Global Priorities Guest Seminar (Friday - Week 3, TT19)

The talk will present some economic approaches to catastrophe aversion. Standard approaches and policy-making applications (e.g., climate change policy evaluation) capture catastrophe aversion through the notions of risk aversion or the value of a statistical life. These approaches however lack sensitivity to the correlation of individuals’ risks of dying. After introducing a formal definition of a more catastrophic situation and of catastrophe aversion, the talk will discuss whether some social choice settings such as utilitarianism or prioritarianism capture catastrophe aversion, and explain why catastrophe aversion may conflict with equity concerns.

Global Priorities seminar webpage: https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/seminar-schedule/