So, I think I might have been anchoring too much on Robin’s original post where he says “Usually the best way to help far future folk is to invest now to give them resources they can spend as they wish”, suggesting that it doesn’t matter too much how you spend the money at the end. So in this post I was trying to explore the possibility of an investment-for-the-sake-of-business-growth model, but maybe that was the wrong thing to focus on. Maybe I’ll have to study the investment-to-give-later model in more detail and see what I think of it.
OK, but what about the following argument: Even if effective-charity opportunities decline over time, maybe we can expect that the minimal value of doing something stupid with our money will stay roughly constant. So that the graph of good done relative to time horizon of investment may be V-shaped: decreasing as the effective-charity opportunities go away at first, but then increasing again once they are all gone and so that the effect of declining opportunities doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe if we wait long enough then the right end of the V will be higher than the left end?
So, I think I might have been anchoring too much on Robin’s original post where he says “Usually the best way to help far future folk is to invest now to give them resources they can spend as they wish”, suggesting that it doesn’t matter too much how you spend the money at the end. So in this post I was trying to explore the possibility of an investment-for-the-sake-of-business-growth model, but maybe that was the wrong thing to focus on. Maybe I’ll have to study the investment-to-give-later model in more detail and see what I think of it.
OK, but what about the following argument: Even if effective-charity opportunities decline over time, maybe we can expect that the minimal value of doing something stupid with our money will stay roughly constant. So that the graph of good done relative to time horizon of investment may be V-shaped: decreasing as the effective-charity opportunities go away at first, but then increasing again once they are all gone and so that the effect of declining opportunities doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe if we wait long enough then the right end of the V will be higher than the left end?