Nadia Asparouhova: preference

Transcript context

…So maybe I'm not John Rockefeller in that I only want my organization to last for 50 years. I'm sure you've come across these people who have this idea that I'll let my money compound for 200 years and if it just compounds at some reasonable rate, it'll be the most wealthy institution in the world, unless somebody else has the same exact idea. If somebody wanted to do that, but they wanted to hedge for the possibility that there's a war or there's a revolt, or there's some change in law that draws down this wealth, how would you set up a thousand or 500 year endowment? Would you just put it in a crypto wallet? If having the most influence in 500 years is the goal, how would you go about that organizationally? I'd worry much less. The question for me is not about how do I make sure that there are assets available to distribute in a thousand years? Because I don't know, just put it in the stock market. You can do some pretty boring things to just ensure your assets grow over time. The more difficult question is, how do you ensure that whoever is deciding how to distribute the funds, distributes them in a way that you personally want them to be spent? Ford Foundation is a really interesting example of this. Henry Ford created the Ford Foundation shortly before he died and just pledged a lot of Ford stock to create this foundation and was doing it basically for tax reasons. He had no philanthropic interest or anything like that. It's just this is what we're doing to house this wealth over here and he then passed away. Son passed away, and the grandson ended up being on the board. But the board ended up being basically a bunch of people that Henry Ford certainly would not have ever wanted to be on his board. The Ford Foundation ended up becoming hugely influential. I have received money from them so it's not at all an indictment of their views or anything like that. It's just much more of — you had the intent of the original donor, and then who are all these people that suddenly just ended up with a giant pool of capital and decided to spend it however they felt spending it. The grandson at the time famously resigned because he was really frustrated and was just like, “This is not at all what my family wanted.” and basically got kicked off the board. So if I had a thousand year endowment is that is the question that I would figure out — How do I make sure that whoever manages that endowment actually shares my views? But also, how do I even know what we need to care about in a thousand years? Because I don't even know what the problems are in a thousand years. And this is why very long term thinking can be a little bit dangerous in this way, because you're presuming that you know what even matters then. Whereas, figure out the most impactful things to do is just so contextually dependent on what is going on at the time. There are also foundations where the donor writes in the charter, this money can only be spent on X-cause or whatever, but then it just becomes really awkward over time because they're spending money on lighthouse keepers or something like that. And this is just not a thing that actually really should be the main focus anymore. I don't know. I think I would probably try to figure out a way to somehow select for thoughtful people. I wonder if a committee with short appointment terms, that can run a contest or something to determine who gets to run this money or distribute this money every generation or something like that. I don’t know. I’d have to come up with something pretty crazy like that. But yeah, I think that would be the biggest challenge. Yeah, I just started reading the book about the Ford Foundation. I haven't gotten that far but it's so fascinating. That raises an interesting question. There is the problem of value drift in charities, but it's a very particular kind of value drift. There's famously Conquest’s second law, that any institution that is not constitutionally and explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing over time. And this seems especially true of NGOs and charitable organizations. What's the explanation? Why does Conquest's Second law seem true in this arena?…

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