It does depend on what values you are maximizing for, though.
Are you maximizing for your own survival, or for the survival of the human race? If you think there’s a 10% chance an nuclear war in the next 50 years large enough to wipe out the human race, and you think that our species spending a billion dollars on fallout shelters increases our species chances of surviving that scenario by 5%, then spending that money increases our chance of surviving the next fifty years by .5%. That doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me; if it’s not worth doing at that cost, you’re valuing the “survival of the human race” at less then 200 billion dollars. (Mitigation of .5% risk is worth a billion dollars if the total value is greater then 200 billion dollars.) Of course, I did just pull those numbers out of thin air; the 10% figure is probably either reasonable or somewhat optimistic, given the last 60 years, but I don’t know how to estimate the odds that fallout shelters might decrease the extinction chance.
You’re probably right that if you’re only worried about protecting your own life, it’s probably not the best investment. But as far as existential risk mitigation goes, that might be more cost effective then in the short term, say, spending a billion dollars on asteroid impact avoidance. (Of course, efforts that actually reduce the chances of nuclear war are still better.)
It does depend on what values you are maximizing for, though.
Are you maximizing for your own survival, or for the survival of the human race? If you think there’s a 10% chance an nuclear war in the next 50 years large enough to wipe out the human race, and you think that our species spending a billion dollars on fallout shelters increases our species chances of surviving that scenario by 5%, then spending that money increases our chance of surviving the next fifty years by .5%. That doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me; if it’s not worth doing at that cost, you’re valuing the “survival of the human race” at less then 200 billion dollars. (Mitigation of .5% risk is worth a billion dollars if the total value is greater then 200 billion dollars.) Of course, I did just pull those numbers out of thin air; the 10% figure is probably either reasonable or somewhat optimistic, given the last 60 years, but I don’t know how to estimate the odds that fallout shelters might decrease the extinction chance.
You’re probably right that if you’re only worried about protecting your own life, it’s probably not the best investment. But as far as existential risk mitigation goes, that might be more cost effective then in the short term, say, spending a billion dollars on asteroid impact avoidance. (Of course, efforts that actually reduce the chances of nuclear war are still better.)
Edit: math error corrected