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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine the implications for wealth, too.

If the means of life extension is not hideously expensive, then anyone past a certain age with even the smallest bit of sense will be rich beyond the dreams of mortal men. Compound interest works.

This would have interesting social ramifications. As it is, most states are organized such that the old are relatively rich, the young are relatively poor, and the young's income subsidizes the old's healthcare costs. In a state with some people who are 420 and some people are 20, the Methuselah will be worth $300 million. For every dollar invested back when he was twenty.

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If 20% of the population becomes mufti billionaires a billion will not buy what it used to.

Compound interest works in large part because capital has value. As the world becomes rich the value of wealth will go down relative to the value of peoples effort. Basically over the extremely long term expected ROI should go down if people start living into extreme old age. Granted some people will always balance this out with the 700 year old with credit card debt keeping the people who get that interest well paid but if 60 million people are willing to lend billions the interest rate is going to be vary low.

PS: What I wonder about is how the death penalty vs life in prison is going to work out. As people live longer I expect more people to commit "major" crimes and even larger groups of people to know someone that "flipped out". Will we want to punish people for mistakes they made 200 years ago or will people become so jaded that minor crimes are are just dealt with by killing the offender?

I don't know that wealth necessarily implies a lower return to capital. More people are wealthier worldwide right now than at any point in history -- the poorest American makes old European royalty like paupers. (Lives two to three times as long, too.) But what does the return on capital look like in 2008 versus 1408? It is much, much higher.

People, in aggregate, have trillions to invest right now. The market finds a way to deploy it. In a society marked by superabundance for a few, the market would presumably deploy capital towards projects with enormous ROIs and entrance requirements which stagger the imagination. (Think on a sci-fi scale, except with reasons to do it other than to sell sci-fi books. Less "colonize a new planet... because we can!", more "harness a star for energy".)

>But what does the return on capital look like in 2008 versus 1408? It is much, much higher.

No it isn't. See table 2 here: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:K7gncYlDrYQJ:www.econ.uc...

Think of it this way: there is only so much wealth being produced in the world. Increasing lifespan by itself does not increase wealth (unless it increases the proportion of people who are of working age, but at most that would less than double it). So, if a large proportion of people are going to be equivalent to today's millionaires or billionaires, where's all this wealth going to come from?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you don't sound like you know too many of the very poorest Americans. They are in debt, or completely insolvent, living a life of vagrancy, homeless, family-less, mentally disturbed, and diseased, often terminally. Kings lived lives of prestige and luxury.

The very poorest in our society are, as you note, mentally ill, addicted and diseased.

Beyond those people, however, most of the poor do live quite well even in comparison to nobility of the past.

I was marvelling a few days ago that I can get bananas and kiwis in the dead of winter.

It's good to keep life in perspective sometimes.

Someone who makes 12K US a year in the American South can easily live better in almost every material way than most nobility could even a few hundred years ago. More food choices (and at least as abundant food), more chances to travel (by driving), and such a vast array of entertainment choices that it would be inconceivable to people whose might see a bunch of concerts and plays every year.

Even the homeless have access to more, through libraries and shelters, than many societies' wealthy ever did.

Have you lived for 12K US a year in the American south? Or even tried to support kids on that? Just trying to make it on 16k in the Bay Area is a struggle, and it's only myself to feed.

I think you touch on an important point: the poor have access to a better life, or at least more choices, than many in the past could dream of. I don't believe that means that they actually do live a life of luxury: they are far less in control of their lives, are almost compelled to do meaningless work to sustain themselves, and the consumer choices they have often trap rather than fulfill them.

I have lived on less than 12K US a year in the American south, yes. My 2007 income was under 12K, even including borrowing to pay the mortgage, etc, and my wife and I weren't uncomfortable (absent stress about where the next month's mortgage payment was coming from). High-speed internet: check; SUV: check; enough food that we were both still fat: check; a home with over 1500 sq ft and a third of an acre: check.

The only thing kings had more of was power and land, and kings had nothing like the entertainment possibilities we had, and most kings had nothing like the variety of consumables we had.

Today's (first world) poor are wealthy beyond the dreams of those from most earlier eras.

I agree, by the way, that today's American poor are trapped by how much they do have. I would say that they're unwilling, for the most part, to give up the luxury they have for a good chance of more stability later. For most of them, though, this might well be the right choice: as far as I can see, people who make what I make now (around 75K) live lives of about the same happiness as the poor, but with more stuff that they mostly don't care about unless they might lose it suddenly. For someone who finds themselves making this after a few years of 10-25K a year, however, it's really awesome. I still haven't gotten over how great my life is, after half a year of the new income level.

The poor life a "life of leisure", to use historical language.

Out of 36.5 million poor people, only 7.4 million even qualify as "working poor". "Working poor" == "spent >27 weeks/year working or looking for work".

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2006.pdf

As for 16k/year in the bay area, I never lived out west so I won't comment. But as a grad student living 15 minutes out of manhattan on 18k/year, I lacked few material goods available to historical royalty. Fewer concubines, better food.

Regardless of lifespan we are going to move into a post scarcity economy, where wealth won't mean what it does today. We must do it because we can already see the decline of extracted resources like oil and minerals. We will do it because we can. The internet has enabled telecommuting. Telecommuting enables the move to smaller communities where housing is cheaper. As robots get more capable they will take over the manufacturing base.

I think we are closer to a post scarcity economy than we realize. The biggest big ticket item is housing. The biggest item in the cost of housing in sub/urban areas is land. If we disperse to small towns, the cost of land goes down. If housing were really low cost and we telecommuted, maybe 10 or 20 hours of work per week would meet our needs. Suppose we adopted a Peace Corps/Habitat for Humanity model. After school/college a person spent 3 years building housing, including their own? Maybe all he has to mortgage is the land and materials. Maybe not even that.

Add other ideas like a robot taxi service, 3D copying machines, reasonable health care; and the need for much of the need for the credit economy would disappear. I don't view this as a socialist utopia, more a natural evolution of our current market economy. It still has lots of room for entrepreneurs (less for VCs), volunteers, and open source whatever.

i truly hope so. wealth in a post scarcity world will revolve around experiences that people value, i.e. fun.

This sounds really cool. The only problem is that people like to congregate, but maybe virtual reality could help.

The only problem with your 10-hour workweek is that, as living expenses go down and people try to stop working, wages drop also (because workers won't complain as much if the cuts won't put them out on the street), so you'll still have to work two full-time jobs to keep your cheap house surrounded by endless farmland.

Consider investments in, e.g., a german bank in 1900. Today worth what? Over the past 1000 years, we've seen major epidemics that wiped out big chunks of the world (e.g., 95% of the population of the americas, 30% of eurasia), deranged dictators who confiscated wealth, revolutions and all sorts of total collapses of society.

Over 1000 years, the risk of losing everything becomes significant.

Hopefully one would diversify among many countries and also with some gold.

And that's why Sumerian investment banks rule the world today.

To get your $300 million number, you're assuming a 5% risk-free return on investment over 400 years. I very much doubt that you would have received a 5% return on investment by investing in a diversified international portfolio of joint stock corporations from 1608, leaving aside the great likelihood that you would have lost everything by personally being a victim of one war or another, as the Cherokees did on the Trail of Tears, as the Jews and Gypsies did in the Holocaust, as many of the Guaraníes did in the War of the Triple Alliance, etc.

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