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David Simmons's avatar

I made a LessWrong post summarizing my epistemic state: https://www.lesswrong.com/p...

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Peter Gerdes's avatar

To put the point differently could a German have made a difference near the end of WWII by donating to the German government a whole bunch of money he'd saved up previously? It seems to me the answer is no since the German government had literally directed the entire manpower of the country at that time to the war effort and there was no additional resources they could have purchased with that savings.

So sure, that money saved earlier might have produced real value, e.g., it let someone live and eat while going to school to be a lawyer rather than work, but if the country has no spare economic capacity (people are starving so everything else goes to the war) that might not be immediately redeemable. So one needs to take into account what fraction of your saved money will go to increasing the total production at the time you care about.

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