Reinventing the Funeral

There is a correct order of operations for removing a load bearing wall.

You do not take it out and see what happens. You install temporary shoring first, on both sides, transferring the load to the floor. Then you place the permanent beam. Then, and only then, you remove the wall, and the building never knows anything occurred.

Do it in the wrong order and the failure is not immediate. That is the treacherous part. The structure above redistributes the load through whatever paths it can find, and holds, and appears fine, and cracks appear somewhere unrelated over the following months, and by the time anyone connects the cracks to the wall it is an expensive problem in a different part of the house.

This chapter is the shoring. Everything in it is an attempt to answer one question: if death was doing five jobs, and death is going away, what does the jobs?

I want to say plainly that I do not think these proposals are adequate. Some are ancient ideas revived, some are borrowed from people who developed them for other purposes, and one of them I regard as genuinely ugly and include because the alternative is pretending the problem is not there. The point is not that this is the answer. The point is that this is the shape of the answer, and that almost nobody is working on it.

The principle underneath all five

Before the specifics, the pattern, because it took me a long time to see that all five solutions are the same solution.

What death actually does, mechanically, is convert permanent claims into temporary ones. Not by negotiation. It simply terminates every arrangement on a schedule and returns the contents to circulation. Your property, your position, your authority, your seat, all of it reverts. You held a lease and called it ownership, and the term was your life.

So the replacement has to do the same thing deliberately.

Ownership becomes a lease. Authority becomes a term. Title becomes a subscription. In every case a claim that currently runs forever is converted into one that runs for a defined period and must be renewed, at a price, against competition.

Everything death used to take back by force, we will have to take back by contract.

One: pricing permanence

The problem. As the discount rate approaches zero, the value of any perpetual asset stops being a finite number. Land, water, spectrum, orbital slots. Pension liabilities become unmanageable. Valuation stops working, because valuation was only ever a trick for making the far future contribute almost nothing.

The mechanism. Stop selling permanent claims on scarce permanent things.

This sounds radical and is not. Hong Kong already runs on it. With the single charming exception of a plot granted to St John’s Cathedral, every square metre of land in the territory is leased from the government rather than owned outright. New leases run fifty years, with an annual rent set at three percent of rateable value. Britain has a large leasehold sector. The instrument exists, every property lawyer understands it, and converting freehold into long renewable leasehold is a change of legal form rather than an invention.

Hong Kong has also, usefully for my argument, already run into the cliff and built the fix. Around three hundred thousand leases expire on the same day in June 2047, and rather than face that, the government legislated to extend them automatically for another fifty years, by gazette notice, without owners having to sign anything. That is precisely the mechanism I want: a term that structurally expires, combined with a renewal that is routine, automatic and not at anyone’s discretion.

The companion move is to tax the flow rather than trying to price the stock. If you cannot say what a piece of land is worth when the discount rate is near zero, you can still say what it earns this year, and you can tax that. This is the old Georgist argument for a land value tax, and it has been waiting two hundred years for a reason to become urgent. It now has one, because a land value tax is nearly indifferent to the discount rate while every other tax on capital is not.

The strongest objection. Leasehold has a well documented failure mode. As a lease approaches its end, the holder stops maintaining the property, because improvements accrue to the freeholder. Britain and Hong Kong have both dealt with the resulting mess. A leasehold system that produces a hundred years of good stewardship followed by twenty years of deliberate neglect is not obviously better than what we have.

The answer, such as it is. Renewal at a formula price rather than at the landlord’s discretion, so the holder always expects to continue and never faces a cliff. That converts the lease into something closer to a subscription, which is the point. The failure mode comes from the ending, not the term.

Two: turning over capital

The problem. Chapter 4. Compounding without interruption, in the hands of people who never hand anything over. Five percent for two hundred years is a factor of seventeen thousand.

The mechanism, mild version. Restore the rule against perpetuities, and do it at a level that cannot be competed away. The reason it collapsed was interstate competition for trust business, which is a race that no individual state can decline to run. That is a textbook case for acting at the federal level, and it requires no new theory, merely the reversal of a change made forty years ago for reasons unrelated to anything in this book.

The mechanism, serious version. There is a more radical instrument that deserves attention here because it solves the specific problem that has defeated every other approach, which is that any system requiring a judgment about who should give something up will be captured by the people the judgment is about.

The idea, developed most fully by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, is that you declare what your asset is worth, you pay an annual tax on the number you declared, and anyone may buy it from you at that price. Declare low and you invite a purchase. Declare high and you pay for the privilege. Nobody has to decide whether you deserve to keep it. The mechanism does not care who you are.

