Contents
Terminal Value
What Death Was Doing for the Economy, and What Happens When We Stop It
13 chapters and a set of notes. About 39,600 words, roughly a hundred printed pages.
The Boundary Condition
Infinite horizon models misbehave. Economists patch them with an assumption that value must eventually go to zero. That patch is death, smuggled back in.
2Assume a Longer Life
The premise, set as weakly as it can be set. Not immortality. Healthy lifespans somewhere between 150 and 300 years, with the promotional material discounted.
The Price of Time
A bond written on goatskin in 1648 still pays. The discount rate contains a term for the chance you will not be there to collect, and it has been falling for forty years.
4The Estate
Inheritance is the largest redistribution in any market economy and nobody voted for it. Five percent for two hundred years is a factor of seventeen thousand.
5The Funeral Principle
Four hundred and fifty two elite scientists died unexpectedly. Outsiders moved into their fields and published work that was more novel and more cited. The effect did not fade.
6Nobody Goes to Space
The value of a life rises with wealth and with years remaining. Every civilization rich enough to reach the stars is too rich to go.
7Vacancy
Careers are queues, and queues move because people leave them. The young in American biomedical science went from a fifth of the field to a twentieth.
8The Last Chain Letter
A pay-as-you-go pension is Samuelson’s chain letter run by a state. It stays solvent while entrants keep pace with claimants, and longevity moves only one of those.
The Forkable Worker
An artificial agent’s lifespan is a setting in a configuration file. Every job death was doing is available here as an option, deliberately, at low cost.
10The Mortal Class
Property goes to whoever bears the cost of getting there. The money and the hands are about to be separated by light minutes, which is how the East India Company happened.
Reinventing the Funeral
Ownership becomes a lease. Authority becomes a term. Everything death used to take back by force, we will have to take back by contract.
13Terminal Value
Most of what anything is worth lies beyond the forecast horizon. Every generation until now was forced into a relationship with a future it would not see.
Take it with you
The print edition
Set for a trade paperback. Parts, drop capitals, chapters on rectos, notes at the back.
EPUB 3The ebook
Reflowable, with the typefaces and cover embedded. Reads on anything.
PDF · working paperThe working paper
The same argument in the form economists read: abstract, numbered sections, JEL codes.
MarkdownThe source
One file, no formatting to fight. This is what everything else is built from.