[LINK] Cochrane on Existential Risk

If global warming gets worse, but people get enough richer, then they could end up better off.

Tautologically, yes.

This is not tautological. Wealth is highly correlated with wellbeing but not logically equivalent.

Global warming is predicted to destroy wealth -- that is the only reason we care about it.

It seems like you have redefined the meaning of some terms here.

You are treating "investing in preventing X" as the same thing as "insuring against X." They are not the same thing. And they are doubly not the same thing on a society-wide level.

Fair enough, certainly one can draw a distinction between spreading risks around and reducing risks; even though in practice, the distinction is a bit muddled inasmuch as insurance companies invest heavily in reducing net risk by fighting moral hazard, funding prevention research, establishing industry-wide codes, withholding insurance unless best-practices are implemented.

So go back to my isomorphic argument, and for every mention of insurance, replace it with some personal action that reduces the risk eg. for 'health insurance', swap in 'exercise' or 'caloric restriction' or 'daily wine consumption'.

Does this instantly rescue Cochrane's argument and the isomorphism sound equally sensible? "You shouldn't try to quit eating so much junk food because while that reduces your health risks, there are so many risks you could be reducing that it makes no sense to try to reduce all of them and hence by the fallacy of division, no sense to try to reduce any of them!"

As Lumifer points out, trying to make your house fire-proof (or prevent any of the other risks you list) really would be ruinously expensive.

So you resolve Cochrane's argument by denying the equality of the risks.

I'm not sure I see any difference between your proposed isomorphic argument and his argument.

Good, then my isomorphism succeeded. Typically, people try to deny that the underlying logic is the same.

the arguments sound exactly as "clever" as each other.

They do? So if you agree that things like car or health or house insurance are irrational, did you run out and cancel every form of insurance you have and advise your family and friends to cancel their insurance too?

I guess what I'm saying is that it doesn't seem implausible to me is that if you asked a representative sample of people if climate change protection was important to invest in they would say yes and vote for that. And then if you made the boringly obvious argument about determining where it belongs on the list of important things, they'd also say yes and vote for that.

But note that thinking climate change is a big enough risk to invest against has nothing at all to do with his little argument about 'oh there so so many risks what are we to do we can't consume insurance against them all'. Pointing out that there are a lot of options cannot be an argument against picking a subset of options; here's another version: "this restaurant offers 20 forms of cheesecake for dessert, but if I ordered a slice of 1 then why not order all 20, but then, why I would run out of cash and be arrested and get fat too! So it seems rational to not order any cheesecake at all." Why not just order 1 or 2 of the slices you like best... Arguing about whether you like the strawberry cheesecake better than the chocolate is a completely different argument which has nothing to do with there being 20 possible slices rather than, say, 5.

See my answer to Salemicus.

Cochrane's arguments don't amount to much. There are two. One is that BIG1 x LOTS > BIG2, the unspecified numbers being respectively the cost of addressing global warning, the number of similarly expensive major threats, and total human resources. No numbers are attached, nor any argument given to establish the inequality. An argument that consists of saying "look how big (or small) this number is!" is worthless unless some effort is made to say specifically why the number is in fact big (or small) enough to do the work demanded of it.

His other argument is that global warming interacts with our emissions. If warming reduces wealth, that will reduce emissions; if emissions are high, we must be very wealthy to be emitting so much, and better able to spend money on not doing that. While this argument, unlike the first, is not dead on arrival, a great deal more work is required for it to be useful. What about lags? How big is this effect? Is there an equilibrium point, and if so, where will it be and what will it look like? Population is self-limiting too, but the Malthusian equilibrium is not where we want to be.

Certainly, the prediction of long-term growth rates is complicated by the effects of growth on climate and of climate on growth. However, he forgets all that when he goes on to compare acting with investing in order to act later:

Instead of spending say $1 trillion in carbon abatement costs, why don't we invest $1 trillion in stocks? If the 100 year rate of return on stocks is higher than the 100 year rate of return on carbon abatement -- likely -- they come out better off.

100 year rate of return? No-one can know that (a point made by the article he starts off from). And how do you invest $1T in stocks, so as to cause total human wealth to increase? Buying stocks personally can increase one's personal wealth (by increasing one's personal money, which can then be exchanged for the things one values); how does moving $1T from wherever it was into stocks do this on a global scale?

And of course, he is not talking about MIRI at all, which is a special case. MIRI claims that for reasons depending on the specific properties of the hazard of UFAI, work must begin now, not postponed. If nobody does the work, the work will not be done.