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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29330 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Ultimately you'd end up with a two class society, between the Methuselahs (those who received a significant initial resource allocation block and have grown by countless death dividends) and the Children (those who start out with a zero or minimal block and have received fewer death dividends than the Meths).

I'm not sure if the math works out that way. I'm envisioning it as follows:

  • Every year, everyone gets +1 allocation point from other people dying

  • Families split their allocation evenly at each birth.

Let's look at several family structures that are stable over generations.

Large young family:

  • Inherit 16 points

  • Marry someone identical, and have children at 20, 22, 24, 26 years old

  • The family has 2 * 16 (inheritance) + 2 * 26 (parent's age) + 6 + 4 + 2 + 0 (children) = 96 points, split six ways = 16 points each

  • Live another 80 years, dying at 96 points of allocation.

  • Average approx 49.4 points during your life

Small young family:

  • Inherit 40 points

  • Marry someone identical, and have a child at 20 years old

  • The family has 2 * 40 (inheritance) + 2 * 20 (parent's age) + 0 (child) = 120 points, split three ways = 40 points each

  • Live another 80 years, dying at 120 points of allocation.

  • Average approx 90 points during your life

Small old family:

  • Inherit 80 points

  • Marry someone identical, and have a child at 40 years old

  • The family has 2 * 80 (inheritance) + 2 * 40 (parent's age) + 0 (child) = 240 points, split three ways = 80 points each

  • Live another 60 years, dying at 140 points of allocation.

  • Average approx 106 points during your life

I don't think that a mere doubling of resources is enough to entrench an aristocracy or cast someone into poverty. More permissive inheritance laws could make for stronger effects, but that isn't how I read the proposal.

I was thinking of much longer lifespans, since mitigatedchaos referred to it being developed to deal with pseudo immortality (i.e. only dying by accidents, murder, etc.) Iirc the expected lifespan with those mortality tables is on the order of 1000 years, with a thicker right tail than our current distribution.

Though I'd suspect that even at 1000 years the disparities wouldn't be that worth worrying about. Thinking about it a bit more, only if there were significant feedback processes (larger allocations leading to longer lifespans leading to larger allocations) would my scenario be a risk.

Replace "years" with "decades" and everything else will be the same. The mechanism simply doesn't allow for concentrating allotment the way that we can currently concentrate wealth.

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