[ExI] Banking, corporations, and rights (Re: Serfdom and libertarian critiques)

[Anders Sandberg]

One reason to have compound interest is to get humans to care about 
investing in the future.

We tend to discount the future, reducing future values by ~5% per year 
into the future. This is likely set by risk and death rates, and was 
much higher in the past (also, we have a few hyperbolic discounting 
issues, but lets ignore them here). Now, if I have some resources and 
get offered a linear growth of them if I invest them somewhere, that 
means that the offer is not going to be very tempting beyond a very 
short investment horizon. The only way to tempt me to invest my 
resources indefinitely long-term is to offer compound interest.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University