With 7 billion people alive today, and our current most cost effective interventions for saving a life in the ballpark of $5000 USD, then with perfect knowledge we should probably be willing to spend up to ~$3.5 billion USD to reduce the risk of extinction or similar this century by 0.01 percentage points even if you’re not all that concerned about future people. Is my math right?
(Of course, we don’t have perfect knowledge and there are other reasons why people might prefer to invest less.)
We may believe that existential risk is astronomically bad, such that killing 8 billion people is much worse than 2x as bad as killing 4 billion people.
Reasons to go lower:
Certain interventions in reducing xrisk may save a significantly lower number of present people’s lives than 8 billion, for example much work in civilizational resilience/recovery, or anything that has a timeline of >20 years for most of the payoff.
As a practical matter, longtermist EA has substantially less money than implied by these odds.
With 7 billion people alive today, and our current most cost effective interventions for saving a life in the ballpark of $5000 USD, then with perfect knowledge we should probably be willing to spend up to ~$3.5 billion USD to reduce the risk of extinction or similar this century by 0.01 percentage points even if you’re not all that concerned about future people. Is my math right?
(Of course, we don’t have perfect knowledge and there are other reasons why people might prefer to invest less.)
Reasons to go higher:
We may believe that existential risk is astronomically bad, such that killing 8 billion people is much worse than 2x as bad as killing 4 billion people.
Reasons to go lower:
Certain interventions in reducing xrisk may save a significantly lower number of present people’s lives than 8 billion, for example much work in civilizational resilience/recovery, or anything that has a timeline of >20 years for most of the payoff.
As a practical matter, longtermist EA has substantially less money than implied by these odds.
Agreed on all points
Around $3 billion also sounds intuitively about right compared to other things governments are willing to spend money on.
governments seem way more inefficient to me than this.
Did you mean 0.01%?
Yes sorry, edited!