Workshop on the Economics of Catastrophe
12-13 June 2019, Oxford University
Topic
This workshop will bring together distinguished researchers in the economics of catastrophe with others who are interested in the general problem of global prioritisation. Its specific objectives are:
- To provide a forum for the advancement and dissemination of relevant research into the economics of catastrophe.
- To identify promising open research questions in the area of catastrophe that are highly relevant to issues of prioritisation, and that are likely to be tractable with the tools and insights of economics.
- To make some initial progress on some of these open questions, via workshop sessions tailored to structured but informal discussion.
Venue
The workshop will take place at Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford.
The workshop is invitation only. However, we plan to publish a short article with some of the key research questions discussed in the workshop.
Schedule
Wednesday, 12 June
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 8.45am | Coffee and Snacks |
| 9.30am | Hilary Greaves: Introduction to the Workshop |
| 10.10am | Short comment 1: Ilan Noy, “Permanent Consequences of Small Shocks” |
| 10.20am | Short comment 2: John Broome, “How to Think About the Badness of Extinction” |
| 10.30am | Short comment 3: Orri Stefansson, “A Mistake in How to Think About the Badness of Catastrophe?” |
| 10.40am | Short comment 4: Stéphane Zuber, “Modelling Catastrophe and New Directions” |
| 10.50am | Break |
| 11.10am | Niel Bowerman, “Could climate change make the Earth uninhabitable (for humans)?” |
| 11.50am | Bridget Williams, “Catastrophic Risks from Biotechnology” |
| 12.30pm | Lunch |
| 1.30pm | Ben Garfinkel, “Catastrophic Risks from Artificial Intelligence” |
| 2.10pm | Owen Cotton-Barratt, “Eliciting Probabilities” |
| 2.40pm | Short comment 5: Christian Tarsney, “Can We Ignore Infinite Ethics?” |
| 2.50pm | Short comment 6: Marc Fleurbaey, “Possibility of Infinite Values” |
| 3.00pm | Short comment 7: Geir Asheim, “Sustainability vs When to Go Voluntarily Extinct/Reduce Fertility” |
| 3.10pm | Break |
| 3.30pm | Breakouts: Discussions in small groups |
| 5.00pm | Break |
| 5.20pm | Individual brainstorm on high-priority questions |
| 5.30pm | Reports back from breakouts |
| 6.30pm | Drinks and dinner at St. Anne’s College |
Thursday, 13 June
| Time | Session | |
|---|---|---|
| 8.45am | Coffee and Snacks | |
| 9.30am | Aurelie Mejean, “When Opposites Attract: Averting a Climate Catastrophe Despite Differing Ethical Views” | |
| 10.10am | Marc Fleurbaey, “Ambiguity Aversion” | |
| 11.00am | Break | |
| 11.20am | Gordon Woo, “Compound Catastrophes” | |
| 12.00pm | R. Daniel Bressler, “Integrated Assessment of Climate and the Economy with an Endogenous Mortality Response” | |
| 12.40pm | Lunch | |
| 1.40pm | Short comment 8: Gordon Woo, “Incentivising Risk Mitigation” | |
| 1.50pm | Short comment 9: Marc Fleurbaey, “(I) How the Past Should Affect Our Evaluation of Future Catastrophes; And, (II) Whether We Need to Go Beyond an Individualistic Evaluation in the Context of Long-term Scenarios” | |
| 2.00pm | Short comment 10: Lennart Stern, “Endogenous extinction risk mitigation in a Ramsey model” | |
| 2.10pm | Short comment 11: Julian Jamison, “Implications of Dependence of our Impacts on Other Actors’ Choices” | |
| 2.20pm | Short comment 12: Matthew Rendall, “Efficiency Without Sacrifice” | |
| 2.30pm | Short comment 13: Ilan Noy, “What Can Mainstream Economics Ideas Add to the Conversation?” | |
| 2.40pm | Short comment 14: Antonin Pottier, “Can applied welfare analysis be of any help to think about catastrophes?” | |
| 2.50pm | Reflect on questions for roundtable/plan lightning talks | |
| 3.00pm | Break | |
| 3.20pm | Lightning talks: “Where Economics Could and Couldn’t Help” | |
| 3.50pm | Roundtable discussion: What further work on the themes of this workshop could and should be done by economists? | |
| 5.00pm | End of workshop - informal dinner in the evening |
Talk Abstracts
Niel Bowerman, “Could climate change make Earth uninhabitable (for humans)?”
