Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think so too. I don’t know if that counts as very low, but again, it’s going to happen sooner or later. And how stable is it if you just trade one nuke back and forth, two countries? We don’t know, right? It’s never happened. I think the chance that that happens within 30 years is easily, say, 5 percent? How destabilizing it will be? Do you have an immediate global financial crisis? Or do markets just react like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Some currencies go up, some go down. It’s a terrible tragedy, but for most of the world, kind of-sort of life goes on after these terrible tragic deaths. We don’t know. Someone came to me, and they were asking for advice, as they sometimes do, on what can they do to improve the long-term future? They were deciding between increasing economic growth and, say, working to prevent a nuclear war or great power war between the U.S. and China. I would almost always recommend that they work on the latter because I feel there are far fewer people who are working on that problem, so it’s substantially more neglected. What would you have to say to them?…

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