The Right Strategy to Respond to Popularism

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How do we make people wiser and a more stoic? That sounds like a bag global project that i wouldn't even know how to start doing. I'm not sure that i have a good strategy for popularizing stoicism. But it is the philosophical approach that, in my view, is there is the right strategy to respond to popularism. And now it's not as though we haden't seen examples of this rising to the top.

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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