Climate change is likely to have substantial negative social and environmental impacts, however there is a lack of literature assessing whether climate change could cause humans to go extinct. In this talk I address the narrower question of whether climate change could make Earth uninhabitable. I briefly review hypothesised physical phenomenon that might be capable of making Earth uninhabitable for humans. I conclude that climate change is very unlikely to make Earth uninhabitable, but that this possibility cannot be ruled out entirely.
Bridget Williams, “Catastrophic Risks from Biotechnology”
Advances in genomics and biotechnology are radically expanding the ways in which humans can modify biological matter. This brings exciting opportunities for reducing suffering and improving lives, but also the possibility of causing catastrophic harm. The capabilities required to engineer and synthesise pathogens or to genetically modify species are becoming increasingly accessible to a broader range of actors. This increases the probability that, by error or intent, a pathogen capable of causing a pandemic of unprecedented scale is released, or the natural environment is altered in another way that results in catastrophic disruption.
Aurelie Mejean, “When Opposites Attract: Averting a Climate Catastrophe Despite Differing Ethical Views”
Climate change is seen by economists as an issue of intertemporal consumption trade-off: consume all you want today and face climate damages in the future, or sacrifice consumption today to implement costly climate policies that will bring future benefits through avoided climate damages. If one assumes enduring technological progress, a controversial conclusion ensues: to reduce intergenerational inequalities, we should postpone climate policies and let future, richer generations pay. Growing evidence however suggests that the trade-off is more complex: abrupt, extreme, irreversible changes to the climate may cause discontinuities to socio-economic systems, possibly leading to human extinction. The most relevant trade-off would then be between present consumption and the mere existence of future generations. To investigate this trade-off, we build an integrated assessment model that explicitly accounts for the risk of catastrophe due to climate change. We compare a wide range of climate policies within the class of number-dampened utilitarian social welfare functions. We show that when accounting even for a very small risk of catastrophic climate change, it is optimal to pursue stringent climate policies to postpone the catastrophe. Our results conform with the well-known conclusion that tight carbon budgets are preferred when aversion towards inequalities between generations is low. However, by contrast with previous studies, we show that stringent policies are also optimal when inequality aversion is high. This is because a higher inequality aversion makes the scenario of a small and relatively poor population (obtained when mitigation is low) especially unattractive. Our result thus demonstrates that views from opposite sides of the ethical spectrum in terms of inequality aversion converge in terms of climate policy recommendations, warranting immediate climate action.
Gordon Woo, “Compound Catastrophes”
Where several sources of hazard, which may be natural or man-made, combine to generate a catastrophic economic loss, or where the loss process involves a complex cascade of subsidiary events, the result is a compound catastrophe. The risk landscape of compound catastrophes is challenging to chart because of the nonlinearity of interactions between perils and their impact on the human environment. A key objective is to be able to identify surprising events, known as Black Swans, which have no historical precedent. A downward counterfactual thought experiment is introduced for tracking Black Swans and charting compound catastrophes.
R. Daniel Bressler, “Integrated Assessment of Climate and the Economy with an Endogenous Mortality Response”
A large body of recent empirical literature has suggested that global warming is likely to have significant mortality effects including impacts on human health, interpersonal violence, and war. Despite this, the effect of global warming on human population levels is not currently incorporated into Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that assess the welfare impacts of climate change. To the limited extent that integrated assessment models have included climate mortality impacts, they have accounted for them as damage to economic output levels. In this paper, I explicitly account for the effect of climate on mortality and population levels using mortality response estimates from the empirical literature. I create an extension to the DICE-2016 model called DICE-EMR (Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model with an Endogenous Mortality Response). I find that explicitly accounting for climate mortality costs significantly increases the welfare consequences of climate change. More broadly, IAMs are potentially good tools to assess other global catastrophic risks like nuclear war and pandemics. However, they are currently limited in their ability to deal with phenomena that have large mortality effects and subsequent changes in population levels. This paper develops a methodology that explicitly addresses this issue. In addition, this methodology can be used to assess how welfare costs vary with different interpretations of population ethics, such as person vs. non-person-affecting views.