Re: poly: Re:non-financial return on investments

At 11:19 PM 3/21/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Regarding the debate over interest rates and 'return' on investments, you
>guys may be missing a point. Look historically at how and why bigtime
>resource managers (from Pharaohs to Medicis) invested in big projects whose
>'return' might only be seen long after their deaths. Their reasons -- and
>the TYPE of expected return -- changed depending on the size of the project
>and their own social status.

Sure, the diversity of things people want implies a diversity of reasons
for investing now to get more later. But it's not clear to me that the rate
of return people want from their investments depends that much on the kinds
of returns they want, at least after we factor out the risk of dying before
the returns are realized. Our discussion was regarding rates of return.

Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
Received on Mon Mar 23 17:43:31 1998