapters that address specific contemporary global issues including disease, hunger, nuclear weapons and climate change. Furthermore the author then ranks the problems based on an index of problem severity, considering what other people think the worst problems are. The relative economic costs to solve each of these problems, individual behavior in the face of these problems, how people could work together internationally to combat them, and a general pathway toward solutions form the basis of the final chapters. This work will appeal to a wide range of readers, students considering how they can help the world, and scientists and policy makers interested in global problem solving./div

Guesstimation

Guesstimation
Author: Lawrence Weinstein
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2009-02-09
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1400824443

Guesstimation is a book that unlocks the power of approximation--it's popular mathematics rounded to the nearest power of ten! The ability to estimate is an important skill in daily life. More and more leading businesses today use estimation questions in interviews to test applicants' abilities to think on their feet. Guesstimation enables anyone with basic math and science skills to estimate virtually anything--quickly--using plausible assumptions and elementary arithmetic. Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam present an eclectic array of estimation problems that range from devilishly simple to quite sophisticated and from serious real-world concerns to downright silly ones. How long would it take a running faucet to fill the inverted dome of the Capitol? What is the total length of all the pickles consumed in the US in one year? What are the relative merits of internal-combustion and electric cars, of coal and nuclear energy? The problems are marvelously diverse, yet the skills to solve them are the same. The authors show how easy it is to derive useful ballpark estimates by breaking complex problems into simpler, more manageable ones--and how there can be many paths to the right answer. The book is written in a question-and-answer format with lots of hints along the way. It includes a handy appendix summarizing the few formulas and basic science concepts needed, and its small size and French-fold design make it conveniently portable. Illustrated with humorous pen-and-ink sketches, Guesstimation will delight popular-math enthusiasts and is ideal for the classroom.

The Idealist

The Idealist
Author: Nina Munk
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2013-09-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0385537743

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Bloomberg • Forbes • The Spectator Recipient of Foreign Policy's 2013 Albie Award A powerful portrayal of Jeffrey Sachs's ambitious quest to end global poverty "The poor you will always have with you," to cite the Gospel of Matthew 26:11. Jeffrey Sachs—celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential bestseller The End of Poverty—disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development." In 2006, Sachs launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring five-year experiment designed to test his theories in Africa. The first Millennium village was in Sauri, a remote cluster of farming communities in western Kenya. The initial results were encouraging. With his first taste of success, and backed by one hundred twenty million dollars from George Soros and other likeminded donors, Sachs rolled out a dozen model villages in ten sub-Saharan countries. Once his approach was validated it would be scaled up across the entire continent. At least that was the idea. For the past six years, Nina Munk has reported deeply on the Millennium Villages Project, accompanying Sachs on his official trips to Africa and listening in on conversations with heads-of-state, humanitarian organizations, rival economists, and development experts. She has immersed herself in the lives of people in two Millennium villages: Ruhiira, in southwest Uganda, and Dertu, in the arid borderland between Kenya and Somalia. Accepting the hospitality of camel herders and small-hold farmers, and witnessing their struggle to survive, Munk came to understand the real-life issues that challenge Sachs's formula for ending global poverty. THE IDEALIST is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man meet the reality of human life.

Be the Solution

Be the Solution
Author: Michael Strong
Publisher: Wiley
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009-03-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780470450031

