poly: discount rate

Robin writes
> On average though, people should discount a factor of two per generation,
    because when you trade off resources for you now vs. resources for a
    child of yours a generation from now, your child only shares half your
    genes.

So in William Tenn's story "The Seven Sexes of Venus", the discount
rate should be 2.81 times as high as on Earth, thus attracting an
enormous amount of investment?

Rich Schroeppel rcs@cs.arizona.edu
Received on Thu Mar 5 20:04:23 1998