That last property is what makes it a candidate. It replicates the one feature of death that matters most: it operates without regard to the merit, connections or eminence of the person it operates on.

The strongest objection. It is horrible for anything you love. The idea that your home could be bought out from under you by anyone willing to pay your own stated number is intolerable to most people, and I think that intuition is correct rather than sentimental. Security of tenure in the place you live is not a market inefficiency.

The answer. Apply it to productive and positional assets rather than personal ones. Land under commercial use, spectrum, licenses, controlling equity stakes. Exempt the primary residence outright. I will admit that the boundary between these categories is contested, that the exemption will be gamed, and that a great many people will discover their yacht is a productive asset. The boundary problem is real. It is also a normal problem of tax design, which we handle badly but do handle, and it is smaller than the problem of a permanently sealed distribution of wealth.

Three: turning over ideas

The problem. Chapter 5. Fields cannot change direction while the people who defined them hold the positions that decide what counts.

The mechanism. Term the position, not the person.

This is the distinction that makes the whole thing tractable. Nobody needs to be retired, fired or diminished. What needs a term limit is authority: the seat on the grant panel, the editorship, the chair of the review committee, the department headship, the foundation board. Fixed terms, non renewable or renewable only after a gap, applied to the roles that decide what gets funded and published rather than to employment itself.

An eminent scientist of two hundred years would remain an eminent scientist, free to publish, teach, argue and persuade. They would simply not also be the person who decides which grant applications succeed, for the two hundredth consecutive year.

The second component is to route a defined fraction of research funding specifically outside the existing consensus, on the model of the high risk programs that several funders already run. If the Azoulay finding is right, and outsider entry produces disproportionately novel and highly cited work, then outsider entry is not charity. It is a portfolio allocation with a measurable return, and we currently set that allocation implicitly, by waiting for funerals.

The strongest objection. Rotation costs expertise. The person who has run the panel for fifteen years knows which apparently promising avenues failed in 1987 and why. Replace them with a rotating cast and you will fund the same dead ends repeatedly.

The answer. That cost is real and I will not wave it away. But it is a cost we already pay in full at every death, and involuntarily. The proposal converts an abrupt, total and unplanned loss of institutional knowledge into a gradual and partial one, with the outgoing holder still alive, still available, and able to advise without being able to decide. That is a strict improvement on what mortality currently delivers.

Four: who is allowed to take a risk

This is the ugly one.

The problem. Chapter 6 established that the risk premium demanded by the very long lived becomes unpayable, and Chapters 9 and 10 established that the consequence is a frontier settled by whatever can afford to die on it. In practice: artificial agents, and people who are poor or who have declined longevity treatment.

The mechanism people will reach for. A legal category for consented high risk activity. Genuine informed consent, insulation from the liability cascade that would otherwise make the insurance unwritable, and a compensation floor.

The strongest objection, which I think is close to fatal. This is precisely how every exploitative labor arrangement in history has described itself. The mine, the trawler, the ship, the mill. All of them had consent, in the formal sense. All of them had a compensation premium. All of them relied on the fact that the people signing had no alternative, and all of them were defended at the time in exactly the language I have just used.

A world where the wealthy live for centuries in safety while the poor accept lethal risk for money is not a frontier policy. It is a caste system with a launch pad.

The answer, and I want to be clear that it is not a clever one. There is no mechanism that fixes this, because the problem is not mechanical. The only thing that distinguishes genuine consent from desperation is whether the person had an acceptable alternative, and that is a question about the distribution of wealth, not about the design of a waiver.

Which means the risk premium calculated in Chapter 6 has to actually be paid. Not avoided by finding someone cheap. If the compensation for accepting a one in ten thousand chance of death is genuinely enormous, denominated against the life expectancy of the person accepting it rather than against what they will settle for, then the frontier gets very expensive and possibly does not happen.

A society that will not pay that price does not get the frontier. That is a legitimate outcome. It is much better than getting the frontier by not paying.

Five: opening positions

The problem. Chapter 7. Vacancies come from growth and exit. Exit stops. The queue does not slow, it halts.

The mechanism. Term limits, understood as an economic instrument rather than a political one.

We already accept these in the one domain where the risk of permanent incumbency is most visible. Many executive offices are term limited, and nobody regards this as an insult to the officeholder. The proposal is simply to recognize that the same logic applies to any position that confers control over resources, and to extend it: board seats, judicial appointments, senior executive roles, endowed chairs, regulatory commissions.

