一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day11 passage4
Passage 4 Costing Catastrophe
人类准备好应对灾难了吗? 《经济学人》
Would people be prepared to pay to avoid future disasters? And if so,
how much? That is the question tackled by Robert Pindyck
of MIT's Sloan School of Management in a recent paper.
It is not easy to calculate accurately the likelihood of disasters.
Some, such as rising sea levels or nuclear weapons gone rogue,
have few historical precedents on which to base estimates.
So Messrs Pindyck chose instead to model how likely people think it is that
a catastrophe will occur,
and how much money they would be prepared to spend to prevent it.
In his model, the hypothetical household had to decide both the likelihood
[01:00]of a potential catastrophe and its magnitude,
[01:04]since a high-risk disaster with little consequence
[01:08]would affect spending behavior differently to a rare but devastating event.
[01:16]The model has the disadvantage of being,
[01:19]like many economic models, theoretical.
[01:24]But it has the advantages of not requiring people
[01:29]to have perfect information about the future,
[01:34]and being applicable to any disaster-not just climate change,
[01:39]but flu epidemics or widespread warfare.
[01:44]Sky-is-falling economic modeling, so to speak, is not new.
[01:50]Two decades ago a paper by Thomas Reitz, then of the University of Iowa,
[01:59]pointed out that equity owners, even while acting averse to risk,
[02:05]demand high rates of return in anticipation of an unlikely, but severe, crash.
[02:14]More recently Richard Posner, of the University of Chicago,
[02:20]has argued at length that governments should spend more to prevent disasters
[02:26]that will probably not happen, but would be awful if they did.
[02:31]Mr Posner's blogging partner, Gary Becker, an economist,
[02:37]estimated in May the worldwide willingness to pay to avoid another flu pandemic
[02:45]at about $200 billion, even assuming the probability of such a pandemic occurring
[02:54]at only 1% over the next 20 years.
[02:59]Messrs Pindyck's study lends credence to previous work
[03:04]which maps not only the probability of a risk occurring,
[03:09]but also the expected damage should it occur. In his model,
[03:16]even when a hypothetical consumer estimates the risk of a disaster occurring is close to zero,
[03:25]he still estimates the scale of potential devastation to be
[03:30]between 26% and 32% of national capital stock, far greater
[03:37]than the effects of Hurricane Katrina or even the 2004 tsunami.
[03:44]To avoid such a disaster entirely, or reduce its impact,
[03:49]the households in the model would be willing to pay a permanent consumption tax of up to 15%,
[03:57]depending on the size of the reduction and the likelihood of catastrophe.