Re: poly: Re: Why interest rates may stay low

In a message dated 3/25/98 1:41:08 PM, hanson@econ.berkeley.edu wrote:

>Perry writes:
>>Imagine tomorrow morning someone came up to you, Robin Hanson, and
>>asked you to invest your money in something with no way to calculate
>>the rate of return, no way to calculate the odds of any particular
>>rate of return, and no exit strategy for 150 years.
>>You'd tell them to take their prospectus and shove it.
>
>Yes, and I'd do this if you changed "150 years" to any time period
>whatsoever. I'm asking for a reason why I should care much about
>that aspect of the scenario.

"No way to calculate",
here, would have to include "cannot calculate a good lower bound".
Hence Robin (and the other 4,999,999,999 people who at least implicitly
rejected all such opportunities today) must have concluded that
it's almost certain either :

a) There's no returns to be made.
b) The returns are so far off he might as well buy T-bills.

So, many people have concluded the chances of any currently proposed
method for breaking the "discount rate barrier" as very slim.
Received on Wed Mar 25 21:37:12 1998