A discount rate of 0.7% would suggest a fund could be passed forward about 300 years (details in Appendix).
This is an interesting point. Naively compounding using expected market returns-discount rates would tell you the fund will grow forever, but what we really should expect is that the fund will eventually fail, and in the unlikely event that it’s still running properly past 300 years (based on your discount rate), it’ll be massive, and we might not even be able to use most of it very usefully, with decreasing marginal altruistic returns to resources.
That being said, it’s worth keeping in mind that EA has multiple such funds and could continue to start more, so it’s far more likely that we’ll still have at least one around for much longer.
This is an interesting point. Naively compounding using expected market returns-discount rates would tell you the fund will grow forever, but what we really should expect is that the fund will eventually fail, and in the unlikely event that it’s still running properly past 300 years (based on your discount rate), it’ll be massive, and we might not even be able to use most of it very usefully, with decreasing marginal altruistic returns to resources.
That being said, it’s worth keeping in mind that EA has multiple such funds and could continue to start more, so it’s far more likely that we’ll still have at least one around for much longer.