Imagine that only a few hundred people in the world thought that climate change is an important problem (rather than at least tens of millions), that philanthropists worldwide spent a few million dollars a year on climate (rather than $10 billion), that society as a whole spent a million dollars on the problem (rather than $1 trillion), and that the international institutions trying to tackle the problem either don’t exist or have a similar budget to a McDonald’s restaurant. How bad would climate change be? This is how bad things are for the other global catastrophic risks, and then some.
This seems to overstate how bad the situation is (although qualitatively it remains an absurd underinvestment, with painfully low-hanging fruit to avert pandemics and AI catastrophe at hand). Surveys of the general public and area experts do show substantial percentages in the abstract endorse nuclear (in particular), bioweapon, and AI risks as important problems (as you mention later). Governments wage wars and spend very large amounts of attention and resources on nuclear proliferation and threats. Biodefense has seen billions of dollars of spending, even if it was not well-crafted to reduce catastrophic bioweapon risk. The low budget for the BWC is in significant part a political coordination problem and not simply a $ supply issue. Annual spending from Open Philanthropy and the Future Fund on catastrophic risks, with priorities close to yours, is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
This seems to overstate how bad the situation is (although qualitatively it remains an absurd underinvestment, with painfully low-hanging fruit to avert pandemics and AI catastrophe at hand). Surveys of the general public and area experts do show substantial percentages in the abstract endorse nuclear (in particular), bioweapon, and AI risks as important problems (as you mention later). Governments wage wars and spend very large amounts of attention and resources on nuclear proliferation and threats. Biodefense has seen billions of dollars of spending, even if it was not well-crafted to reduce catastrophic bioweapon risk. The low budget for the BWC is in significant part a political coordination problem and not simply a $ supply issue. Annual spending from Open Philanthropy and the Future Fund on catastrophic risks, with priorities close to yours, is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
These are good points, I will amend