The reference class of “companies” is the wrong class. Unfortunately I don’t think there is a good reference class. “Organizations who exist primarily to survive, rather than grow / make money” would be a good class, but I can’t think of anything else much like this.
Oh wait, people. Like survivalist organizations, humans exist primarily to survive and we consume resources at a predictable rate. On the other hand there are a lot of things that make humans different from organizations. The relevant differences: a) we die of natural causes, whereas organizations don’t; b) we have one intelligence directing our actions and choices, whereas organizations have no intrinsic intelligence and depend on their human constituency/directorship for this. Are there other relevant differences?
Maybe you should look at how long foundations survive, esp. family foundations which have a comparable business model: Caring for humans—living ones instead of not-quite-dead ones though. I’d guess that these live significantly longer. Thre are even special tax rules for those (e.g. in Germany a family foundation has to pay a virtual death tax every 30 years).
Other relevant differences might be that humans are never allowed to just ‘die’ of making bad financial decisions in countries like America—if humans make really wild spending decisions the state will at least feed and house them.
Perhaps charities would be a better reference class? If anyone can find any data I’ll happily rerun the analysis, but ‘age charities’ will give you charities concerned with age and ‘life expectancy charities’ will give you charities concerned with life expectancy; it could be a bit of a slog.
The reference class of “companies” is the wrong class. Unfortunately I don’t think there is a good reference class. “Organizations who exist primarily to survive, rather than grow / make money” would be a good class, but I can’t think of anything else much like this.
Oh wait, people. Like survivalist organizations, humans exist primarily to survive and we consume resources at a predictable rate. On the other hand there are a lot of things that make humans different from organizations. The relevant differences: a) we die of natural causes, whereas organizations don’t; b) we have one intelligence directing our actions and choices, whereas organizations have no intrinsic intelligence and depend on their human constituency/directorship for this. Are there other relevant differences?
Maybe you should look at how long foundations survive, esp. family foundations which have a comparable business model: Caring for humans—living ones instead of not-quite-dead ones though. I’d guess that these live significantly longer. Thre are even special tax rules for those (e.g. in Germany a family foundation has to pay a virtual death tax every 30 years).
Other relevant differences might be that humans are never allowed to just ‘die’ of making bad financial decisions in countries like America—if humans make really wild spending decisions the state will at least feed and house them.
Perhaps charities would be a better reference class? If anyone can find any data I’ll happily rerun the analysis, but ‘age charities’ will give you charities concerned with age and ‘life expectancy charities’ will give you charities concerned with life expectancy; it could be a bit of a slog.