The Asteroids and the Volcanoes and the Solar Flares

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Jon Wertheim: How do you decide how much money to spend? He says we need to calebrate the probabilities a little bit more precisely and try and get a better alignment of spending to to risk with one of the values. But i guesstii its a paradime for this issue, he adds. "I don't want it to happen, but we certainly wouldn't be having this conversatioon now"

We’re pretty well-calibrated when it comes to dealing with common, everyday-level setbacks. But our brains aren’t naturally equipped for dealing with unlikely but world-catastrophic disasters. Yet such threats are real, both natural and human-induced. We need to collectively get better at anticipating and preparing for them, at the level of political action. Andrew Leigh is an academic and author who now serves in the Parliament of Australia. We discuss how to move the conversation about existential risks from the ivory tower to implementation in real policies.

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Andrew Leigh received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a member of the Australian House of Representatives representing Fenner. He was previously a professor of economics at Australian National University, and has served as Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury and Charities. His recent book is What’s the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics.

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