Maybe not “worship” exactly, but at least great respect and deference. By “efficient” I mean that it increases economists’ standard “cost-benefit” concept of welfare. That is: as usually estimated, the benefits of deferring greatly to distant ancestors
Personally,, if I signed up for Cryonics, and then future generations discovered with certainty that it was impossible to bring me back to life (my brain had degraded enough that sufficient information wasn't available, or maybe they discover that souls exist or something), I would consider it entirely reasonable for them to dispose of my body and turn the resources towards something else.
The "with certainty" part makes the comparison slightly harder, since while we haven't found any evidence to support the idea that an afterlife exists, we haven't found any evidence disproving it either...In this case though, I get the impression that the modern Catholic Church most likely no longer supports the idea that prayers can reduce time in purgatory, which could be construed as a "discovery" of new "evidence" that prayers no longer reduce time in purgatory.
There seems to be some confusion here between utility and cash. Let's suppose you'd be willing to donate one ancient monetary unit towards a compounding charity in 3000BC if we agree to perform actions in the distant future where you knowing that these actions will be performed give you one utility at the time you create the fund. If it could compound as claimed (imagine no-one stole the money), then we'd still come out ahead even if it took an absurdly large amount of money to produce that one utility.
The problem is that utility doesn't compound. One utility now is the same as one utility later. Any future interest deductions come from the odds being that you won't actually receive the one utility later, say if you die or the company goes out of business.
> "As recently as 1903, Pope Pius X was still able to tabulate the number of days' remission from purgatory that each rank in the hierarchy was entitled to grant: cardinals two hundred days, archbishops a hundred days, bishops a mere fifty days. By his time, however, indulgences were no longer sold directly for money. Even in the Middle Ages, money was not the only currency in which you could buy parole from purgatory. You could pay in prayers too, either your own before death or the prayers of others on your behalf, after your death. And money could buy prayers. If you were rich, you could lay down provision for your soul in perpetuity. My own Oxford College, New College, was founded in 1379 (it was new then) by one of that century's great philanthropists, William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. A medieval bishop could become the Bill Gates of the age, controlling the equivalent of the information highway (to God), and amassing huge riches. His diocese was exceptionally large, and Wykeham used his wealth and influence to found two great educational establishments, one in Winchester and one in Oxford. Education was important to Wykeham, but, in the words of the official New College history, published in 1979 to mark the sixth centenary, the fundamental purpose of the college was 'as a great chantry to make intercession for the repose of his soul. He provided for the service of the chapel by ten chaplains, three clerks and sixteen choristers, and he ordered that they alone were to be retained if the college's income failed.' Wykeham left New College in the hands of the Fellowship, a self-electing body which has been continuously in existence like a single organism for more than six hundred years. Presumably he trusted us to continue to pray for his soul through the centuries.>> Today the college has only one chaplain* and no clerks, and the steady century-by-century torrent of prayers for Wykeham in purgatory has dwindled to a trickle of two prayers per year. The choristers alone go from strength to strength and their music is, indeed, magical. Even I feel a twinge of guilt, as a member of that Fellowship, for a trust betrayed. In the understanding of his own time, Wykeham was doing the equivalent of a rich man today making a large down payment to a cryogenics company which guarantees to freeze your body and keep it insulated from earthquakes, civil disorder, nuclear war and other hazards, until some future time when medical science has learned how to unfreeze it and cure whatever disease it was dying of. Are we later Fellows of New College reneging on a contract with our Founder? If so, we are in good company. Hundreds of medieval benefactors died trusting that their heirs, well paid to do so, would pray for them in purgatory. I can't help wondering what proportion of Europe's medieval treasures of art and architecture started out as down payments on eternity, in trusts now betrayed."
The cryonics comparison is disquieting; it's one thing when we're ripping off those stupid gullible theists...
You can't contract with people that will live in the future.
What you can do is decide what resources future people will have by deciding how much you will consume today versus saving or investing. Whatever you don't consume before you die will become someone else's.
