That assumes the stability of the system which keeps the invested money safe for 1000 years. Very doubtful. If civilization collapses, or undergoes major restructuring due to changes in the social order, you think administration of your investment into perpetuity is going to survive? Think again. One good revolution, and the new boss is going to seize your assets. Without an active beneficiary to protect them, it probably doesn’t even need a revolution. If your fortune is benefiting nobody, there’s going to be precious little objection to laws being crafted which would revert it to the state.
I think in this thread we are discussing a hypothetical scenario in which it is stipulated that the administration of the fund continues successfully, whatever story you want to build around that.
-FrL-
This is doable, and it will cost you under ten billion dollars.
First, raise your cash.
Second, get your hands on a list of every property owner in the world.
Third, visit each one and offer him a dollar for everything he owns.
Expect some initial resistance.
But then toss this out there: he doesn’t have to deliver his estate to you until 3008. Until that time he can hold it all with nothing but a lien on it. Everything he ever sells, gives away, throws away, etc will all carry this lien. When he sells his iPod on eBay, he has to tell the buyer that, come 3008, it needs to be delivered to you. The buyer probably won’t care.
Now it might take some fast talking, but your property owner should take this deal. After all, it’s a dollar for him and he has no obligation whatsoever to give you anything for the rest of his life. “Free dollar!” he thinks.
Pay special attention to owners of raw materials. You want to be sure that everything that will ever be made will be covered by one of your billions of contracts.
Fourth, wait 1000 years.
Fifth, sue everybody for specific performance of the six billion or so contracts you signed.
Jurisprudento-bot will examine your argument thusly:
For the contract to be valid, there must be consideration from both parties. The property owners’ consideration is their property. Very straightforward. Your consideration, however will be in dispute.
Defense Attorney-bot will argue that your one dollar was a mere “peppercorn.” That one dollar is unconscionably disproportionate to all the property in the world.
If you’ve hired a good plaintiff’s-attorney-bot, he will demand that Jurisprudento-bot calculate the Present Value of your original consideration. Plaintiff’s-attorney-bot will even concede an abysmal Discount Rate. Jurisprudento-bot will come up with an astronomical figure for the Present Value.
Defense Attorney-bot will be forced to concede that his clients’ consideration was valid.
The robo-court will order performance of the contracts.
You get everything.
If I invest in a wealth producing asset (and that’s the only way to achieve steady interest and experience inflation-adjusted exponential growth) then I will end up with greater wealth than someone who does not. I will not end up with any greater wealth proportionately than who ever owns the balance of the world’s wealth producing assets. So I won’t have any advantage over them when trying to buy their assets off them.
What a clever plan! It might be hard to sign up every person, considering new people are being born, but given time and resources I agree it is doable. In fact, this is the perfect plan if someone ever perfects cryogenic freezing.
Rats, I think I found a flaw in Randy’s plan. If the Defense Attorney-bot challenges the contract, how do you prove the person signed the legal document? Otherwise, someone today could present a stack of 1000-year old dummied-up contracts and sue for the world.
You enjoyed it? Wow. I couldn’t even finish it. It seemed very poorly written.
Well, there’s at least two others that will be familiar to many Dopers.
I’m sure that someone wil;l know the exact amounts involved, without looking it up.
Red Dwarf - Holly plays a prank on Lister, and tells him that the few dollars in his bank account before he went into stasis are now worth something like 96% of the wealth of Earth, and the surviving humans are after him.
Futurama - Fry is frozen for 1000 years, and wakes up to find his few dollars have accumulated billions in compound interest.
A thousand years, exactly as in the OP? Coincidence?
There’s another SF story based on a similar premise, but I forget the title and author.
The story starts with the beginning of the annual meeting of the board of directors of a corporation. This is to be an unusual meeting, so first they review the corporation history. It seems the corporation began when a man approached a banker in Renaissance Italy with a bag of gold he wished to invest. The investor gives some general guidelines as to how the investment is to be done, but leaves the details to the banker. He then disappears for N (I forget what N is, but I think 50) years.
And so it goes. Every N years, the Mysterious Investor shows up to review the books and give more advice. The advice is usually that country A will be a good place to invest until year X and country B will start to be a good investment locale begining in year Y. That kind of thing. It turns out that all the advice is accurate and with that kind of help, the corporation flourishes and is now one of the richest companies in the world.
