5 over 100 feels high to me but not order-of-magnitude off. I'm at maybe a 2 myself. I agree that's an entirely unreasonable amount of risk for everyone to just be waving off though.
On average, governments last 250 years — which means we have a 0.4% chance per year. Using that figure, 100 years has a 33% chance of collapse — as our background.
Or roughly 4% per decade.
People wave off that risk because there’s not a lot that can be done: we don’t know how to make perfect governments and we’ve never discovered a good way to, eg, eliminate the ratcheting tax burdens that destabilize society.
Yeah, part of my argument is that that 250 year number is heavily skewed by past civilizations where life was much worse and so people were much more apt to just tear everything apart. I don't think it holds for countries at current First World standards of living. As we improve living standards further the number of years regimes will last for will stretch out even more.
I'm not too crazy about this as an anarchist, mind you, I think there are better stable equilibria we could get to. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, I guess.
I think 5 in 100 is totally reasonable to wave off.
I’m not giving it a second thought personally.
If it happens it will be so bad that I’ll almost certainly die as a result (due to chronic illness) so I should just keep on living as-is and not worry about it.
An, to be precise I really meant everyone, like including national banks and giant corporations and stuff. Ordinary folk like you and me can almost certainly ignore it, it's just weird I rarely hear people talk about how to price this kind of thing in for very long term assets.
the "very long term" property of assets has very little present value with any reasonable discount rate, and fewer experienced people to actually care about it.
