Two weeks ago the Wall Street Journal kicked off a debate on how best to allocate scarce resources to solve the world's problems. Bjorn Lomborg offered a summary of the latest findings from his Copenhagen Consensus project, where he has enlisted some of the world's top economists to address the issue. Now we're offering views on the subject from top political and business leaders. How would you spend $10 billion of American resources (either directly or through regulation) over the next four years to help improve the state of the world?

Senior Fellow  Newt Gingrich

Historically the greatest improvements in the quality of life have come from two long patterns--the extension of the rule of law and the development and diffusion of technology.

First, there has been a gradual extension of the rule of law, which protects the weak from the predatory and ensures private property rights, which encourages the accumulation of wealth and the expenditure of effort.

In places like Darfur, Myanmar and Zimbabwe, the extension of the rule of law would do more to improve human lives than any other approach. In authoritarian states like Russia, the reassertion of the rule of law would improve the process of wealth creation and increase the security and prosperity of the middle class.

Unfortunately, the extension of the rule of law is a complex and difficult process and $10 billion would have little effect on it.

Therefore it would be better to focus on the development and diffusion of technology.

New technologies have been improving life for virtually all of known history (think of fire or the wheel as examples of early technological breakthroughs). Given the inefficiency and slowness of bureaucracies with a four-year time horizon and a limited amount of money, I would favor the use of large tax-free prizes.

Prizes are powerful because they send signals to everyone that they can compete. Furthermore they are payable on achievement rather than on application.

The modern emphasis on peer-reviewed research has three bad side effects. One, it leads people to spend an amazing amount of time on the paperwork of application rather than on actually doing the experiment or undertaking the research. Second, it limits the applications to credentialed people. Third, it is a very cautious process that emphasizes relying on the approval of peers who tend to be cautious.

The Wright brothers could never have gotten peer-reviewed government funding for their airplane; in fact the Smithsonian Institution had failed to invent a workable airplane even though it spent more money than the Wright brothers.

Henry Ford could never have gotten government funding for the development of his first car; he was a shift foreman at the Edison Electric Plant in Detroit when he started.

Thomas Edison could never have gotten a government bureaucracy to subsidize the estimated 49,000 failures by Edison and his assistants that led to the invention of the electric light bulb.

Prizes would be a useful experiment in large-scale breakthroughs.

Here are seven prizes, the first three at $2 billion tax free and the last four at $1 billion each tax free (tax free because not paying taxes makes these prizes psychologically worth much more):

1) A low-cost vaccine or preventive intervention for malaria -- possibly the single biggest potential improvement in the quality of life in poor tropical countries.

2) A modestly priced, mass-manufacturable hydrogen engine for cars, which would be the biggest single contribution to reducing carbon loading of the atmosphere and reducing subsidies through high oil prices to dictatorships.

3) A cheap method for turning large quantities of seawater into fresh water.

4) A reusable system that could get people into space at 10% of the current cost, thus enabling genuine space tourism and launching an age of exploration.

5) The first privately financed permanent lunar base.

6) A method for reusing nuclear waste to make Yucca Mountain, Nevada unnecessary as a repository.

7) A method of learning math and science that kids like, and that enables us to leapfrog India and China by breaking out of our unionized, bureaucratic curriculum. This would enable us to replace "No Child Left Behind" with a more effective education model that could be called "Every American Gets Ahead."

Newt Gingrich is a senior fellow at AEI.