OK, it’s now been N years since the last appearance of the Mysterious Investor, so they’re expecting him to show up at this board meeting.
In the meantime, they’ve asked Professor So-and-so about the possibility of time travel being feasible, since they figure the Mysterious Investor is a time traveller. The Professor shows up and it turns out he’s the Investor. He’s here to start the liquidation of the company, since he’s going to need lots of funds to perform the experiments to develop a time travel machine…
Anyone know the title/author of this story?
Come on! How could you not love a story with this line in it?
“I dare say those moon-hunks are going yet.”
Peter Morris writes:
> Futurama - Fry is frozen for 1000 years, and wakes up to find his few dollars
> have accumulated billions in compound interest.
This is presumably a parody of “John Jones’s Dollar.” It’s a well known story among science fiction readers of a certain age. It appears in one of Groff Conklin’s anthologies, I believe. The Red Dwarf episode may also be intended as a parody of the story too.
Economic growth is not a zero-sum game. In an expanding economy, the total wealth of the world increases. You may be getting richer, but lots of other people are also getting richer.
I enjoyed it just for the quaintness of the technological descriptions. Imagine, technology made with shiny brass cylinders, having to actually speak to a person to verify a news account, and how impressive a wireless device is.
I also liked how $93 million was supposed to be “the largest single fortune on earth” in 2500-something. You’d think that anyone who understands compound interest would understand inflation, as well.
I didn’t understand that either. Did they have billionaires back in the gilded age, but in 1914 an author thinks that $93 million will be the largest fortune on earth in 2500?
iamthewalrus(:3= writes:
> I also liked how $93 million was supposed to be “the largest single fortune on
> earth” in 2500-something. You’d think that anyone who understands compound
> interest would understand inflation, as well.
It doesn’t say that $93 million was supposed to be the largest private fortune. It says that $912 million was the largest fortune in 2621. That’s still wrong, even if you don’t take future inflation into account, since the largest fortune today is somewhere between $50 and $100 billion. Incidentally, I had forgotten that the story specified that the money went to the fortieth descendant (going through the eldest child in each case), not to the descendant who was living 1000 years in the future. Also, it seems that the story didn’t appear in a Groff Conklin anthology as I claimed above, but in Fantasia Mathematica and Strange Ports of Call.
Even at the time it was written, the richest man was John D Rockefeller and he was worth about a billion. I think after you take inflation into account, his fortune was actually bigger than Gates’s.
But note it was written when we were still on the gold standard. During that era, there was very little inflation over the long term. Yes, there were times of inflation, but they were always offset by depressions or panics when deflation would pretty much wipe it out. So a fortune of $50 billion was fairly unimaginable in those days.
dtilque writes:
> I think after you take inflation into account, his fortune was actually bigger than
> Gates’s.
If I recall correctly from what I’ve read, Rockefeller’s fortune is less than Gates’s (which isn’t the largest anymore anyway, since some Mexican man has the largest fortune) if you just take inflation in account. However, if you look at the money as a proportion of the world GNP, Rockefeller’s is a larger proportion of the GNP at that time than Gates’s is of the current world GNP. The world GNP has increased noticeably faster than inflation.
But supposed every man, woman, and child on earth invested one dollar the way John Jones did. In 40 generations, we can’t suppose that everyone in the world will have massive wealth.
Let’s assume that current laws (excluding perpetuities) continue to exist that long. How would everyone alive get paid off these incredible sums?
You’d probably blow it all on a can of anchovies anyway.
Well, first, it wouldn’t be everyone alive. It would only be one person per person alive now. But they’d be paid off the same way investors are paid off now, their investments go toward the expansion of production and the improvement of our lives. Bill Gates surely has $6 billion invested in Microsoft alone. How is that different than 6 billion people investing $1 each? He gets a return because Microsoft creates products that people pay for because they make peoples lives easier (cue Microsoft jokes).
Basically, those invested dollars will only make 5% a year (or whatever), as long as the economy is expanding. So, either the economy will have expanded to give each of those people unimaginable wealth compared to modern standards (not too hard to believe. How much would you pay to live for 500 years, or to vacation on Mars? It doesn’t matter, because we can’t do it at any cost. They’ll probably have those things relatively cheaply. Or something we can’t even imagine, yet), or the economy won’t have expanded that much, and they won’t have earned as much on their investments.