All Episodes - Professor Jonathan B. Wiener - 26 July 2017 - The Tragedy of the Uncommons

DESCRIPTIONIn this public lecture, Professor Jonathan B. Wiener, formulates a distinct type of problem: ‘the tragedy of the uncommons’, involving the misperception and mismanagement of rare catastrophic risks.The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a classic type of problem, involving multiple actors who face individual incentives to deplete shared resources and thereby impose harms on others. Such tragedies can be overcome if societies learn through experience to mobilize collective action.Although the problem of rare and global catastrophic risk has been much discussed, its sources and solutions need to be better understood. Descriptively, one identifies psychological heuristics and political forces that underlie neglect of rare catastrophic ‘uncommons’ risks, notably the unavailability heuristic, mass numbing, and underdeterrence. Normatively, one can argue that, for rare catastrophic risks, it is the inability to learn from experience, rather than uncertainty, that offers the best case

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