Robin supposes that there are win-win deals to be made between the generations, if only the future could be committed to agreeing to the present's desires. "I won't chop down the forest and use it to make fires to keep me warm; instead, I'll leave the trees for your own use after I die... but only if you promise to cut a few of them down and use them to build totem poles with my face on them." But this isn't a win-win deal; it's not a deal at all. The future doesn't get to reject the offer or negotiate on the price. The present does whatever they want, and the future gets what they get.
That means we can't take advantage of markets and price discovery mechanisms to determine what the efficient trades are. The best we can do is to make those trades in which the resources donated to the future are very large and the costs imposed on the future are very small, so as to ensure that the trade is actually beneficial to the future. The limit case here, of course, is intergenerational altruism, where resources are donated to the future for free. This happens all the time. But suppose we'd like to increase this on the margin? Can the future "offer" something to the present in order to find more win-win "deals"?
Would paying people in the future to carry out the wishes of the present increase the amount of donation from the present to the future? Will you get more donations to a fund that says "Save our grandchildren and have your name carved on a monument" than one that just says "Save our grandchildren"? And if so, do we need stronger inter-generational commitment mechanisms to enable those win-win trades?
I'm inclined to think that the amount of gains to be made here is small, at best, and might even be negative. First off, I think the value to the present of "leave a bunch of money to my descendents" is much, much greater than the value to the present of "have my descendents remember my name" (or worship my god, or be vegetarian, or structure their society according to the dictates of my favorite socio-political theory). In other words, I doubt there's a lot of win-win trades being left on the table due to lack of enforcement mechanisms, at least relative to the size of the altruistic trades which require no such mechanisms. Second, I think the existing enforcement mechanisms we already have in place do well to enforce those trades where the cost to the future is small (e.g. erecting a monument, writing someone's name in a book someplace) while ignoring those that would be very costly (e.g. holding on to outdated and obviously erroneous beliefs). Since the present is very, very likely to have erroneous estimates of the cost to the future of their demands, this selective abrogation of the "terms" of the "contract" by the future actually serves to improve efficiency, not reduce it.
Re: "Many folks would be willing to create trusts that accumulated funds long after their death and then paid distant descendants (perhaps indirectly) to do things like remember their ancestor’s name, pray to his gods, etc."
Which folks are those? Such a policy makes little sense to me. Why not just give the resources to your direct descendants - as most biological systems who contribute resources to future generations do?
So you are saying that the British lawyers and judges who developed the law against perpetuities were merely acting out of "unthinking repugnance" and a desire to steal the dead's resources? A brave claim to make, that other people are not merely being irrational but unthinking.
It may not be *obvious* that the dead will persistently make the wrong trade-off between flexibility and putting their preferences into trusts, but plenty of non-obvious things are true (eg refrigerators manage to cool things). If the experience of a number of lawyers and judges over a massive variety of trial cases is that old trusts keep causing problems by being inflexibile when asset use needs to change, then a rule against perpetuaties is not unthinking repugnance. It might still be wrong, but my Bayesian priors are with the British common law system on this point. The prosperity of the UK and its offshoots (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ) doesn't match with a hypothesis that the English system was being run by fools.
In reply to Doug's comment, I agree with John. I can currently experience utility at the low chance that the world will end and at lowering that chance. I cannot experience disutility at the time after my death. I can currently have preferences about future states of the universe, but I cannot have any utility after I'm dead.
Jess, we could (for some values of could) currently be living in a handful of 'fake' worlds (simulation, Cartesian evil demon, solipsistic hallucination). As long as we cannot tell the difference, we cannot have different utilities in the two situations. I say this as a physicalist, if they are absolutely indistinguishable (to us) they are identical (to us). I can (do) value living in a real universe and would not willingly enter a simulated universe (in general). This is a statement about my current preferences over future states, not preferences I will have in the future after I am gone.Or a different interpretation of Jess's comment (I don't know which is correct); if someone forces my brain patterns into some state (say the state it is in now), at that time I will be experiencing the same utility that I am now. Again, I say this as a physicalist; there is no spirit floating above my mind checking my utility function. I currently do not value that state as highly as the free state, but that is a statement about my current state, not the future state.That was kind of rambling, sorry, I guess my point is that I can currently have preferences over the probabilities for the future, but cannot experience utility at that future time if I am dead.
