My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,
It’s always something, especially in the 21st century, am I right? The modern age offers no shortage of material for diehard doomers.
- Some computer scientists warn that artificial intelligence could soon surpass human capabilities and turn against its carbon-based creators — whether through accident, malice, or simple misalignment with human values. (Among the most alarmed are those who obsess over “p(doom),” the probability that advanced AI ends in civilizational collapse.)
- Some climatologists fret about tipping points that could trigger unstoppable warming. Melting ice caps could reduce the Earth’s ability to reflect sunlight, while thawing permafrost belches methane into the atmosphere.
- The specter of nuclear war between major powers looms larger than it has in decades.
- And some epidemiologists caution that the next pandemic could make Covid-19 look like nothing more than a nasty flu outbreak.
These myriad threats join the usual suspects — asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, and other natural mega-disasters — in what has become a veritable cacophony of catastrophism.
When warnings backfire
Yet a new paper by economists Jakub Growiec and Klaus Prettner argues that such stark warnings from (mostly) well-meaning, earnest experts, however accurate, may not achieve their intended effect. “The Paradox of Doom: Acknowledging Extinction Risk Reduces the Incentive to Prevent It” suggests that highlighting extinction risk paradoxically reduces humanity’s willingness to act against it. The greater the danger appears, the more impatient people become. (In economics talk, extinction risk raises the discount rate, the tendency to value the present more than the future.)
Why invest in preventing tomorrow’s catastrophe when you may not be around to enjoy the benefits? YOLO!
From the paper:
In the case of a rise in the discount rate, caused by the acknowledgment of higher extinction risk which cannot be hedged against, humanity would become more present-focused. Then it would be even harder to convince us to invest in projects that could mitigate extinction risks themselves. This is a destabilizing force because once humanity deviates from a sustainable path of long-run development towards a path with increased extinction risk, the endogenous rise in the discount rate caused by this deviation would make it even more difficult to get back to the sustainable path. The only exception to this self-defeating logic would be if humanity believed that a given intervention would successfully lower the underlying extinction risk, which would allow us to approve the intervention and simultaneously adjust our beliefs on extinction risk back down
Extinction risk verus ordinary risk
The authors arrive at this conclusion, to start with, by distinguishing between ordinary mortality risk and extinction risk. The former can be hedged by reproduction. Individuals may die, but their descendants carry on, giving reason to plan for the long run. Extinction, on the other hand, permanently cancels this intergenerational continuity. Game over. The finality of such threats tends to turn us into short-term thinkers and fatalists rather than long-term planners and problem-solvers.
Growiec and Prettner: “Overall, we show that in the face of extinction risk, people become more impatient rather than more farsighted. Thus, the greater the threat of extinction, the less incentive there is to invest in avoiding it.”
Dismal science meets dismal futures
From there, the authors set up a basic economic model. They look at different viewpoints: a single person, a dynastic family line that continues through children, and even the “selfish gene” idea from biology. In each case, they ask: How do people value the future when death is just individual versus when humanity itself could disappear?
Ticking through these various cases shows that extinction risk always makes people more impatient and focused on the present. Crucially, it is not actual hazard rates but beliefs about them that matter. What pop science commentators, Hollywood, and TikTok say matters, I guess. And once people revise their estimates of doom upwards, whatever the accuracy, short-termism takes hold.
Solutions > scare stories
One takeaway here is that the “scared straight” method of activism, dire doomsaying without a plausible pathway out, is paralyzing. The more constructive approach is to pair realistic risk awareness with plausible, progress-friendly solutions. For climate change, for instance, that might mean accelerating all-of-the-above clean energy and carbon capture rather than demanding dreary degrowth.
For AI, at least from the perspective of existential worriers, it might mean an agenda of scaling up safety research, instituting mandatory incident reporting for frontier models, and requiring third-party audits in high-stakes uses. Pauses and bans are off the table. (Indeed, the sci-fi scare stories from AI doomers, combined with their exteme policy solutions, has no doubt worked to the benefit of AI accelerationists, at least in Washington.)
Deciphering America’s Down Wing turn
What’s more, the paradox may offer a deeper explanation for America’s Down Wing turn in the 1970s, as I discuss in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. There, I note that Yale economist Ray Fair has argued that beginning around 1970, the United States became less willing to invest in its own future, letting infrastructure spending slide even as it piled up deficits. “The overall results suggest that the United States became less future-oriented beginning around 1970. This change has persisted,” he has observed.
Seen through the lens of Growiec and Prettner, this retreat looks like a predictable psychological response. Faced with nuclear brinkmanship, environmental alarmism, and social turmoil, Americans came to view the future as far bleaker than in the 1960s. And when people believe tomorrow may not come — or will bring only worse — why save, build, or imagine boldly?
By foregrounding catastrophe — especially extreme environmental tail events — and failing to offer palatable solutions (like more nuclear energy) due to their distaste for techno-capitalism, prophets of eco-doom may have hastened the very short-termism that left America less capable of minimizing or averting it.
The post The Paradox of P(Doom): Why Doomer Talk Makes Policy Action Less Likely appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.
