Humans have long lives. We are unusually dependent on our parents when young, and we then slowly gain competence over a lifetime, usually reaching peak productivity in our forties and fifties. Most of the time we are aware of this. For example, we count on our peak earning years by taking out loans as young students, and later saving for retirement. And we prefer leaders at those peak ages.
I would like to see old people given the option to "leverage the power of compound interest to donate to help the future needy" via a federal government scheme that offers these people a 100% subsidized trust in their name and commencing at $50,000 (or double that in the case of a couple). The cost? Forgoing Medicare entitlements for the remainder of their lives.
If you fear that your values will drift as you get older then you should act sooner even if you could, in principle, do more good later. In practice value drift seems very common indeed.
Acting now may also decrease value drift as you reinforce your values with actions.
Young people have a pretty near-term focus in general.
Interesting point, as it is in tension with youthful idealism. Youth are impulsive. But in their idealism, they also seem more inclined than older people to far-mode. This produces a modal mismatch ( http://tinyurl.com/6pt9eq5 ) between the timescale and the granularity of their thinking.
Young people's movements (Occupy?) may thus represent the hard-to-find Demagogism of the left. ( http://tinyurl.com/7xrb9u2 )
Microfinance and poor-country moneylenders also charge high interest rates.
But from Robin:
...rates of return on loans, far above their growth rates.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Robin's claim was about "rates of return on loans" not "interest rate on loans." Rate of return takes account of transaction costs and default rates.
If you think of your personal monitoring as a complement to your donations, you might want it to be spend before you die, so you can personally monitor your charities. Else you might instruct your charity fund to grow until it seems that worthy causes are about to run out, or investments no longer grow.
OK. 1. Your argument makes sense. 2. I accept that I was in mistaken to tie the mere existence of value-generating interest rates to overall economic growth. I suppose that all one really needs to have a positive rate of return is the existence of an economy and the wisdom to make the right investments. Now, in regard to the latter, I do think we can agree that accumulating actual wealth via compound interest (on money deposited in a bank, for example) requires that someone, somewhere, generates that real-world wealth. After all, if everyone on Earth put money into the banks and then went into hibernation for 20 years, and then we all woke up and computed the interest that we had all "earned," we could probably all agree that we have bigger numbers in our bank accounts than before, but none of us would actually be any richer.
There's also the possibility that you spend 20-30 years doing things you don't like thinking it will eventually be something you like but then turn out to be wrong about it all and never getting the reward.
Also, 50 year old you might be a sell out, especially if he spent 30 years practicing selling out everyday.
Impatience comes from a realization that the current state of affairs does not reflect a society that is remotely sustainable nor does it offer hope for realignment; it seems to get worse every year. Primordial needs trump all others, especially the need for a long term strategy.
Don't consider our resistance to playing gambits and establishing credibility / influence as a flawed tactic, we simply feel such delays are too costly.
If older generations were a bit more idealistic, more impatient, more instinctive in their time, perhaps we wouldn't have so much to worry about.
We have good data at least on England, and the rates of land expropriation there were too low to explain the difference between growth and rental interest rates.
Isn't this kind of long-term benefit thinking exactly what philanthropists like Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller and Hughes were trying to do with their mega-foundations? In other words, it has been tried, and with great success.
Charging high interest rates and receiving a "high rate of return on loans" (as was Robin's claim) are not equivalent. ("Rate of return" takes account of transaction costs and risks.)
How would you prefer they express their idealism, or even their "idealism"?
Are you forgetting discounting, in particular hyperbolic discounting?
I would like to see old people given the option to "leverage the power of compound interest to donate to help the future needy" via a federal government scheme that offers these people a 100% subsidized trust in their name and commencing at $50,000 (or double that in the case of a couple). The cost? Forgoing Medicare entitlements for the remainder of their lives.
I'm glad George Lucas and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet took your advice. OH WAIT.
If you fear that your values will drift as you get older then you should act sooner even if you could, in principle, do more good later. In practice value drift seems very common indeed.
Acting now may also decrease value drift as you reinforce your values with actions.
Young people have a pretty near-term focus in general.
Interesting point, as it is in tension with youthful idealism. Youth are impulsive. But in their idealism, they also seem more inclined than older people to far-mode. This produces a modal mismatch ( http://tinyurl.com/6pt9eq5 ) between the timescale and the granularity of their thinking.
Young people's movements (Occupy?) may thus represent the hard-to-find Demagogism of the left. ( http://tinyurl.com/7xrb9u2 )
Microfinance and poor-country moneylenders also charge high interest rates.
But from Robin:
...rates of return on loans, far above their growth rates.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Robin's claim was about "rates of return on loans" not "interest rate on loans." Rate of return takes account of transaction costs and default rates.
If you think of your personal monitoring as a complement to your donations, you might want it to be spend before you die, so you can personally monitor your charities. Else you might instruct your charity fund to grow until it seems that worthy causes are about to run out, or investments no longer grow.
OK. 1. Your argument makes sense. 2. I accept that I was in mistaken to tie the mere existence of value-generating interest rates to overall economic growth. I suppose that all one really needs to have a positive rate of return is the existence of an economy and the wisdom to make the right investments. Now, in regard to the latter, I do think we can agree that accumulating actual wealth via compound interest (on money deposited in a bank, for example) requires that someone, somewhere, generates that real-world wealth. After all, if everyone on Earth put money into the banks and then went into hibernation for 20 years, and then we all woke up and computed the interest that we had all "earned," we could probably all agree that we have bigger numbers in our bank accounts than before, but none of us would actually be any richer.
There's also the possibility that you spend 20-30 years doing things you don't like thinking it will eventually be something you like but then turn out to be wrong about it all and never getting the reward.
Also, 50 year old you might be a sell out, especially if he spent 30 years practicing selling out everyday.
Impatience comes from a realization that the current state of affairs does not reflect a society that is remotely sustainable nor does it offer hope for realignment; it seems to get worse every year. Primordial needs trump all others, especially the need for a long term strategy.
Don't consider our resistance to playing gambits and establishing credibility / influence as a flawed tactic, we simply feel such delays are too costly.
If older generations were a bit more idealistic, more impatient, more instinctive in their time, perhaps we wouldn't have so much to worry about.
"Did you know that over 50% of the Bolsheviks in Russia at the time of the October Revolution were 17 or under?"
That explains a great deal.
Spending the interest on a large endowment on charity is different than growing the investment.
We have good data at least on England, and the rates of land expropriation there were too low to explain the difference between growth and rental interest rates.
Isn't this kind of long-term benefit thinking exactly what philanthropists like Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller and Hughes were trying to do with their mega-foundations? In other words, it has been tried, and with great success.
Charging high interest rates and receiving a "high rate of return on loans" (as was Robin's claim) are not equivalent. ("Rate of return" takes account of transaction costs and risks.)