Science Quote by Bjorn Lomborg

Pragmatism is doing the moral math out loud, and Lomborg’s line is engineered to make that feel like courage rather than coldness. By framing policy as a medical decision - ailment versus cure - he smuggles a controversial claim into a commonsense metaphor: interventions can backfire, and some “solutions” are worse than the thing they’re meant to fix. It’s tidy, intuitive, and disarming, the kind of sentence that lets a speaker sound reasonable while pushing listeners to downgrade urgency.

The specific intent is triage. Lomborg isn’t arguing that problems don’t matter; he’s arguing that attention and money are scarce, and that politics often treats “doing something” as automatically virtuous. The subtext: activists and policymakers routinely oversell benefits, ignore tradeoffs, and demand expensive fixes for problems that might be better handled by adaptation, incremental steps, or simply prioritizing other crises. It’s a warning shot at symbolism masquerading as policy.

Context matters because Lomborg’s public brand has been built in debates over climate change and global risk: not denial, but cost-benefit skepticism about sweeping decarbonization timelines versus spending on poverty, health, or targeted innovation. That’s why “expensive” carries rhetorical weight here; it preloads the conversation with a metric (price) and sidelines others (justice, irreversible harm, long time horizons). The line works because it flatters the reader as rational and unsentimental, while quietly shifting the burden of proof onto anyone who argues that some ailments can’t be left to “wait and see” without becoming catastrophic.