Beliefs about the end of humanity: How bad, likely, and important is human extinction?
Matthew Coleman (Northeastern University), Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford), Joshua Lewis (New York University) and Geoffrey Goodwin (University of Pennsylvania)
GPI Working Paper No. 1-2024
Human extinction would mean the end of humanity’s achievements, culture, and future potential. According to some ethical views, this would be a terrible outcome. But how do people think about human extinction? And how much do they prioritize preventing extinction over other societal issues? Across five empirical studies (N = 2,147; U.S. and China) we find that people consider extinction prevention a societal priority and deserving of greatly increased societal resources. However, despite estimating the likelihood of human extinction to be 5% this century (U.S. median), people believe that the chances would need to be around 30% for it to be the very highest priority. In line with this, people consider extinction prevention to be only one among several important societal issues. People’s judgments about the relative importance of extinction prevention appear relatively fixed and hard to change by reason-based interventions.
Other working papers
The long-run relationship between per capita incomes and population size – Maya Eden (University of Zurich) and Kevin Kuruc (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
The relationship between the human population size and per capita incomes has long been debated. Two competing forces feature prominently in these discussions. On the one hand, a larger population means that limited natural resources must be shared among more people. On the other hand, more people means more innovation and faster technological progress, other things equal. We study a model that features both of these channels. A calibration suggests that, in the long run, (marginal) increases in population would…
Dynamic public good provision under time preference heterogeneity – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
I explore the implications of time preference heterogeneity for the private funding of public goods. The assumption that players use a common discount rate is knife-edge: relaxing it yields substantially different equilibria, for two reasons. First, time preference heterogeneity motivates intertemporal polarization, analogous to the polarization seen in a static public good game. In the simplest settings, more patient players spend nothing early in time and less patient players spending nothing later. Second…
Staking our future: deontic long-termism and the non-identity problem – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Greaves and MacAskill argue for axiological longtermism, according to which, in a wide class of decision contexts, the option that is ex ante best is the option that corresponds to the best lottery over histories from t onwards, where t is some date far in the future. They suggest that a stakes-sensitivity argument…