The Paradox of Doom: Acknowledging Extinction Risk Reduces the Incentive to Prevent It

Jakub Growiec and Klaus Prettner

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We investigate the salience of extinction risk as a source of impatience. Our framework distinguishes between human extinction risk and individual mortality risk while allowing for various degrees of intergenerational altruism. Additionally, we consider the evolutionarily motivated "selfish gene" perspective. We find that the risk of human extinction is an indispensable component of the discount rate, whereas individual mortality risk can be hedged against - partially or fully, depending on the setup - through human reproduction. 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. Our framework can help explain why humanity consistently underinvests in mitigation of catastrophic risks, ranging from climate change mitigation, via pandemic prevention, to addressing the emerging risks of transformative artificial intelligence.

Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-rmg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04855 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Paradox of Doom: Acknowledging Extinction Risk Reduces the Incentive to Prevent It (2025)
Working Paper: The Paradox of Doom: Acknowledging Extinction Risk Reduces the Incentive to Prevent It (2025)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2509.04855

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().