The argument we mean to refer to here is the one that we call the ‘best-known argument’ elsewhere: the one that says that the non-existence of future generations would be an overwhelming moral loss because the expected future population is enormous, the lives of future people are good in expectation, and it is better if the future contains more good lives. We think that this argument is liable to overshoot.
I agree that there are other compelling longtermist arguments that don’t overshoot. But my concern is that governments can’t use these arguments to guide their catastrophe policy. That’s because these arguments don’t give governments much guidance in deciding where to set the bar for funding catastrophe-preventing interventions. They don’t answer the question, ‘By how much does an intervention need to reduce risks per $1 billion of cost in order to be worth funding?’.
We currently spend less than a thousandth of a percent of gross world product on them. Earlier, I suggested bringing this up by at least a factor of 100, to reach a point where the world is spending more on securing its potential than on ice cream, and perhaps a good longer-term target may be a full 1 percent.
And this doesn’t seem too different from your own advice ($400B spending by the US is 2% of a year’s GDP).
This seems like a good target to me, although note that $400b is our estimate for how much it would cost to fund our suite of interventions for a decade, rather than for a year.
The argument we mean to refer to here is the one that we call the ‘best-known argument’ elsewhere: the one that says that the non-existence of future generations would be an overwhelming moral loss because the expected future population is enormous, the lives of future people are good in expectation, and it is better if the future contains more good lives. We think that this argument is liable to overshoot.
I agree that there are other compelling longtermist arguments that don’t overshoot. But my concern is that governments can’t use these arguments to guide their catastrophe policy. That’s because these arguments don’t give governments much guidance in deciding where to set the bar for funding catastrophe-preventing interventions. They don’t answer the question, ‘By how much does an intervention need to reduce risks per $1 billion of cost in order to be worth funding?’.
This seems like a good target to me, although note that $400b is our estimate for how much it would cost to fund our suite of interventions for a decade, rather than for a year.
Thanks for the clarifications!