How many lives does the future hold?
Toby Newberry (Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Technical Report No. T2-2021
The total number of people who have ever lived, across the entire human past, has been estimated at around 100 billion.2 The total number of people who will ever live, across the entire human future, is unknown - but not immune to the tools of rational inquiry. This report estimates the expected size of the future, as measured in units of ‘human-life-equivalents’ (henceforth: ‘lives’). The task is a daunting one, and the aim here is not to be the final word on this subject. Instead, this report aspires to two more modest aims...
Other working papers
Quadratic Funding with Incomplete Information – Luis M. V. Freitas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Wilfredo L. Maldonado (University of Sao Paulo)
Quadratic funding is a public good provision mechanism that satisfies desirable theoretical properties, such as efficiency under complete information, and has been gaining popularity in practical applications. We evaluate this mechanism in a setting of incomplete information regarding individual preferences, and show that this result only holds under knife-edge conditions. We also estimate the inefficiency of the mechanism in a variety of settings and show, in particular, that inefficiency increases…
Choosing the future: Markets, ethics and rapprochement in social discounting – Antony Millner (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Geoffrey Heal (Columbia University)
This paper provides a critical review of the literature on choosing social discount rates (SDRs) for public cost-benefit analysis. We discuss two dominant approaches, the first based on market prices, and the second based on intertemporal ethics. While both methods have attractive features, neither is immune to criticism. …
Population ethical intuitions – Lucius Caviola (Harvard University) et al.
Is humanity’s existence worthwhile? If so, where should the human species be headed in the future? In part, the answers to these questions require us to morally evaluate the (potential) human population in terms of its size and aggregate welfare. This assessment lies at the heart of population ethics. Our investigation across nine experiments (N = 5776) aimed to answer three questions about how people aggregate welfare across individuals: (1) Do they weigh happiness and suffering symmetrically…