People trying to guard civilisation against catastrophe usually focus on one specific kind of catastrophe at a time. This can be useful for building concrete knowledge with some certainty in order for others to build on it. However, there are disadvantages to this catastrophe-specific approach:
1. Catastrophe researchers (including Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom) think that there are substantial risks from catastrophes that have not yet been anticipated. Resilience-boosting measures may mitigate risks that have not yet been investigated.
2. Thinking about resilience measures in general may suggest new mitigation ideas that were missed by the catastrophe-specific approach.
One analogy for this is that an intrusion (or hack) to a software system can arise from a combination of many minor security failures, each of which might appear innocuous in isolation. You can decrease the chance of an intrusion by adding extra security measures, even without a specific idea of what kind of hacking would be performed. Things like being being able to power down and reboot a system, storing a backup and being able to run it in a "safe" offline mode are all standard resilience measures for software systems. These measures aren't necessarily the first thing that would come to mind if you were trying to model a specific risk like a password getting stolen, or a hacker subverting administrative privileges, although they would be very useful in those cases. So mitigating risk doesn't necessarily require a precise idea of the risk to be mitigated. Sometimes it can be done instead by thinking about the principles required for proper operation of a system - in the case of its software, preservation of its clean code - and the avenues through which it is vulnerable - such as the internet.
So what would be good robustness measures for human civilisation? I have a bunch of proposals:
Disaster forecasting
Disaster research
* Build research labs to survey and study catastrophic risks (like the Future of Humanity Institute, the Open Philanthropy Project and others)
Disaster prediction
* Prediction contests (like IARPA's Aggregative Contingent Estimation "ACE" program)
* Expert aggregation and elicitation
Disaster prevention
General prevention measures
* Build a culture of prudence in groups that run risky scientific experiments
* Lobby for these mitigation measures
* Improving the foresight and clear-thinking of policymakers and other relevant decision-makers
* Build research labs to plan more risk-mitigation measures (including the Centre for Study of Existential Risk)
Preventing intentional violence
* Improve focused surveillance of people who might commit large-scale terrorism (this is controversial because excessive surveillance itself poses some risk)
* Improve cooperation between nations and large institutions
Preventing catastrophic errors
* Legislating for individuals to be held more accountable for large-scale catastrophic errors that they may make (including by requiring insurance premiums for any risky activities)
Disaster response
* Improve political systems to respond to new risks
* Improved vaccine development, quarantine and other pandemic response measures
* Building systems for disaster notification
Disaster recovery
Shelters
* Build underground bomb shelters
* Provide a sheltered place for people to live with air and water
* Provide (or store) food and farming technologies (cf Dave Denkenberger's *Feeding Everyone No Matter What*
* Store energy and energy-generators
* Store reproductive technologies (which could include IVF, artificial wombs or measures for increasing genetic diversity)
* Store information about building the above
* Store information about building a stable political system, and about mitigating future catastrophes
* Store other useful information about science and technology (e.g. reading and writing)
* Store some of the above in submarines
* (maybe) store biodiversity
Space Travel
* Grow (or replicate) the international space station
* Improve humanity's capacity to travel to the Moon and Mars
* Build sustainable settlements on the Moon and Mars
Of course, some caveats are in order.
To begin with, one could argue that surveilling terrorists is a measure specifically designed to reduce the risk from terrorism. But there are a number of different scenarios and methods through which a malicious actor could try to inflict major damage on civilisation, and so I still regard this as a general robustness measure, granted that there is some subjectivity to all of this. If you know absolutely nothing about the risks that you might face, and the structures in society that are to be preserved, then the exercise is futile. So some of the measures on this list will mitigate a smaller subset of risks than others, and that's just how it is, though I think the list is pretty different from the one people think of by using a risk-specific paradigm, which is the reason for the exercise.
Additionally, I'll disclaim that some of these measures are already well invested, and yet others will not be able to be done cheaply or effectively. But many seem to me to be worth thinking more about.
Additional suggestions for this list are welcome in the comments, as are proposals for their implementation.
Related readings
https://www.academia.edu/7266845/Existential_Risks_Exploring_a_Robust_Risk_Reduction_Strategy
http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.pdf
http://users.physics.harvard.edu/~wilson/pmpmta/Mahoney_extinction.pdf
http://gcrinstitute.org/aftermath
http://sethbaum.com/ac/2015_Food.html
http://the-knowledge.org
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ma8/roadmap_plan_of_action_to_prevent_human/
I kind of doubt it. There are virtually no serious non-Marxist economists who believe that artificially raising the cost of labor, capital, or any other economic input diminishes output. The real debate is over whether it is appropriate to do so for other reasons, like fairness, justice, equality, and so on. So, if you really need a citation, I'd say that any first-year economics textbook would do it.
My main point was about the mental process that generated the list. It a constraint on the process that generates the list is that it must be 100% de-politicized, then I wouldn't put much faith in the list. And it reads to me like it has been.
Sure, but that main point again was about the process that led to the list. There's a cost to everything on the list. Just because taxes pay for some item on it doesn't make it free, even in terms of robustness.
One would hope, but they seem to be moving together for the past 20 years or so toward greater regulation, and hence greater fragility. If you can point me to a country whose published laws and regulations are shorter now than they were 10 years ago, I will happily retract the point (and consider buying a second home there).
And I would say that there are some legal jurisdictions that, if they failed quickly enough, could bring down the entirety of civilization. The US and EU are the two that come to mind. Two EMP devices, or two large enough asteroids, might do it.
It was the orthodox explanation in my economic history class that I took in 1988. I sometimes return to the subject to see if anyone has overturned that theory, and have never seen anything along those lines. The regulation was mainly driven by taxation,. The state raised revenues to the point that avoidance was really problematic, then instituted heavy controls on individuals to ensure payment. For example, in the late empire, most taxes were levied in kind; the regulatory response was that the law positively required the eldest son to succeed to his father's profession, property, and station -- so that the authorities could ensure that they were getting the right in-kind taxation. Some Roman citizens abandoned their property in order to avoid taxation, like runaway slaves. There is a theory that this is where serfdom originated, though I suspect the reality was more culturally mixed. The regulation had vast cost beyond the taxes being paid, because it prevented the movement of resources to more productive uses, either by changing jobs or by moving locations.
In any case, the point is that the regulatory structure created civilizational fragility. It didn't take much after that for Rome to fall. I mean seriously -- barbarian invaders? Rome had dealt with that for a thousand years and had always recovered from any reverses. It's like the signature of the Roman Republic that they lost battles, won wars, and came back stronger than before. But the empire became a different thing.
You didn't say "the first-order effect of abolishing labor laws would almost certainly be some increase in economic output", you said "abolishing all labor law would vastly increase the size of the economy". There are two differences here.
Either would suffice to make your proposal to settle the issue by consulting "any ... (read more)