By 1800 early trusts grew a billion-fold, and trusts dominate the economy.
The trusts assets are quietly leached away by the trustees. Does this remind anyone of the Anthony Trollope novella "The Warden"?
And Richard Dawkins pointed out in The God Delusion that his college at Cambridge was originally founded mainly to pray for the soul of its founder, Bishop Wycome of Winchester in 1379. Originally it had ten chaplains who produced a constant stream of prayers for him. Now there is one chaplain. And two prayers a year.
Let me tell you a story. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was a large tribe of people whose sole religion, their one true passion, was to see that, in fifteen thousand years, Robin Hanson would give me all of his money and property.
Here's the question: whether they never existed, or whether they're just all dead, what difference should that make in RH's decision? His actions cannot provide them with direct satisfaction, and they'll never know what he did, but he would be fulfilling their one great aspiration. Even if giving up all his property distracts him from his effort to continuously breed so as to satisfy the wants of the non-existent, it should still be a net win.
Well, for one, the members of English monasteries in the 1530s would have begged to disagree. What reason is there to think that these hypothetical trusts would be able to grow to such vast sizes without attracting the same sort of unwanted attention?
You seem to claim that allowing long-term trusts would lead to win-win deals with the past, but I can't quite see how that follows.
Usually, enforced contracts increase efficiency because if two parties spot a win-win deal, they are able to commit to it. Conversely they will not commit unless the deal is win-win, since it would not be in the interests of at least one of them. So the efficiency of contracts depends on both parties having veto power.
But your scenario is different: a change of laws to recognize trusts amounts to simply taking a bunch of stuff (all assets in the year 2200) and reallocating them from one party (the people of 2200) to another party (the people of 2010). The people of 2200 are not consenting to this, because they are not here now. Why should we think that such a reallocation would be a Pareto improvement?
But lets follow that conclusion through. Lower interest rates mean that ancestors have less leverage over descendants. Thus, there is a strong self-tempering mechanism here.
It would be like saying given the current price the market for X would be so much bigger if we could expand the number of customers. However, if the number of customers expands then the price will rise and that will choke back demand.
So, we are thinking of much smaller effects than a world dominated by ancestor trusts.
1. Don't you really have a perfect as the enemy of the good problem? The rule against perpetuities and its variants may represent a balancing that gives trustors control for as long as you could hope a society in the future would allow it. If trusts were unlimited and if they grew even at rates much lower than your guess, they would be targetted with punitive taxation as Vladimir mentions above. How to fund health care? I know! That dead rich guy has a lot of money while poor people are going without Tamoxifin and Minoxidil!
2. Your dead hand returns seem to be based on no taxation and (since you go back to 3000 BC) no regime change/confiscation, which wasn't true for the living or the dead. England is probably the only example that comes close to not having a regime change in recent history, and I bet that if you looked at taxation on living English people throughout the past thousand years it would at times have been extraordinarily high and would have eaten up your dead guys' principal.
3. You ask "What else changed?" Over many generations, living rich people would have stayed organized to defend the interests of dead rich people over the shorter-term interests of the living rich, in service of their goal of having their own dead hands rule in the future. So I'd say you would need an entire--and powerful--class of wealthy people to stay in control of the laws and to be ruling for the benefit not just of themselves but of others like them in the past and future. That starts to sound like lots of conspiracy theories with the Illuminati, the Jews, the Pope, the Queen, and Henry Kissinger.
4. How is your idea of trusts different from primogeniture/royal succession writ broad? The Queen still owns lots and lots of English land; the Vatican too. Are they good evidence for your ideas? I think they are not because they have both required fresh 'donations' beyond income on existing assets.