The design detail that matters is that the term should attach to the seat rather than to the sector. A person leaving a board seat after twelve years is not barred from working. They are barred from occupying that particular position of control indefinitely, and the position returns to circulation.

The strongest objection. Forced churn advantages the already connected. If everyone must move every decade, the people who move well are the ones with networks, and a system of mandatory rotation could easily entrench a class of professional seat holders circulating among positions while genuine outsiders remain outside.

The answer. Pair rotation with genuinely open selection, and accept that this objection identifies a real risk rather than a fatal one. A system that rotates badly is still better than one that does not rotate, because the first has a mechanism that can be improved and the second does not have a mechanism.

Where two of these were actually tried

Everything above is a proposal, and every proposal has had its strongest objection printed next to it. But those objections were arguments. Two of these mechanisms have been enacted somewhere, by real legislatures, against real property and real careers, and the record is available.

It is not encouraging. It is also the most useful material in this chapter, because both cases fail in the same specific way, and the way they fail is not the way the objections predicted.

California, 1990.

In November of that year the state’s voters passed a ballot initiative limiting service in the Assembly to six years and in the Senate to eight, with no possibility of return. It was the strongest legislative term limit adopted by a large American state, and it was sold on exactly the reasoning set out earlier in this chapter: the seats had stopped turning over, incumbency had become self perpetuating, and forcing exits would open the system.

The measure did what it said. Members left on schedule. The legislature turned over.

Now the part that matters.

The same initiative also cut the legislature’s operating budget by roughly two fifths, and that cut fell hardest on professional staff. The independent analytical office that served the legislature lost around half its people. The committees lost the long serving specialists who had made them function.

So the state removed the experienced legislators and, in the same stroke, removed the experienced people who advised legislators.

The consequences are documented and they are consistent across the studies. Committees began screening out fewer of the bills sent to them, and more of their work was rewritten at later stages by others. Legislative oversight of the executive branch declined. Bills sponsored by organised interests became more likely to pass than bills without such backing. Newly elected members, asked how their legislation came to exist, described a large majority of it arriving already drafted, from outside.

Understand what happened, because the mechanism is general and the chapter above missed it.

Term limits did not reduce the amount of expertise the legislature needed. A state still has to write budgets, regulate utilities, and understand water rights, and those tasks require somebody who knows how they work. What the limits did was remove that knowledge from inside the institution while leaving the requirement in place.

The requirement was then met from outside, by the parties who had the knowledge and were not term limited.

Nobody term limits a lobbyist. Nobody term limits the executive branch, or the permanent civil service, or the industry association that has employed the same three specialists for twenty years. The reform bound one institution and left every institution adjacent to it untouched, and power moved, as it always does, to whatever is still standing.

This is the objection this chapter already printed, that forced churn advantages the already connected. It was correct. What the chapter did not say is why, and the why is not about networks or social capital. It is about where the expertise ends up living once you have evicted it from the place it used to live.

So the proposal has to be revised, and the revision is not cosmetic.

A term limit on a position is only a turnover mechanism if the surrounding ecology is also term limited. Applied to a single institution it is not a rotation device. It is a transfer, from the body that was limited to the bodies that were not, and it is likely to make the underlying problem worse while appearing to address it. Any serious version of this has to cover the advisory layer, the regulatory staff, the standing consultancies and the permanent interests, or it will simply relocate the incumbency it was meant to break.

That is a much larger and much less appealing proposal than the one made a few pages ago, and it should be stated at its real size rather than at the size that is easy to argue for.

Taiwan, and a mechanism that was adopted and then hollowed out.

The second case concerns self assessment, and it is stranger, because on paper it succeeded.

Sun Yat-sen, whose political programme became the founding doctrine of the Republic of China, proposed a land system with four connected parts. Owners declare the value of their own land. They are taxed on the value they declare. The state reserves the right to buy the land at the declared price. And increases in value created by society rather than by the owner accrue to the public.

Read those four again and notice that the first three are precisely the mechanism this chapter described as its serious version, the one associated in modern economics with Posner and Weyl. Declare low and invite a purchase. Declare high and pay for it. The system does not need to know who you are or whether you deserve to keep the land, which is the property that makes it a candidate for replacing something that death used to do without judgement.

This was not a thought experiment. It was written into the political foundations of a state and carried into its constitutional order, and Taiwan built its land taxation around the doctrine.

Here is what the system actually runs on today.

Official assessed values, set by local government authorities and revised on a fixed cycle.

The self assessment survives in the framing and in the name. The operative number is an official valuation, produced the way property valuations are produced everywhere else, by assessors. The distinctive component, the one that made the design self enforcing, is not what determines anybody’s tax bill.

