‘Apocalypse Next: The Economics of Global Catastrophic Risks’ by Dr Stephen Davies (Institute of Economic Affairs, IEA)
A global catastrophic risk is a possible event that would have effects that affect the entire world (global) and are utterly disastrous (catastrophic). Catastrophic in this case means either human extinction (or something close) or the irretrievable collapse of civilisation, or a change in human society that permanently closes off future prospects for human flourishing and development
Humans have always lived under the shadow of threats of this sort but historically they were low probability and had natural causes. Now though, the number of possible GCRs has risen dramatically, their nature has changed, and the probability of some of them is increasing. Many new ones derive from the possible impacts of human technological developments, such as nuclear weapons, genetic editing, and AI.
Another threat is the way that economic and technological development has made some phenomena that were harmless before into serious GCRs now, e.g. a major solar flare.
Thirdly, the way modern society has developed and its current stage of technological development makes it highly vulnerable to shocks of all kinds and makes threats that civilisations have survived in the past into terminal ones now. In this context it is important to think clearly and to bring correct economic reasoning to bear, not least because some of the proposed responses to GCF are themselves a threat of a catastrophic kind (typically of the third sort).
There is a pressing need for correct mathematical reasoning, for properly informed cost-benefit analysis that takes account of that mathematics, and for a reconfigured economic thinking that discards the current fixation of too many economists on the immediate present.