Terminal Value

Economics treats death as a boundary condition and never inspects it.

But death is quietly doing at least five jobs. It sets the discount rate. It turns over capital. It turns over ideas. It prices risk. And it creates vacancy.

Each one is load bearing. None of them has a backup. Radical life extension removes all five at once, and the result is not utopia and not catastrophe but something stranger: a civilization that is wealthy, safe, static and permanently locked in.

Meanwhile artificial agents arrive as the first economic actors with genuinely arbitrary lifespans, and the turnover function migrates from people to machines.

An essay in five removals, argued through the discount rate, inheritance, the sociology of science, the value of a statistical life and vacancy chains, with a full apparatus of notes so every claim can be checked. Thirteen chapters in five parts, from a Dutch bond written on goatskin in 1648 that still pays, to Venice's Serrata, to the maritime code for ships with no crew.