When to Terminate a Charitable Trust
trust that will grow in value for a specified period. When the trust matures the capital and accumulated income will go to an organization working to prevent famine, poverty and human suffering. You are pessimistic about human affairs, but optimistic about the long term future of the stock market. You expect human suffering to grow at a slow constant rate, but you believe the money in the trust will grow at a slightly faster rate (in real, inflation-adjusted dollars). There might even be proportionally less and less human misery in the world and still constant absolute misery growth. Total human happiness would just have to soar fast enough. Having imagined those conditions, ask yourself a simple question. What date would you set for dissolving the trust? For any date that you pick, had you picked a later date, you could have helped more people with more money. If you do not pick a date, if you have the trust grow forever, then of course the trust will never help anyone. As a utilitarian, your guiding