This is most likely my fault; I think I got confused between allfed.org and allfed.info
We tried to buy the .org domain, but unfortunately it was not for sale.
Essentially I’d expect any preparation to at least fail partially, fail to get implemented, be ignored, not survive in institutional memory, etc.
There are definitely a lot of failure modes, though part of the money should go to updating institutions as staff turn over.
Thanks for updating the Guesstimate.
Separately, your numbers still seem fairly high. Suppose that in 1980 you had $100M and knew that there was going to be a pandemic (or another global financial crisis) in the next 100 years, but didn’t knew the details; it seems unlikely that you could have made the covid pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis more than 10% better.
Good question. I think these are quite different because billions of dollars had been put into preparedness, at least for a pandemic. Though billions of dollars have been put into preventing a nuclear war (and reducing weapon stockpiles), we could not find anything preparing for feeding populations for a multiyear catastrophe. I think generally there are logarithmic returns, which means the first amount of money spent on a problem has much greater marginal cost effectiveness.
We tried to buy the .org domain, but unfortunately it was not for sale.
There are definitely a lot of failure modes, though part of the money should go to updating institutions as staff turn over.
Thanks for updating the Guesstimate.
Good question. I think these are quite different because billions of dollars had been put into preparedness, at least for a pandemic. Though billions of dollars have been put into preventing a nuclear war (and reducing weapon stockpiles), we could not find anything preparing for feeding populations for a multiyear catastrophe. I think generally there are logarithmic returns, which means the first amount of money spent on a problem has much greater marginal cost effectiveness.