What if the distinction between business and doing good vanished? What if all those who engaged in business were committed to a deeper purpose, and all those committed to doing good were entrepreneurial and enterprising? What would it take for a world of seven billion such people to solve all the world’s problems? More and more people are looking for meaning and purpose in their lives as employees, as consumers, and as investors. More and more people have more than enough material goods and are more interested in the qualities of the goods they buy; in the experiences associated with the services they provide and buy; in the way the companies they buy from act as citizens; and in self-actualization—rising up Maslow’s hierarchy. As an increasing percentage of the population reaches the point at which they no longer need more stuff, what will they do, how will they live their lives? If you are one of these people, wondering where to go from here, how to “be the solution” in the twenty-first century, Be the Solution provides an original perspective on how to create a better world. Focused entirely on entrepreneurial and Conscious Capitalist solutions to the challenges and opportunities facing humanity, Be the Solution shows how the entrepreneurial passion to create a better world, in combination with Conscious Capitalist business practices, can solve far more of the world’s problems than any other approach. In combination with leading Conscious Capitalists such as John Mackey writing on “Conscious Capitalism,” leading social entrepreneurs such as Muhammad Yunus writing on “Social Business,” and leading legal reform experts such as Hernando de Soto writing on “Is Economic Freedom for Everyone?,” entrepreneurial educator Michael Strong lays out a philosophical, social, and legal framework for a FLOW vision through which all problems may be solved entrepreneurially. FLOW, Inc., is an organization cofounded by John Mackey and Michael Strong to promote Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow as optimal experience—the state in which we are so immersed in challenging, creative activity that we forget that time is passing. To be engaged in flow activities is happiness itself. Whether we are creators of enterprises or entrepreneurially creative within our life as employees, we can embody the entrepreneurial spirit and, in the words of Michelangelo, “criticize by creating.” In addition, FLOW refers to the global flow of goods, services, capital, humans, ideas, and culture, in a positive win-win-win world based on love rather than fear. Combining the best of the positive psychology and human potential movements with the best of free market thinking, FLOW offers a unique perspective on how to Be the Solution in the twenty-first century.

Solving the World's Problems

Solving the World's Problems
Author: Robert Lee Brewer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2013-09-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781935708902

The "World" in Robert Lee Brewer's Solving the World's Problems is a slippery world ... where chaos always hovers near, where we are (and should be) "splashing around in dark puddles." And one feels a bit dizzy reading these poems because (while always clear, always full of meaning) they come at reality slantwise so that nothing is quite the same and the reader comes away with a new way of looking at the ordinary objects and events of life. The poems are brim-full of surprises and delights, twists in the language, double-meanings of words, leaps of thought and imagination, interesting line-breaks. There are love and relationship poems, dream poems, poems of life in the modern world. And always the sense (as he writes) of "pulling the world closer to me/leaves falling to the ground/ birds flying south." I read these once, twice with great enjoyment. I will go back to them often. -Patricia Fargnoli, former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and author of Then, Something

The Fix

The Fix
Author: Jonathan Tepperman
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 110190299X

We all know the bad news. Our economies are stagnant. Wages are flat and income inequality keeps rising. The Middle East is burning and extremism is spreading. Frightened voters are embracing populist outsiders and angry nationalists. And no wonder: we are living in an age of unprecedented, irreversible decline—or so we’re constantly being told. Jonathan Tepperman’s The Fix presents a very different picture. It identifies ten pervasive and seemingly impossible challenges—including immigration reform, economic stagnation, political gridlock, corruption, and Islamist extremism—and shows that, contrary to the general consensus, each has a solution, and not merely a hypothetical one. By taking a close look at overlooked success stories—from countries as diverse as Canada, Botswana, and Indonesia—Tepperman discovers practical advice for problem-solvers of all stripes, making a data-driven case for optimism in a time of crushing pessimism.

Wicked and Wise

Wicked and Wise
Author: Ken Wilber
Publisher: Wicked and Wise
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2015-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781909273641

A groundbreaking new series explores hotly debated issues and offers some intelligent, challenging, and wise ways forward that may be able to break through the current intractable position—the first is coauthored by the author of A Brief History of Everything Each book in this series is coauthored by leading leadership consultant Alan Watkins and a hand-picked expert in the relevant subject field—in this case, one of the most widely read and influential American philosophers of our time. This first entry looks at some of the most pressing and topical issues affecting the world today, from the clash of religions and cultures in a globalized world to the growing dominance of technology. The book sets the scene for debating the key challenges facing current and future generations, and sets possible agendas for how leaders, and potential leaders, can solve challenges through the wise application of multi-tiered multi-channel, multi-organizational intervention lead in a highly developed, enlightened, and selfless way.