Looks like Dynasty Trusts are back on the menu!https://www.nolo.com/legal-...
Personally,, if I signed up for Cryonics, and then future generations discovered with certainty that it was impossible to bring me back to life (my brain had degraded enough that sufficient information wasn't available, or maybe they discover that souls exist or something), I would consider it entirely reasonable for them to dispose of my body and turn the resources towards something else.
The "with certainty" part makes the comparison slightly harder, since while we haven't found any evidence to support the idea that an afterlife exists, we haven't found any evidence disproving it either...In this case though, I get the impression that the modern Catholic Church most likely no longer supports the idea that prayers can reduce time in purgatory, which could be construed as a "discovery" of new "evidence" that prayers no longer reduce time in purgatory.
There seems to be some confusion here between utility and cash. Let's suppose you'd be willing to donate one ancient monetary unit towards a compounding charity in 3000BC if we agree to perform actions in the distant future where you knowing that these actions will be performed give you one utility at the time you create the fund. If it could compound as claimed (imagine no-one stole the money), then we'd still come out ahead even if it took an absurdly large amount of money to produce that one utility.
The problem is that utility doesn't compound. One utility now is the same as one utility later. Any future interest deductions come from the odds being that you won't actually receive the one utility later, say if you die or the company goes out of business.
For those curious:
> "As recently as 1903, Pope Pius X was still able to tabulate the number of days' remission from purgatory that each rank in the hierarchy was entitled to grant: cardinals two hundred days, archbishops a hundred days, bishops a mere fifty days. By his time, however, indulgences were no longer sold directly for money. Even in the Middle Ages, money was not the only currency in which you could buy parole from purgatory. You could pay in prayers too, either your own before death or the prayers of others on your behalf, after your death. And money could buy prayers. If you were rich, you could lay down provision for your soul in perpetuity. My own Oxford College, New College, was founded in 1379 (it was new then) by one of that century's great philanthropists, William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. A medieval bishop could become the Bill Gates of the age, controlling the equivalent of the information highway (to God), and amassing huge riches. His diocese was exceptionally large, and Wykeham used his wealth and influence to found two great educational establishments, one in Winchester and one in Oxford. Education was important to Wykeham, but, in the words of the official New College history, published in 1979 to mark the sixth centenary, the fundamental purpose of the college was 'as a great chantry to make intercession for the repose of his soul. He provided for the service of the chapel by ten chaplains, three clerks and sixteen choristers, and he ordered that they alone were to be retained if the college's income failed.' Wykeham left New College in the hands of the Fellowship, a self-electing body which has been continuously in existence like a single organism for more than six hundred years. Presumably he trusted us to continue to pray for his soul through the centuries.>> Today the college has only one chaplain* and no clerks, and the steady century-by-century torrent of prayers for Wykeham in purgatory has dwindled to a trickle of two prayers per year. The choristers alone go from strength to strength and their music is, indeed, magical. Even I feel a twinge of guilt, as a member of that Fellowship, for a trust betrayed. In the understanding of his own time, Wykeham was doing the equivalent of a rich man today making a large down payment to a cryogenics company which guarantees to freeze your body and keep it insulated from earthquakes, civil disorder, nuclear war and other hazards, until some future time when medical science has learned how to unfreeze it and cure whatever disease it was dying of. Are we later Fellows of New College reneging on a contract with our Founder? If so, we are in good company. Hundreds of medieval benefactors died trusting that their heirs, well paid to do so, would pray for them in purgatory. I can't help wondering what proportion of Europe's medieval treasures of art and architecture started out as down payments on eternity, in trusts now betrayed."
The cryonics comparison is disquieting; it's one thing when we're ripping off those stupid gullible theists...
You can't contract with people that will live in the future.
What you can do is decide what resources future people will have by deciding how much you will consume today versus saving or investing. Whatever you don't consume before you die will become someone else's.
