Introduction

Robin Hanson: People are deviating from what they would do optimally, trying to take the long term into account. He says if it's true that thinking about the long term future is useful, then wouldn't you expect the most powerful institutions today to be the ones that thought about the long-term future in the past? The challenge is to come up with a unit of selection that can pass on resources to itself over the long run - and so far organizations haven't been able to just collect resources for themselves.