Many questions about existential risk are speculative and hard to answer. Even specific ones, like "How have the odds of nuclear war changed after the United States withdrew from the Iran deal?", are still multi-layered and rather chaotic. Because of this, there haven't been many attempts at answering general questions ones even when they could be more significant. One such question is: what's the effect of economic growth on existential risk?

Leopold Aschenbrenner's paper "Existential Risk and Growth" (2020) begins to answer this. Since it seems like hasn't gotten as much attention as it should, hopefully more people will read this paper after this book review. Since there's this good summary already out there, and already good discussion over this, I'll instead summarise that discussion with additional thoughts that are mine to save time for anyone who's interested. Any errors included here are mine.

Summary

TLDR:

Continued economic growth is needed to better mitigate risks of existential catastrophes. Or as Aschenbrenner states:

It is not safe stagnation and risky growth that we must choose between; rather, it is stagnation that is risky and it is growth that leads to safety.

Longer summary:

Out of existential risks that are human-induced many could be caused by some sort of technological progress. As Nick Bostrom imagines, the process of technological development is like "pulling balls out of a giant urn".

But because technology can outpace safety mechanisms that can regulate it, economic growth could be our best shot to develop the capacity for these safety mechanisms. Examples of dangerous technologies and thier respective safety mechanisms include climate change / carbon capture technology, artificial intelligence / successful alignment.

The paper argues that if humanity is currently in a "time of perils", which is when we are advanced enough to have developed the means for our destruction but not advanced enough to care about safety, stagnation doesn't solve the problem because we would just stagnate at the same level of risk. Eventually a nuclear war would doom humanity. Intead, faster economic growth could initially increase risk, but would also help us get past the time of perils more quickly.

As economic growth makes people richer, they will invest more in safety, protecting against existential catastrophes. This is because the value of safety increases as...

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