It’s no secret that I’m a fan of economics-inspired solutions to otherwise hard problems. The other day I happened across an old post by GMU economist Bryan Caplan which I think does this very elegantly, for a problem of some interest to me.
The vast majority of wills evenly divide the residuary estate between children. Mine evenly divides the residuary estate between (children and grandchildren).
I like this a lot. It makes it unambiguously clear where your priorities in the case of your untimely demise lie. It is also self-reinforcing; children of yours who have no children themselves will recieve less, but when it comes time to write their own wills, they won’t have any children or grandchildren to bequeath to anyway. Children of yours who have many children themselves, perhaps inspired by this very policy, might decide in the end they were duped - but it seems far more likely to me they’ll cite it as one of the biggest reasons they ultimately went for 4 instead of 3, or 2 instead of 1, or 1 instead of none. After seeing it work in practice on themselves, they might decide they want to incentivize bringing their own grandchildren into being in kind.
Is this wrong? I don’t think so. It fails the first order wrongness test, for one: Would we want to make it illegal for grandparents to bequeath money in their wills to their grandchildren? Of course not. But a will is dividing up a fixed amount of resources, so ultimately any dollar that goes to a grandchild is a dollar that does not go to a child, or a charity, or what have you. That upper bounds how wrong this could truly be, if indeed it is wrong at all.
I also don’t think it is wrong at all, for the simple reason that the money is the parent’s money. They are allowed to do whatever they want with it. Incentivizing other people to conform to one’s own standards of moral and good behavior by giving them stuff to do so will always strike a nerve among disagreeable men in online spaces, but it’s how the world works.
You can always turn down the money. I said no at my Catholic confirmation when I was 10, choosing to put what I really believed over the ~$1000 in gifts from friends and family I would have otherwise gotten. I was not materially hurt by not receiving that money, I was simply no better off than I would have been anyway. I left my second internship at State Street when I was 15 becuase I saw half of the department I was interning for get laid off in the first week and then got handed a stack of about 2000 papers to scan through by hand for errors. Again, I was not materially hurt, I just turned down the offer because the environment was not to my tastes.
Can you do this over and over again until you Diogenicize yourself into abject poverty? Sure, but nobody is going to shed a tear for you because you decided to turn down all forms of win-win deals because of your own conscience. You can find them literally everywhere where there is another person around. I have a Twitter mutual who couchsurfed at friends’ places for years, skirting rent entirely, and people loved him because he was just a really, really cool guy to hang out with. (Free vacuuming and doing the dishes every evening because it was how he unwound while listening to Deftones was also a pretty good deal.)
We’re veering off. Not being written into someone’s will does not hurt you. If you want to bank on being in someone’s will, it makes sense that they would ask you to do some stuff for them as well. What’s something old people love more than anything? Their own grandchildren. I report this from experience - my own relationship with my parents has never been better after giving them their first grandchild, even though I’m not getting anything in their will either until I do that damn confirmation. Makuasioita.