Dr. David Denkenberger co-founded and directs the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED.info) and donates half his income to it. He received his B.S. from Penn State in Engineering Science, his masters from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Building Systems Program. His dissertation was on an expanded microchannel heat exchanger, which he patented. He is an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in mechanical engineering. He received the National Merit Scholarship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, is a Penn State distinguished alumnus, and is a registered professional engineer. He has authored or co-authored 134 publications (>4000 citations, >50,000 downloads, h-index = 32, second most prolific author in the existential/global catastrophic risk field), including the book Feeding Everyone no Matter What: Managing Food Security after Global Catastrophe. His food work has been featured in over 25 countries, over 200 articles, including Science, Vox, Business Insider, Wikipedia, Deutchlandfunk (German Public Radio online), Discovery Channel Online News, Gizmodo, Phys.org, and Science Daily. He has given interviews on 80,000 Hours podcast (here and here) and Estonian Public Radio, WGBH Radio, Boston, and WCAI Radio on Cape Cod, USA. He has given over 80 external presentations, including ones on food at Harvard University, MIT, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Cornell University, University of California Los Angeles, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos National Lab, Imperial College, and University College London.
Denkenberger
This is very interesting. However, I suspect that for many people, the percentage of time required to recharge is not that large. For instance, many people work 50 or 60 hours a week. And even when they are not working, they might be mostly doing things that would not be considered recharging, like housework or commuting. My personal recharge percentage might only be around 5%. So I might be biased, but I would guess it would typically be around 20%, at least for people who are motivated like effective altruists. As for the question about whether timesaving interventions are worth it, I have done a lot of calculations for my own personal decisions. To my surprise, I found that many things make sense even if you value your time at order of magnitude 1 dollar per hour or less. They include things like dishwasher (you can get a countertop version if you are in a single person household), having laundry in your apartment (you can get a combination washer dryer that uses a standard outlet-this actually saves you money even when you count the increase in rent due to the lost square footage), having a second monitor, using voice recognition software (this is one of the biggest timesaving interventions), using a hands-free phone so you can do housework while on the phone, having a wireless headset so you can listen to things like TED talks while grooming, etc.
Asteroid/comet impact, super volcanic eruptions, and even nuclear war risks are quantifiable within an order of magnitude or two: link. There are additional uncertainties in the cost and efficacy of interventions such as storing food or alternate foods. However, if you value future generations, one-three orders of magnitude uncertainty is not a significant barrier to making a quantified case.
I have a background in energy and I have studied these issues extensively, so I could write many pages, but I will try to be brief. We actually already have the technology to support 10 billion people at the US standard of living sustainably. It is good to think about the dynamics and embodied energy. But because typical renewable energy pays back the energy investment in about three years, if we just took the energy output of renewable energy and reinvested it, the amount of renewable energy production would grow at about 30% per year. Therefore, if we just reinvested our current renewable energy production, we would be at 100% renewable in a couple decades. The energy payback time of nuclear energy power plants (not mining) is more like one third of a year, so this is even more favorable. The HANDY paper does not consider technological improvement, which is probably appropriate for the timescale of past collapses (but note that in the longer term, our carrying capacity has gone from millions as hunter gatherers to billions now even with higher consumption per capita, so technological change is key). However, now that we have markets and R&D, we don’t need the government to intervene to get to a sustainable solution quickly. The book “Limits to Growth” does consider technological improvement. But for some reason it estimates the carrying capacity of the earth is much below current consumption, perhaps because it does not recognize we can make nitrogen fertilizer with renewable hydrogen. I think the carrying capacity issue is why “Limits to Growth” nearly always predicts collapse. It is conceivable that we will overreact to these slow problems much more so than we did in 2008, and this could turn into a catastrophe. But more likely these resource constraints could reduce our resilience slightly to actual catastrophes. From a food perspective, there is around a 10% chance of nuclear winter this century, and when you include lesser catastrophes like regional nuclear war, volcanic eruptions, abrupt climate change, pandemics disrupting food trade, etc., it is greater than even chance. So I am worried much more about these catastrophes than resource constraints.
I recently realized that the opportunity cost of taking off work is not just the lost wages in the present year, but reduced future wages. This is because salaries are generally based on experience. This applies if you plan to work up to a certain age. If you take a year off, you will have one year less experience for each of the futures years you work. From a couple sources, I have found this experience premium to be about 2% per experience year. Therefore, taking off early in a career results in lost future salaries roughly equal to the lost salary in the present year. This doubles the opportunity cost. Does anyone know if someone has posted on this topic more rigorously?
