This paper starts with a simple model that formalizes a tradeoff between technological progress increasing growth/wellbeing/consumption, and having a small chance of a massive disaster that kills off a lot of people. When do we choose to keep growing? The intuitive idea is that we should keep growing if the growth rate is higher than (the odds ratio of death) times (the dollar value of a statistical life). If the value of life in dollar terms is low—because everyone is desperately poor, so dollars are worth a lot—then growth is worth it. But under very mild assumptions about preferences, where the value of life relative to money grows with income, we will eventually choose to stop growing.
However, the question becomes different is the value of new technologies is saving lives rather than increasing prosperity. Money has diminishing marginal utility; life does not. So technology that saves lives with certainty, but destroys a lot of lives with some probability, is just a gamble. We decide to keep progressing if it saves more lives in expectation than stopping, but unfortunately that’s not a very helpful answer.
This paper starts with a simple model that formalizes a tradeoff between technological progress increasing growth/wellbeing/consumption, and having a small chance of a massive disaster that kills off a lot of people. When do we choose to keep growing? The intuitive idea is that we should keep growing if the growth rate is higher than (the odds ratio of death) times (the dollar value of a statistical life). If the value of life in dollar terms is low—because everyone is desperately poor, so dollars are worth a lot—then growth is worth it. But under very mild assumptions about preferences, where the value of life relative to money grows with income, we will eventually choose to stop growing.
However, the question becomes different is the value of new technologies is saving lives rather than increasing prosperity. Money has diminishing marginal utility; life does not. So technology that saves lives with certainty, but destroys a lot of lives with some probability, is just a gamble. We decide to keep progressing if it saves more lives in expectation than stopping, but unfortunately that’s not a very helpful answer.