Science Quote by Bjorn Lomborg

Lomborg’s line is a moral triage dressed up as common sense: start with what’s cheap, measurable, and lifesaving. “My suggestion” signals technocratic modesty, but it’s a rhetorical wedge. He’s not merely advocating water and sanitation; he’s implicitly challenging the status hierarchy of global priorities, especially the tendency of wealthy publics to elevate abstract, long-horizon threats over concrete, present-tense suffering.

The phrase “first work to ensure” does a lot of quiet argumentative work. It concedes that other agendas may matter, then insists on sequencing. That sequencing is the real provocation: if you accept the premise, you’re pushed toward cost-benefit thinking, the kind Lomborg has popularized through his “Copenhagen Consensus” approach. Clean water becomes the archetypal “high return” intervention, a policy no one can openly oppose without sounding callous, which makes it an effective foil against more politically fashionable spending.

“Third World” is telling, too. It’s an older term that carries Cold War baggage and a whiff of distance: a shorthand that can flatten wildly different societies into a single deficit category. That flattening helps his argument travel in Western debates, where “the Third World” functions less as a place than as a moral invoice.

Context matters: Lomborg has built a reputation as a skeptic of panic-driven policymaking, particularly around climate. Read that way, the subtext is: if you want to do good, stop indulging symbolic virtue and fund the basics. It’s a pragmatic appeal, but also a critique of how elites choose which suffering counts as urgent.