Climate Changes the Classic Collective Action Problem

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

A toby ord's estimate is that there is a one in sixa chance that the human project ends in the next century. If that's e and that continues to be true over the next millennium, then you can think of it as plying repeated rounds of russian roulette for a millennium. So just as we should pick up our trash, we should also have an interest in common pool solutions. But again, we're a long way off where we need to be.

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.