Hope

 

“Hope” Is The Thing With Feathers 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul 
And sings the tune without the words 
And never stops - at all 

Hope is the belief that there is a future. 

As I said in an earlier blog post , https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/07/faith.html, the three biblical virtues are Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest was claimed to be Love. I previously made a pitch for Faith, trust, because without trust, you may not accept Love. I also want to make a pitch for Hope in the future, because without it there is no point to Love. 

I have a special fondness for Hope. As a native Rhode Islander, I know that Hope not only is the shortest American State motto, but in the Greek myth, Pandora opened the chest which released evil into the world, but remaining in the chest was Hope. Hope is a belief that there is a future. And it is the future of the group, not oneself. Old men plant trees that won’t bloom until long after they are gone because their hope is for the group, not themselves.

 The future does not have the same value as today, even if it is not zero. “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush,” etc. Requiring a profit is merely expressing that the future is worth less than the present. If you say that the future has a value of 0.91 of the present, then this is consistent with saying that you expect a 10% profit. 

A problem with valuing the future is that we also know that as individuals we have a limited life. But the value of the future should not depend on our age. A 5-year old toddler, thinks that their next birthday is a long way off because each birthday is 1/5 of their life. They do not think of how many birthdays they will experience. A 20-year old’s next birthday is  1/20 of their life but they might reasonably expect that it is merely one of 60 more that they will experience. A 70 year old's next birthday is only 1/70 of their life, but it is only one of 10 more that they might expect to have. However the group may celebrate your birthday long after you have departed. Is the next birthday “A long way off”  as a toddler might think, or “Not so far away, but only  a few more of them” as the elderly like to think. 

	Self	Self	Group	Self	Group
Age in years	5	20	20	70	70
Expected number of birthdays to come	75	60	60	10	10
Value of next birthdays based on age	0.83	0.95	0.95	0.99	0.99
If only your life matters	.94	0.75	1.00	0.125	1.00
Effective net value of next birthday	0.78	0.71	0.95	0.125	0.99
Implied Interest Rate for Future	29%	40%	5%	700%	1%

 A toddler has not yet been civilized and thinks only of themselves, not any group.  The elderly thinking of the group, might think that the future has the same value as the present and ignore the fact that they only have a limited number of birthdays in the future. This is bad, since there are more future days than the present day and this leads to a belief that the future is worth more than the present.  The selfish elderly might think since they only have a few more birthdays left,  “Après moi, le déluge”. This would be equally wrong since it says the future has no value.  It seems like a future of 0.9 times the present, which is more consistent with a selfish 20-year old might be a good value for the future.  As long as the future has a value greater than zero, then we do have Hope.