Bryan Caplan of Econlog asks his readers how to improve his will (given a few constraints) in light of the principles of optimal philanthropy. His current draft reads:
I give and bequeath to whatever charity is currently ranked #1 by GiveWell, the sum of $100,000 adjusted for inflation since 2013 using the U.S. Consumer Price Index, or 10% of the total value of my estate excluding our primary residence, whichever is smaller. If GiveWell no longer exists, I give and bequeath the same sum to another charity, selected by my wife and children, dedicated to helping the deserving poor in the Third World in a maximally cost-effective manner. I request that my wife and children consult my friends Robin Hanson, Alexander Tabarrok, Fabio Rojas, James Schneider, Michael Huemer, William Dickens, and Jason Brennan to help them select the most cost-effective charity with this mission. If possible, funding for this bequest should come from my tax-deferred 403(b) retirement accounts.
The full blog post can be found here.
Robin Hanson responds:
I fear "the Third World" might not be a robust reference, and that GiveWell will no longer exist. You might pick some "ex ante % chance that I'd have died by now", such as 25%, and give the money away when you are at an age where you've suffered that % chance. This could ensure at 75% chance that you'll give the money away yourself.
When I clicked through I thought somehow that Caplan was asking for help optimizing his "personal faculty by which he decides on and initiates action" which seemed like a strikingly self-effacing thing to do.
Now that I think about it, writing does seem to be involved in optimizing this faculty even for people who are alive and proud... but somehow it had not occurred to me until just now that other people's last wills and testaments might be an interesting source of inspiration and guidance on what kinds of actions people's faculties tend towards when they are really serious and have only this document to express what they feel to be their true external-world-targeting wishes...
So I've just spent 10 minutes googling around and I can find the text of last will and testament of stray famous people (like George Washinton's) but I can't seem to find an archive of them, much less anything like a statistical analysis of typical targets and allocation ratios. It might be that my google-fu is weak in the areas of jurisprudence/legalities or it might be that there really is a gap in human knowledge here? I'm not sure which.
If there is a gap this seems like a tragedy from the perspective of the study of human volition. I could imagine the gap arising from a simple lack of anyone ever having done the legwork to gather such things up or I could imagine the gap arising from privacy concerns that prevent distribution and archiving of most of them. If the latter, I think maybe an interesting clause that could be added to last will and testaments would be that they be published or otherwise transferred to an archive after a certain amount of time, for the sake of posterity and science :-)