This Is the Way the World Ends, Not With a Bang but Bonds and Bullets

Abstract

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This article explores instinctive frames of human decision-making in environmental and resource economics. Higher-moment asset pricing combines rational, mathematically informed economic reasoning with psychological and biological insights. Leptokurtic blindness and skewness preference combine in particularly challenging ways for carbon mitigation. At their worst, human heuristics may generate perverse decisions. Information uncertainty and the innate preference for bonds-and-bullets portfolios may impair responses to catastrophic climate change.

Keywords

• skewness
• kurtosis
• information uncertainty
• irreversibility
• environmental economics
• asset pricing