It was not repealed in a dramatic reversal. It was adopted, and then the hard part quietly stopped being the part that mattered, and the label stayed on.

Why that happened is not mysterious and it generalises well beyond Taiwan.

A self assessment scheme is self enforcing only if the purchase right is real. The threat has to be exercised occasionally, on somebody, publicly, or declared values drift downward and the whole thing becomes an honour system with extra steps. But exercising it means a government taking a family’s land at a price the family named, which is intolerable to almost any electorate, and becomes more intolerable the more sympathetic the owner.

So the enforcement is not used. And once it is not used, the mechanism has no teeth, and an ordinary assessment process moves in to do the work, because the tax still has to be collected.

The mechanism did not lose an argument. It was never defeated on the merits. It was simply never exercised, and a mechanism that is never exercised is decoration.

What the two cases share

Put them together, because they fail the same way and the pattern is the most important thing in this chapter.

Neither mechanism was repealed. Neither was defeated in open political combat. In both cases the institution kept its name, kept its formal description, and kept being cited as an example of the reform working.

What happened instead is that the component doing the actual work was hollowed out, while the shell remained. California still has term limits and they still force exits, and the power that used to sit with experienced legislators now sits with people nobody elected. Taiwan still has a land system founded on self declared values, and the values that matter are declared by assessors.

That is what happens to any mechanism that forces turnover: it is eroded continuously by the people it binds, and the erosion is invisible because the name does not change.

Which sharpens what this chapter is actually claiming, and makes it harder rather than easier.

The difficulty is not designing a device that does what death did. Both of these devices work as designed. The difficulty is that a turnover mechanism has to keep being enforced, forever, against parties who are permanently motivated to weaken it and who are, by construction, the people in a position to do so. Death required no enforcement. That was its entire advantage, and it is the property none of these proposals reproduce.

An honest version of this chapter has to say that both of its two most concrete mechanisms have been tried in weakened form and both were hollowed out within a generation, in a democracy, with mortality still fully operative and the affected parties still eventually leaving.

Which is the strongest available argument for the section that follows, and against the idea that any of this gets easier later.

The problem with all of it

Every proposal above shares a defect, and I would rather end this chapter on the defect than on the proposals.

Each of them has to be adopted by the people it constrains.

Term limits on authority must be enacted by those who currently hold authority. Sunset clauses on capital must be legislated by governments responsive to concentrated capital. Perpetuity rules must be restored by the same political system that dismantled them, over the objection of everyone who has structured their affairs around their absence.

This is not a new difficulty. It is the oldest problem in political economy. But it has always been solvable, in the long run, for one specific reason, and that reason is the subject of this book.

John Rawls asked us to imagine designing a society without knowing what position we would occupy in it. Not knowing whether we would be rich or poor, gifted or ordinary, lucky or not. From behind that veil of ignorance, he argued, we would choose rules that were fair to every position, because any of them might turn out to be ours.

It is the most influential thought experiment in modern political philosophy, and it is usually treated as a hypothetical device. A trick for checking your reasoning.

It is not a hypothetical. We have been living behind that veil the entire time, and death is what puts it there.

You do not know where your grandchildren will land. More importantly, you know with certainty that you will not be holding your own position, because you will not be here. Every constitution, every long term institution, every rule intended to outlast its authors was written by people who knew they would be dead when it mattered. That knowledge is what made fairness rational rather than merely admirable. You write rules you can live under from any position, because you cannot know which position your line will occupy, and you will not be there to defend the one you have.

Remove death and the veil lifts. Permanently. For the first time, the people writing the rules will know exactly who they are going to be when the rules take effect, because they are going to be the same people, holding the same positions, indefinitely.

Nothing in the history of political thought prepares us for that. Every theory of justice we possess was developed by mortals, for mortals, and quietly assumes that the author will not be present to enjoy the outcome.

Which produces the one genuinely actionable conclusion in this book.

The window for building any of this is now, and it is closing.

Not because of a technological deadline, but because constitutional moments happen only while the parties are uncertain where they will end up. Right now, nobody knows whether they will be among the long lived. Nobody knows whether their family will be inside or outside. The veil is still down, thinly, and it is the last time it will be.

Once the first cohort exists and knows itself, the negotiation is over. Not lost, exactly. Simply no longer available, because one of the parties will have no reason to be at the table.

Everything in this chapter is easy to enact today and impossible to enact later. That is the whole argument, and it is why I wrote a book about an economic mechanism that has not started operating yet.