“If we ignore distant future generations by discounting, the benefits of reducing existential risk fall by between 3 and 5 orders of magnitude (with a 1% to 5% discount rate), which is still far more cost-effective than measures to reduce small-scale casualty events. Under our survey model (Model 1), the cost per life-year varies between $1,300 and $52,000 for a 5% discount rate and between $770 and $30,000 for a 1% discount rate. These costs are even competitive with first-world healthcare spending, where typically anything less than $100,000 per quality adjusted life-year is considered a reasonable purchase.29
This suggests that even if we are concerned about welfare only in the near term, reducing existential risks from biotechnology is still a cost-effective means of saving expected life if the future chance of an existential risk is anything above 0.0001 per year.”
I think their model ought to include a category of catastrophic risk—they don’t have anything between disaster (100,000 deaths) and extinction.
“Even if we expected humanity to become extinct within a generation, traditional statistical life valuations would warrant a 32 billion annual investment in asteroid defense (Gerrard & Barber, 1997). Yet the United States spends only $4 million per year on asteroid detection and there is no direct spending on mitigation.”
See also the models in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5576214/ (cost-effectiveness of mitigating biorisk) and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2007.00960.x (asteroid risk), which have estimates for the risk level, cost of reducing it, and cost per qualy for different future discount levels.
I think their model ought to include a category of catastrophic risk—they don’t have anything between disaster (100,000 deaths) and extinction.