Robin supposes that there are win-win deals to be made between the generations, if only the future could be committed to agreeing to the present's desires. "I won't chop down the forest and use it to make fires to keep me warm; instead, I'll leave the trees for your own use after I die... but only if you promise to cut a few of them down and use them to build totem poles with my face on them." But this isn't a win-win deal; it's not a deal at all. The future doesn't get to reject the offer or negotiate on the price. The present does whatever they want, and the future gets what they get.
That means we can't take advantage of markets and price discovery mechanisms to determine what the efficient trades are. The best we can do is to make those trades in which the resources donated to the future are very large and the costs imposed on the future are very small, so as to ensure that the trade is actually beneficial to the future. The limit case here, of course, is intergenerational altruism, where resources are donated to the future for free. This happens all the time. But suppose we'd like to increase this on the margin? Can the future "offer" something to the present in order to find more win-win "deals"?
Would paying people in the future to carry out the wishes of the present increase the amount of donation from the present to the future? Will you get more donations to a fund that says "Save our grandchildren and have your name carved on a monument" than one that just says "Save our grandchildren"? And if so, do we need stronger inter-generational commitment mechanisms to enable those win-win trades?
I'm inclined to think that the amount of gains to be made here is small, at best, and might even be negative. First off, I think the value to the present of "leave a bunch of money to my descendents" is much, much greater than the value to the present of "have my descendents remember my name" (or worship my god, or be vegetarian, or structure their society according to the dictates of my favorite socio-political theory). In other words, I doubt there's a lot of win-win trades being left on the table due to lack of enforcement mechanisms, at least relative to the size of the altruistic trades which require no such mechanisms. Second, I think the existing enforcement mechanisms we already have in place do well to enforce those trades where the cost to the future is small (e.g. erecting a monument, writing someone's name in a book someplace) while ignoring those that would be very costly (e.g. holding on to outdated and obviously erroneous beliefs). Since the present is very, very likely to have erroneous estimates of the cost to the future of their demands, this selective abrogation of the "terms" of the "contract" by the future actually serves to improve efficiency, not reduce it.
I suspect.
Re: "Many folks would be willing to create trusts that accumulated funds long after their death and then paid distant descendants (perhaps indirectly) to do things like remember their ancestor’s name, pray to his gods, etc."
Which folks are those? Such a policy makes little sense to me. Why not just give the resources to your direct descendants - as most biological systems who contribute resources to future generations do?
So you are saying that the British lawyers and judges who developed the law against perpetuities were merely acting out of "unthinking repugnance" and a desire to steal the dead's resources? A brave claim to make, that other people are not merely being irrational but unthinking.
It may not be *obvious* that the dead will persistently make the wrong trade-off between flexibility and putting their preferences into trusts, but plenty of non-obvious things are true (eg refrigerators manage to cool things). If the experience of a number of lawyers and judges over a massive variety of trial cases is that old trusts keep causing problems by being inflexibile when asset use needs to change, then a rule against perpetuaties is not unthinking repugnance. It might still be wrong, but my Bayesian priors are with the British common law system on this point. The prosperity of the UK and its offshoots (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ) doesn't match with a hypothesis that the English system was being run by fools.
In reply to Doug's comment, I agree with John. I can currently experience utility at the low chance that the world will end and at lowering that chance. I cannot experience disutility at the time after my death. I can currently have preferences about future states of the universe, but I cannot have any utility after I'm dead.
Jess, we could (for some values of could) currently be living in a handful of 'fake' worlds (simulation, Cartesian evil demon, solipsistic hallucination). As long as we cannot tell the difference, we cannot have different utilities in the two situations. I say this as a physicalist, if they are absolutely indistinguishable (to us) they are identical (to us). I can (do) value living in a real universe and would not willingly enter a simulated universe (in general). This is a statement about my current preferences over future states, not preferences I will have in the future after I am gone.Or a different interpretation of Jess's comment (I don't know which is correct); if someone forces my brain patterns into some state (say the state it is in now), at that time I will be experiencing the same utility that I am now. Again, I say this as a physicalist; there is no spirit floating above my mind checking my utility function. I currently do not value that state as highly as the free state, but that is a statement about my current state, not the future state.That was kind of rambling, sorry, I guess my point is that I can currently have preferences over the probabilities for the future, but cannot experience utility at that future time if I am dead.
