What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

How can societies best deal with risks that are potentially catastrophic? Andrew Leigh, an Australian politician, seeks to answer this question by exploring what he believes are the biggest existential risks facing humanity—pandemics, climate change, nuclear weapons, and artificial intelligence. His argument is that private people tend to underestimate the odds of extreme events, especially those that may occur in the future, and their magnitude. Well-functioning governments, therefore, are necessary to fill the gap through well-designed policies that take account of these risks both in the immediate term and in the long term. The rise of populism, however, threatens the effectiveness of government to respond to these threats while posing a direct threat to democracy.

Leigh begins by referencing the philosopher Toby Ord (The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Hachette Books, 2020) who estimates the odds of human extinction over the next century at one in six. He then dedicates a chapter to each of the four aforementioned risks. Each chapter discusses the threat and then proposes high-level solutions. For instance, Leigh ends his discussion of climate change by proposing shifting energy production to renewables, government subsidization of clean technology, phasing out polluting technologies, and the importance of governments working together.

In Leigh’s telling, populism threatens the ability of political institutions to address these existential risks. Populism frames “politics as a conflict between crooked elites and the pure mass of people” (p. 10). Leigh offers four reasons why populism poses a threat to addressing long-term risks. First, populists are anti-intellectual in that they are skeptical of experts, who are viewed as part of the elite. This means that populist leaders will tend to ignore the proposals and warnings of experts related to potentially catastrophic threats. Second, populists are anti-institutional, meaning they tend to be critical of organizations, such as government agencies and the media. This limits the design and implementation of effective policies and the communication of accurate information to the public. Third, populists are anti-international, meaning they are skeptical of immigrants, international trade and investment, and global international organizations (e.g., the World Bank and the IMF). This zero-sum framing limits cooperation and coordination on policy to address risks while potentially generating tensions which increase the chances of threats becoming realities, as in the case of nuclear war. Finally, populists benefit from disagreement and division rather than cooperation and consensus. This politics of division makes it difficult to focus on long-term threats because of the priority of focusing on the immediate threat posed by “others.” Leigh warns that, under certain circumstances, populism can result in the death of democracy and the rise of totalitarianism.

What is to be done? Leigh suggests both marginal changes (holding elections on weekends rather than weekdays to increase turnout) and major changes (compulsory voting) to increase voter participation. At the congressional level, he suggests independent redistricting to limit partisan redistricting. He also advocates for rank-choice voting where voters order their candidates according to their rank preference. Leigh believes this will give voters more options and the ability to better express their preferences. Other proposals include upholding democratic norms as important “guardrails” and better civic education to foster an informed electorate.

The main strength of the book is pushing readers to think about the issue of catastrophic risks. The main weakness is that in discussing how to address these risks, Leigh focuses exclusively on government solutions. He makes his assumptions explicit early in the book—“Private citizens can achieve many things, but preventing nuclear war, averting bioterrorism, and curbing greenhouse emissions are fundamentally problems of government. Governments control the military, levy taxes, and provide public goods. So, the values of those who run the country will determine how much of a priority the nation places on averting catastrophe” (p. 14). In assuming that government is the solution, Leigh neglects five important issues.

One is that government is often the cause of existential risks. Nuclear weapons exist because of the warmaking capabilities and investments of governments. Further, the risk of the use of nuclear weapons is heightened when some nations engage in military activities which make others feel less safe. Leigh is right to note that governments are important for preventing nuclear war, but it is important to note that they are solely responsible for the threat of nuclear war in the first place.

A second issue is that governments do not just produce public goods, but also public bads. For example, the government provision of the military generates numerous bads, including significant environmental damage (the Pentagon is one of the world’s largest producers of greenhouse gases). Given this, are military activities a public good or a public bad? It depends on how one looks at the matter. Interventions in complex systems can never do just one thing, so any effort to generate a good on certain margins may generate bads on others. In emphasizing only the public good aspects of government (by assumption), Leigh overstates the net benefits of state action by ignoring the potential bads generated by these activities. The production of bads means that the state may become an existential threat itself, whose existence is justified on the grounds of mitigating existential threats.

Third, government responses to emergencies, whether actual or potential, are often a source of permanent increases in government power. As documented by Robert Higgs (Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, Oxford University Press, 1987), the push to “do something” in the face of a crisis situation often leads to increases in the overall size (scale and scope) of government, including reductions in the freedoms and liberties of the citizens, which remain after the crisis subsides. What if, in addressing the existential risks highlighted by Leigh, government facilitates the “death of democracy” that he associates almost purely with populism?

Fourth, Leigh fails to clearly identify how his political fixes will avoid the political dysfunctions associated with populism. What if citizens desire populist candidates and policies? Leigh seems to assume that political leaders drive political preferences. This might be the case, but it is not the only possible scenario. For instance, states might increase civic education (what exactly this increased education entails is left unsaid by Leigh), move elections to weekends, and require people to vote, only have them select populist leaders. What is to be done in such scenarios? State experts overruling the desires of voters will result in the totalitarianism Leigh detests. There is also little to no discussion of other sources of political frictions—e.g., special interest groups and regulatory capture—that can result in narrow opportunism irrespective of the ideology of those in power.

The final issue is Leigh’s preoccupation with top-down solutions (seeing like a state) and his inability to appreciate the potential for bottom-up (seeing like a citizen) solutions to the risks he identifies. Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, 1990) documented the ability of ordinary citizens to navigate collective action situations where theory would suggest they are incapable of doing so. She also highlighted that environmental issues, including climate change, require polycentric, rather than monocentric, solutions that appreciate the diverse and context-specific nature of the challenges (“Polycentric Systems for Coping with Collective Action and Global Environmental Change,” Global Environmental Change, 2010, 20(4): 550–557). In this scenario, a top-down, one-size-fits-all policy is likely to miss key opportunities for change if not be altogether ineffective.

The historian Lawrence Wittner (Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, Stanford University Press, 2009), documents how the global nuclear disarmament movement was a key factor in pressuring governments not to use nuclear weapons in the post-1945 period. This movement, which included millions of people around the world, was diverse and bottom-up rather than centrally coordinated or planned by some centralized coercive apparatus. To the extent Wittner is correct, it is ordinary people, and not the state as per Leigh’s contention, who are crucial to limiting nuclear war. In fact, it is everyday people who have mitigated the existential risks created by government’s investment in the tools of destruction that threaten the very existence of humanity.

In sum, Leigh is correct to highlight the possibility of catastrophic events and to push us to think about how the associated risks can be mitigated. Narrowly focusing on government as the solution, however, neglects the catastrophic risks posed by states themselves. It also overlooks the ability of people outside of the state to exercise their creativity in ways that foster resilience in the face of an array of diverse threats and risks.