The Utility Function of a Prepper

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For things like hurricanes, one can look at the historical record, make a reasonable estimate, and do a prudent amount of prepping.  For a societal collapse, there's no data, so the estimate is based on a narrative.  The narrative may be socially constructed, for example, a religious narrative about the End Times.  Or it may be that prepping has become a hobby, and preppers talk to each other about their preps, and the guy that has 6 months of water and stored food gets more respect than the guy who has a week's supply of water under his bed and whatever canned food is in his pantry.  The difference is not really the utility functions, but the narratives and probability estimates that feed into the utility functions.  The doomsday preppers are prepping more because they think doomsday is much more likely.

(I completely agree with your advice to store some water.  I do the same.  Over-prepping runs into diminishing returns, and not prepping at all is irresponsible, but a modest amount of prepping is a no-brainer.)

I doubt it's a difference in utility function (the value placed on a given state of the world), but in the distribution of predicted event.  If you're worried about a sudden event that disrupts everything for a few weeks to months, then surviving that with stored food and defense is what you plan for.  If you're worried about a complete collapse to pre-industrial capacity, then you think about seeds and skills to make rebuilding slightly faster (even if not in your lifetime, perhaps your grandkids).  

What the second group forgets is that even if it's a long-term collapse, there's still 1-10 years of short-term violence and starving people trying to eat your seed stock.  You may not need lots of guns, but you need lots of people you trust who have guns.

Having lots of potable water around is definitely a good start.  That's one of the reasons I argue against tankless water heaters - having 40-60 gallons of stored water is rarely a bad thing.  If you don't have a few weeks' worth of food and medicine that doesn't require electricity to eat, that's also valuable in a very wide range of scenarios.

This post reminds of fallout shelters during the cold war. It can be the most extreme kind of prepping among common people, and it has been the real thing at that time period.All the news and propaganda could have influenced people’s minds and the market for bunkers and shelters had been pretty big, shaping one of the features of the cold one era. Obviously, buying a bunker is not frequent that much anymore and it failed to have a chance to prove its usefulness; we don’t know if they worked against nuclear bombs.  

I have an interesting question, imagine yourself going back to the era, as a middle class. Are you going to buy this bunker? What would be its utility function and satisfying facts?

P.s. oh, I realized this feels like prepping a must-item like water, except that its cost is very very high. If the cost is very high, do we prep the item or not? 

Alex is correct about water. People can go weeks without food but only days without water, so if there's a crisis water is the most important.

I'm not a general prepper, but if an earthquake breaks a bunch of water pipes or something it might take a few days to fix things.

Here in the UK many people did basic prepping against Brexit, by buying lots of canned food in case there were import shortages. (Not surprisingly these were Remainers, ie opposed to Brexit, so more inclined to believe doom-laden narratives about it.)

As it turned out there were no such shortages, nor indeed the predicted miles of food trucks from Europe held up at customs, because supermarkets had planned adequately.

There was also of course a lot of hoarding at the start of covid. A friend of mine bought a second freezer and filled it with a month’s supply of pizzas etc. He also made serious plans to (illegally?) decamp to another part of the UK (and asked me to join him) so as to be very near a major hospital. He researched which hospitals had the most available intensive care beds.