Pablo_Stafforini comments on A Rational Altruist Punch in The Stomach - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Neotenic 01 April 2013 12:42AM

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Comment author: Elithrion 01 April 2013 01:44:54AM *  21 points [-]

I'm not sure what an investment in a particular far-future time would look like. Money does not, in fact, breed and multiply when left in a vault for long enough. It increases by being invested in things that give payoffs or otherwise rise in value. Even if you have a giant stockpile of cash and put it in a bank savings account, the bank will then take it and lend it out to people who will make use of it for whatever projects they're up to. If you do that, all you're doing is letting the bank (and the borrowers) choose the uses of your money for the first while, and then when you eventually take it out you take the choice back and make it yourself. The one way I can think of to actually invest in the distant future is to find or create some project that will have a massive payoff in the distant future but low payoffs before that, and I don't think anyone knows of a project that pays off further than 100 years in the future.

Maybe you could try to create a fund that explicitly looks for far-future payoff opportunities and invests in them, but I don't think one exists right now, and the idea is non-trivial.

I dunno, maybe there's something else I'm missing, though.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 01 April 2013 04:05:17PM *  2 points [-]

I'm not sure what an investment in a particular far-future time would look like.

Maybe like this:

Franklin [left] £1000 each to Philadelphia and Boston in his will to be invested for 200 years. He died in 1790, and by 1990 the funds had grown to 2.3, 5M$, giving factors of 35, 76 inflation-adjusted gains, for annual returns of 1.8, 2.2%.

Comment author: Elithrion 01 April 2013 05:25:23PM *  7 points [-]

This is more like a conservative investment in various things by the managing funds for 200 years, followed by a reckless investment in the cities of Philadelphia and Boston at the end of 200 years. It probably didn't do particularly more for the people 200 years from the time than it did for people in the interim.

Also, the most recent comment by cournot is interesting on the topic:

You may also be using the wrong deflators. If you use standard CPI or other price indices, it does seem to be a lot of money. But if you think about it in terms of relative wealth you get a different figure [and standard price adjustments aren't great for looking far back in the past]. I think a pound was about 5 dollars. So if we assume that 1000 pounds = 5000 nominal dollars and we use the Econ History's price deflators http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ we find that this comes to over $2M if we use the unskilled wage and about $5M if we use nominal GDP. As a relative share of GDP, this figure would have been an enormous $380M or so. The latter is not an irrelevant calculation.

Given how wealthy someone had to be (relative to the poor in the 18th century) to fork over a thousand pounds in Franklin's time, he might have done more good with it then than you could do with 2 to 5 million bucks today.

Comment author: Neotenic 02 April 2013 01:27:09PM 0 points [-]

That is unreasonable because we have more access to means of helping the poor today. If you expect the trend to go on into the future, than 2 million tomorrow is always better than a thousand today, which approximates maximal 3 lives on AMF of SCI

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