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When we think about the time value of money, we're thinking about the value of money to an individual. It isn't fundamentally about market returns, at bottom; i
by zopa 5y ago
When we think about the time value of money, we're thinking about the value of money to an individual. It isn't fundamentally about market returns, at bottom; it's about the near-universal human preference for something now over something later. Once you have that concept in mind you can do some calculations and get the wealth-weighted aggregate time preferences of everyone in the market. But notice that that's an average: particular people can and do have wildly different time preferences, and there's no abstract Platonic "true" value of money aside from its value to people.
Which is all well and good, but not really relevant to effective altruism or utilitarian ethics. Effective altruism starts with the premise that people have inherent worth in some universal sense. If we're just thinking about people's value relative to me, then sure, humanity thousands or millions of years from now isn't worth much. I'll never know or interact with them, and nor will anyone I know or care about. But the whole appeal of utilitarian ethics is that it's not based on who I happen to like.
- gautamcgoel 5y agoI see the point you're making, but part of what I was trying to get at is that economic utility and social welfare should be discounted, not necessarily utility. For example, a life saving invention created today is worth more than if it's created a century from now, because it could potentially save many lives during that century.
- zopa 5y agoAnd that's fine, but now you don't have the right behavior in the limit to defeat longtermism, because with the right assumptions population growth can easily swamp the effects of a delay. Unless I'm missing something you really do need the value of a life to approach zero in the distant future for your argument to work. I actually agree with you that longtermism is problematic; I'm not fond of ethical systems that give wildly shifting directives based on guesses about the shape of the future. But that's why I'm not utilitarian. Grant all the assumptions and the logic seems pretty sound to me.