It's not a new idea, right? People are bad at valuing far-off very-bad risks compared to inconsequential but tangible near-term risks. And bad at valuing broadly distributed hardships versus concentrated individual pain.
It's exactly why we can't solve climate change, right?
It’s one reason we’ve had trouble solving climate change (I wouldn’t go so far as to say we can’t).
Two more reasons:
1. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons, where many actors, at the individual, corporate, and national level, have incentives to worsen the problem even if nearly everyone would benefit if they all behaved differently.
2. The climate is a complex system, so it’s hard to educate the public about how it works, and easy for bad faith actors or pseudoscientific cranks to obfuscate the discussion.
3. It is also easy for bad faith actors to exploit the response for their own benefit, undermining the nascent response directly, and undermining it indirectly by undermining those who argue for change with integrity
It's exactly why we can't solve climate change, right?