Are you here endorsing the massacre of the Templars?
By 1800 early trusts grew a billion-fold, and trusts dominate the economy.
The trusts assets are quietly leached away by the trustees. Does this remind anyone of the Anthony Trollope novella "The Warden"?
And Richard Dawkins pointed out in The God Delusion that his college at Cambridge was originally founded mainly to pray for the soul of its founder, Bishop Wycome of Winchester in 1379. Originally it had ten chaplains who produced a constant stream of prayers for him. Now there is one chaplain. And two prayers a year.
Let me tell you a story. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was a large tribe of people whose sole religion, their one true passion, was to see that, in fifteen thousand years, Robin Hanson would give me all of his money and property.
Here's the question: whether they never existed, or whether they're just all dead, what difference should that make in RH's decision? His actions cannot provide them with direct satisfaction, and they'll never know what he did, but he would be fulfilling their one great aspiration. Even if giving up all his property distracts him from his effort to continuously breed so as to satisfy the wants of the non-existent, it should still be a net win.
Well, for one, the members of English monasteries in the 1530s would have begged to disagree. What reason is there to think that these hypothetical trusts would be able to grow to such vast sizes without attracting the same sort of unwanted attention?
You seem to claim that allowing long-term trusts would lead to win-win deals with the past, but I can't quite see how that follows.
Usually, enforced contracts increase efficiency because if two parties spot a win-win deal, they are able to commit to it. Conversely they will not commit unless the deal is win-win, since it would not be in the interests of at least one of them. So the efficiency of contracts depends on both parties having veto power.
But your scenario is different: a change of laws to recognize trusts amounts to simply taking a bunch of stuff (all assets in the year 2200) and reallocating them from one party (the people of 2200) to another party (the people of 2010). The people of 2200 are not consenting to this, because they are not here now. Why should we think that such a reallocation would be a Pareto improvement?
But lets follow that conclusion through. Lower interest rates mean that ancestors have less leverage over descendants. Thus, there is a strong self-tempering mechanism here.
It would be like saying given the current price the market for X would be so much bigger if we could expand the number of customers. However, if the number of customers expands then the price will rise and that will choke back demand.
So, we are thinking of much smaller effects than a world dominated by ancestor trusts.
1. Don't you really have a perfect as the enemy of the good problem? The rule against perpetuities and its variants may represent a balancing that gives trustors control for as long as you could hope a society in the future would allow it. If trusts were unlimited and if they grew even at rates much lower than your guess, they would be targetted with punitive taxation as Vladimir mentions above. How to fund health care? I know! That dead rich guy has a lot of money while poor people are going without Tamoxifin and Minoxidil!
2. Your dead hand returns seem to be based on no taxation and (since you go back to 3000 BC) no regime change/confiscation, which wasn't true for the living or the dead. England is probably the only example that comes close to not having a regime change in recent history, and I bet that if you looked at taxation on living English people throughout the past thousand years it would at times have been extraordinarily high and would have eaten up your dead guys' principal.
3. You ask "What else changed?" Over many generations, living rich people would have stayed organized to defend the interests of dead rich people over the shorter-term interests of the living rich, in service of their goal of having their own dead hands rule in the future. So I'd say you would need an entire--and powerful--class of wealthy people to stay in control of the laws and to be ruling for the benefit not just of themselves but of others like them in the past and future. That starts to sound like lots of conspiracy theories with the Illuminati, the Jews, the Pope, the Queen, and Henry Kissinger.
4. How is your idea of trusts different from primogeniture/royal succession writ broad? The Queen still owns lots and lots of English land; the Vatican too. Are they good evidence for your ideas? I think they are not because they have both required fresh 'donations' beyond income on existing assets.
There is no requirement that trusts investments be risk-free. Yes interest rates would fall eventually; that is the point.