| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010969)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010969" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2030 |
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| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| Free growth then arrives at its whim, like a deus ex machina, without calling for |
| more than this steady effort of replication. I find myself focusing more and more on |
| that cash flow component of rate of return, or pure consumption rate at the |
| collective scale, as the part we can predict and model. |
| The generation length is a biological norm which probably has not varied by more |
| than a factor of two since Ancestral Eve some 200,000 year ago. This suggests that |
| next generation theory can be tested against data from any period. Meanwhile it |
| predicts only at the collective scale. Collective return is average risk return. Subtract |
| collective growth rate to leave cash flow rate. Return and growth are two of the |
| most closely measured rates in economics. That says that tests of next generation |
| theory should be practical. I will show tables broadly in support. |
| Next generation theory is a blockbuster. An explanation of interest and return has |
| been the Holy Grail of capital theory. Boehm Bawerk contributed a big advance by |
| revealing return as an artifact of time preference rather than the other way around. |
| Some including Irving Fisher have seen that beautiful insight as enough. |
| Not me. What explains and quantifies time preference? What turned out to be |
| Petty's idea occurred to me about 40 years ago, when I first took an interest in |
| evolutionary biology. My friend Alan Rogers, a population geneticist I didn't know |
| all the time, was thinking in the same direction. His two published papers on this are |
| in my appendix. Neither of us knew about Petty's priority. |
| The idea would have been a still bigger blockbuster before the wall came down. |
| Wars were being fought about whether return has any legitimacy at all. Karl Marx, |
| ironically a champion of Petty, may have missed his argument on that. |
| Petty's idea is really the biological imperative I discussed in Chapter 1. The first |
| priority is survival and reproduction. I will argue that this was implicitly accepted |
| Chapter 2: Fast Forward |
| 1/06/16 |
| 29 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010969 |
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