The way I fit reading in is on a stationary recumbent bicycle. This can be done in a gym, but it is generally cheaper and less time to have it in one’s apartment, even including the increased rent for more square footage.
I am surprised that there have been no comments-maybe because everyone agreed? I think you made a lot of good points.
Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955) link
“No one knows how widely such lethal radio-active particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race.”
Reasons and Persons paraphrased:
“I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:
1 Peace.
2 A nuclear war that kills 99 per cent of the world’s existing population.
3 A nuclear war that kills 100 per cent.
99% kill would be worse than peace, and 100% kill would be worse than 99% kill. Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between peace and 99% kill. I believe that the difference between 99% kill and 100% kill is very much greater. The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilisation began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilised human history. The difference between 99% kill and 100% kill may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second.”
So I think many people were worried about the extinction risk of nuclear war.
Very nice article. Could you please give a link to Carl Shulman’s blog post on the economics of space colonization?
Diffusion of Innovations is a book that shows that only the most innovative few percent of people adopt innovations from mass media—everyone else generally adopts because of word of mouth.
If this is still linking to the correct Economist article, it notes that Greece is poorer than other parts of Europe but Greeks work more hours per week. However, I have not seen evidence for causation, that is if the rest of Europe worked more hours, its GDP per capita would actually fall. Has anyone seen this?
Related here is the fact that the US military compensates victims generally up to $2500, at least if they are not directly related to a military strike: link.
Any data on the QALY loss of the typical person in a nursing home? I was thinking one way to address the criticism that euthanasia is sometimes done to an unwilling person would be to have a system where some of the saved money is donated to effective causes. But maybe effective altruists don’t want to go there?
Excellent article-it’s great to have some more numbers to validate my intuitions. I have sent this to many of my friends.
If a single person is making $50,000 per year, they were in the 25% tax bracket in 2013 (your source), which means you would get back $1250 on a $5000 donation (the deduction applies to the marginal rate, not the average). If you expect to be making more money later in life, you will be in a higher tax bracket if the laws don’t change, so this would be a reason to give later. The other factor is that there is a standard deduction of around $6,200. So unless you own a house (and therefore are deducting the interest payments), you actually have to give a lot of money away first with no tax benefit. This is another reason to delay giving (if you eventually plan to own a house).
I think there are several parallels with cryonics. Both this and EA appeal to reason and often have emotional rationalizations as reactions. Early growth of cryonics looked exponential, but recent decades it has been more linear. There are currently debates about how to sell it (e.g. emergency medicine or gateway to transhumanism) and how to deal with controversy.
I would add the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute to the X risk list. It looks across all risks that could significantly harm civilization and seeks to prioritize interventions. Its work is largely done by volunteers. Disclosure: I am a (volunteer) research associate there.
My solution is listening to all the TED talks-only about a six-month delay and much more durable information.
I just spent the last 4 1⁄2 years as an energy efficiency consultant where we primarily wrote comment letters to influence the national energy efficiency mandatory standards, national voluntary (ENERGY STAR), and California mandatory standards. I do think that we had significant impact on the stringency of the standards. Without an energy efficiency advocate voice, regulators will trust what manufacturers say. We worked on the neglected smaller products like battery chargers, clothes dryers, lighting, computers, small network equipment, TVs, etc. There is a lot of interest in the big products like cars and heating ventilating and air conditioning, so it is harder to make an impact. But in the smaller products, there was a study that showed that the national government estimated incremental cost of meeting the standard was an order of magnitude greater than what it actually cost manufacturers to meet. And my experience is that manufacturers claim that the incremental cost would be an order of magnitude greater than what the national government said. And the advocates claimed an order of magnitude less than the regulators, so we were closest to the truth. Even though the work was high impact, it did cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, because in order to convince the regulators, we needed to do not only writing, but also testing products and in some cases tearing them down and making them more efficient to show what could be done. The broader picture here is that even though this work was high impact by US standards, the cause of climate change is not high impact (see next collective action post comments, and my own calculations indicated that global poverty was about two orders of magnitude more cost effective at helping the present generation than climate change, though it could possibly be high impact when concerning future generations). So I would say this type of work would be good if you can target the four effective altruism areas of global poverty, animal welfare, global catastrophic risk, and meta-charities. But otherwise, I think there is higher priority work to do. And that’s why I left my job to do global catastrophic risk work.
Another option is Long News: https://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_citron_and_now_the_real_news And if you are into global catastrophic risks, you only need to spend about 10 minutes a month here: http://gcrinstitute.org/gcr-news-summary-june-2015/
These articles are indeed a great introduction to the issue. However, I would say the book-length counterpart is James Barrat – Our Final Invention because it is more accessible than Bostrom’s Superintelligence.