You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it, and funding things wisely is always complicated. But what if you had a trillion dollars to change the world – what could you do with it? How much change could it buy?
That’s the premise of Rowan Hooper’s entertaining thought experiment How to Spend a Trillion Dollars. By giving himself permission to play with a very large budget, Hooper finds a new perspective on some of the world’s biggest problems and how they could be solved.
Which problems, specifically? We start with the oldest and most entrenched: eradicating poverty. For many of the experts Hooper consulted in his research, this was the only thing worth spending a trillion on. How to spend it isn’t difficult either. After considering a few options and the research around them, the book settles on education and cash transfers. Just fund education and give the money directly to the poorest. Since universal education has been priced at the “shockingly small amount” of $39 billion a year, a trillion buys you plenty.
There won’t be many quibbles about Hooper’s second proposal for spending a trillion either. For that money you make enormous strides in healthcare, funding vaccination programmes, researching new cures, and eradicating diseases such as malaria. Unfortunately the obvious priority is universal healthcare for everybody and that’s expensive, so here we get a fully paid trial for just one country in order to make the case for it, and that’s $100 billion for Ethiopia.
Next comes the climate crisis, where the book lobs its trillion entirely at clean energy, and then chapter four details an alternative plan for conservation and biodiversity.
From chapter five onwards, readers might struggle to justify some of the spending, as we look at moon settlements, spending an entire trillion on finding extra-terrestrial life, or funding research into particle physics. Hooper wrestles with the ethics of some of these himself in a world with so many urgent problems, but this is an imaginary trillion. And besides, often the secondary benefits are as important as the central goal. On that lunar colony, Hooper writes that “our investment, primarily, is in human cooperation.” Citing the International Space Station as an example, he argues that a grand project that is bigger than any one country could be a powerful counter to isolationism and nationalism.
How to Spend a Trillion Dollars is smart and fun, and it makes serious points along the way. Perhaps the most important is that a trillion isn’t the impossibly large number we might think it is. Amazon is worth a trillion and so is Microsoft. The EU spent a trillion on Covid stimulus in 2020 and the US spent another two. President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is just shy of a trillion and reads a lot like the summaries at the end of the chapters here. It is entirely possible to commit a trillion in spending. The real question is why we can’t summon the political will to fund the things that matter most.
- How to Spend a Trillion Dollars is available from Earthbound Books
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