Theological Paranoia

Say you're God and you want to kill of all of humanity, but in such a way that no-one will know that it's you (as is your want). How would you do it? You might consider what humans' weaknesses are, in order to exploit them.

Addictive behaviour? Doesn't seem to be universal enough, even if you try to compensate with substantial negative externalities. Eg. Smoking.
Risk Management and Natural Disasters? It seems like people aren't very good at anticipating rare, catastrophic events. But humans would be on to you with this one, they've already labelled these 'acts of God'.

There are plenty of others, but I think your best bet would be a lethal collective action problem dispersed across the entire world. Humans are broadly self-interested, and at the very best can only consistently be altruistic in quite a limited way. So if you set things up in such a way that heaps of their actions have costs which they themselves don't have to bear, they will by and large do little about it, while collectively making themselves slowly worse off, to the point of self-extermination, if you set it up right. It would be more effective if it was dispersed across the whole world, because that makes it harder for people to bargain with each other and come to better outcomes that way.

That sounds pretty effective, but here's how you could make it even more deadly. You would make the costs so dispersed and hard to see that it would take the smartest people in the world to notice that they actually existed. Secondly, you would notice that academics aren't very good at collaborating across genres, so you make it a massive cross-disciplinary project to determine the costs precisely.

Finally, you set up a lot of the industries that produce the most cost with high fixed costs, and economies of scale. This makes them naturally fairly uncompetitive, that is, you have a small number of big companies producing in those areas. So there will be strong incentives on very powerful interests to resist pricing in the costs appropriately.

So far, so hypothetical. It's lucky for us that God loves us and... wait. Uh oh.

We are screwed.

My Favourite Blog

My favourite blog at the moment (apart from yours of course, if you have one!) is My First Dictionary. If you like black humour, I recommend it.

Free Book

They say there's no such thing as a free lunch, but you can always get someone else to pay for you. Become a fan of Sir Roger Douglas on facebook (which you can do here) and he will send you a copy of his latest book. I have no idea what the book is about (although the title is suggestive), but something in me can never say no to a free book. I have therefore become a fan, and my book is apparently on its way.

Depending on your politics and friend circles, you might argue that publicly becoming his fan is the cost, which you bear to your reputation. That's probably true; I probably wouldn't, for example, become a fan of Hitler to get a free copy of Mein Kampf. Still, if you have non-judgemental friends, it looks win-win.

No word on whether he does overseas shipping. If he doesn't, is that protectionism?