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OrphanWilde comments on Improving long-run civilisational robustness - Less Wrong
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This is an intended as a provocation to think outside your box. I hope you take it in the spirit intended.
If you are really brainstorming around the risk of a collapse of civilization due to some catastrophe, it is really hard to think outside your own political preferences. I say this from experience because I shy away from certain solutions (and even from acknowledging the problem). So allow me to suggest that your own limitations are making you avoid what I'd call ugly choices.
You suggest international cooperation as a way to prevent widespread destruction. Well, maybe. But there are two to four countries that have developed or are developing nuclear weapons and missile systems and that the rest of the world seems to treat as unstable. So one solution to that problem is invade them, destroy their facilities for nuclear and missile research, remove their leadership, and remove their relevant scientists and technical personnel. Why neither that problem nor that solution on your list? There is at least one recent example of a country invading another country after taking a public position that the second country had weapons of mass destruction. Was your omission because of that experience?
Many of your proposals seem oriented towards saving as many people as possible, rather than saving civilization. If civilization falls, the resulting economy will probably not produce enough food quickly enough to feed everyone. (Me? I'll starve in year 1 , if I survive that long.) Why propose to spend resources on things that do not actually improve civilization's robustness (like widely distributed gas masks when their recipients starve in the following winter)?
Economic growth creates more resources that can be used for resilience. Our current laws reduce both the maximum potential growth rate and the growth rate we actually have. For example, abolishing all labor law would vastly increase the size of the economy. Why does your list not embrace whatever political policies induce the fastest economic growth?
Relatedly, one major civilization that fell due to its own laws was probably the Roman empire. It choked off its own economic growth through regulations intended to support its taxation structure, until it could not sustain its own weight. Why does your list not include that kind of threat to civilization?
I think there is commonality in these items, but that might be in the eye of the beholder.
[citation needed], as the saying goes.
I agree that the list should include something like "Pursuing rapid economic growth". But (1) it would probably be a mistake for the list to pick specific economic policies on the basis that they produce the fastest economic growth, since then the discussion would be in danger of being politicized by, say, an advocate of some particular economic/political policy that happens to differ from the one assumed in the list. (Of course that would never happen if the OP declined to pick favourites in this fashion.) And (2) fastest economic growth should not be the only criterion, unless that really is the only thing that influences robustness, which it may well not be. E.g., a policy might produce faster growth but also greater danger of violent and destructive revolution. Or it might produce faster growth but also introduce more single points of failure where one asteroid strike or serious outbreak of illness or terrorist act could bring everything down.
To take an example you already gave: laws restricting how unpleasant employers can make their employees' lives may reduce economic growth but also make it less likely that there's a violent uprising by workers fed up of their unpleasant lives.
As I understand it, RyanCarey is interested in threats to human civilization as a whole rather than to individual human civilizations. Human civilization as a whole doesn't have laws, regulations, taxation, etc. If one nation collapses under the weight of its own regulatory burden then others will presumably take note.
(How widely held, and how well supported, is the theory that the Roman empire failed because of overregulation and overtaxation? It's not a claim I've heard before, but I am about as far from being an expert in late Roman history as it is possible to be. In particular, how widely accepted is this theory outside circles in which everything is blamed on overregulation and overtaxation?)
Overtaxation is a standard reason given for the fall of the Roman Empire, and I'm surprised you haven't heard of that before. I've never heard of overregulation being a reason; I've never looked into the Roman regulatory state, and have no idea how burdensome it was, or even if it substantively existed.
It seems to be very unclear what effect the Edict on Maximum Prices actually had -- it looks as if the inflation caused by repeated currency debasement was the primary problem.