Going to use my 1337 5k1llz to hack causality and retroactively inject my response in the comment stream. #5 feels like a good number. Aaaaaand done. Unfortunately, the butterfly effect has caused a sentence about the letter “J” to appear right here for no reason. That seems to be the extent of the damage.

Two things: in the hospital we don’t know who has which discount rate. Also, in the second scenario, we have to decide today, in the hospital, the distribution a year from now.

In the Real World the person best connected gets richer, instead. So what are we talking about here?

As a practical matter, a 50/50 split makes sense, unless, of course, one of the two has a lower discount rate and therefore can wait out for more bargaining. (I vaguely remember a result in game theory where alternative proposal-making leads to an advantage to the more patient player.) — The question is, would the influence of patience in bargaining be “fair”? Whatever that means…

…

It looks like I’ll have to be the first to volunteer answers to the questions.

I’d split the loot between us equally in the first instance.

The question of how to split the loot a year from now is harder. On the one hand, any inequality then is due to individual talent and even though one of us being smarter is not the other’s fault, I don’t have a sense that those inequalities are bad. So no redistribution required.

On the other hand, if I turn out to be the smarter of the two of us, I’d be worried that I’d produce so much more than you that there would be a non-negative probability that you would grow envious and try to steal from me (by force maybe). I might want to set some threshold of inequality where some redistribution kicks in, if only to prevent you from being inspired to beat me up and take my stuff. This would also help reduce the chance of me becoming envious if I turned out to be the stupid one.

To the point… taking the idea of rights seriously implies more than an obsession with the division of loot.

And then there’s the problem of secession. Are we restricting our investigation to the set accessible to the grand coalition (in the cooperative game theory sense)?

Thunderdome, of course. Two men enter. One man leaves.

Here’s were I start to sing the virtues of revealed preferences and behavioral data over survey results!

I prefer moral nihilism.
I prefer for you to prefer it too.