Growth and Exisential Risk

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I want to research the relationship between growth and existential to createdecision-relevant research aimed at supporting philanthropists seeking toprevent our extinction. I would collaborate with the Global Priorities Institute atthe University of Oxford as well as the Centre for the Study of ExistentialRisks at Cambridge to determine the most pressing areas of research. In myresearch proposal, I present a preliminary idea. I propose to adopt the model proposed by Aschenbrenner (2020), which summaries the economy in terms of consumption (which increases existential risk) and safety (which reduces it) to incorporate philanthropist, altruistic activities, and the potential to change the preferences of agents through a 'value' sector. This seeks to capture the options faced by a philanthropist who wishes to reduce the risk of extinction and would explore whether philanthropists should allocate resources directly towards safety or whether they should aim instead to alter agents' preferences, and if so in what way. One might expect the optimal strategy of the philanthropist to involve initially attempting to increase the altruism of agents to gather more resources, before aiming to increase the patience of agents, allocating resources towards safety directly and decreasing the point at which agents become (relatively) satiated by consumption.