If existential risk reduction appears more promising than effecting trajectory change, do ‘broad’ approaches to existential risk reduction (such as promoting good institutions or global peace) tend to be more or less effective, in expectation, than ‘narrow’ approaches (such as working on reducing the risk of bioengineered pandemics)?

ECONOmics - CATASTROPHIC RISK, INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS

A catastrophic risk can be called ‘existential’ to the extent that it carries, in expectation, a truly permanent negative shock to the subsequent growth path. An even more precise characterization of this property may be valuable. How can we best model the magnitude of the permanent costs associated with a given risk?

ECONOMICS - CATASTROPHIC RISK, TIME-SERIES ECONOMETRICS, MACROECONOMIC THEORY

How does expected value of the future, given that the world was marginally spared some extinction event, depend on the extinction event in question? (For example, averting extinction from asteroid impact saves an ‘average’ world, whereas averting extinction from nuclear war only saves a world in which advanced human civilisations would otherwise be prone to nuclear war, which is presumably of lower value.)

PHILOSOPHY - ANTHROPICS, DECISION THEORY
ECONOMICS - CATASTROPHIC RISK

When an extinction risk is correlated with other extinction risks, the value of averting it is less than when it is anti-correlated. In light of this consideration, and the consideration above, how should funds best be spent to mitigate a portfolio of arbitrary correlated extinction risks?

ECONOMICS - CATASTROPHIC RISK

To date, most of the work in economics concerning long-term catastrophic risk mitigation has focused on climate change. To what extent does climate change pose a genuinely existential threat? How do the risks of climate change and the benefits from mitigating them compare with more neglected risks?

ECONOMICS - CATASTROPHIC RISK, ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS

Are there existential risks that we’re currently missing?

ECONOMICS - CATASTROPHIC RISK 

> Existing Academic Literature

• Martin Weitzman, On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change, Review of Economics and Statistics 91 (2009): 1-19.
• Antony Millner, On Welfare Frameworks and Catastrophic Climate Risks. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 65.2 (2013): 310-325.
• Aurélie Méjean, Antonin Pottier, Stéphane Zuber, and Marc Fleurbaey, Intergenerational Equity under Catastrophic Climate Change. Working paper (2017).
• Yew-Kwang Ng, The Importance of Global Extinction in Climate Change Policy, Global Policy 7 (2016): 315-322.
• John Broome, The Most Important Thing about Climate Change, in Jonathan Boston, Andrew Bradstock and David Eng (eds.), Public Policy: Why Ethics Matters (Canberra, A.C.T.: ANU E Press, 2010): 101-116.
• Jason Matheny, Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction, Risk Analysis 27 (2007): 1335-1344.
• Ian Martin and Robert Pindyck, Averting Catastrophes: The Strange Economics of Scylla and Charybdis, American Economic Review 105:10 (2015): 2947-2985.
• Ian Martin and Robert Pindyck, Averting Catastrophes That Kill, Working paper.

> Existing Informal Discussion

• Nick Beckstead, The long-term significance of reducing global catastrophic risks
• Michael Dickens, Is Preventing Human Extinction Good?
• Nick Beckstead, A proposed adjustment to the astronomical waste argument
• William MacAskill, Human Extinction, Asymmetry, and Option Value
• Owen Cotton-Barratt and Toby Ord, Existential Risk and Existential Hope