“We need to get back home so we can really work,” Daniil, who was wearing green trousers with Pokémon and flowers on the legs, told me. For some days, they’d been courted by fancy investors, with a schedule that included a trip in a private helicopter, an experience they found fun but, like most things that aren’t part of what they call their “mission,” distracting. David, a year younger, resembles Stephen Hawking in his youth. Daniil, who is older, at thirty-nine, has a gaunt, freckled face, and when we met was wearing his hair in the long, curling style of George Frideric Handel. They were fresh from Playa Vista, California, a residential and office-space hamlet whose chief virtue is its proximity to LAX. The brothers have a sandy shade of hair and a punctilious Eastern European way of furrowing their brows and making little tutting noises as they zero in on the mot juste. And now imagine that, instead of being one person, you are two.ĭaniil and David Liberman, two entrepreneur brothers who purport to share a single life, met me one chilly November afternoon in midtown, and we set off for a walk through Central Park. Imagine that this idea becomes a fixation, so much that you decide you’d risk a piece of your own future on a solution. You dream of what would happen if the money from your day job could cross over to your friends at night. You notice that older generations and big corporations rule the roost in the United States, but it’s not clear why this should be so.Īt your day job, which deals in shareholder capital, you impress your graying superiors, while at night you talk with young friends who, beset by debt and meagre wages, feel they’re barely eking out a life. In a more equal world, you cannot help but think, people would draw on their lifetime wealth throughout their lives, not merely at the pinnacle of their careers. Such timing issues-how much money you receive or can spend now and later-have effects on your financial fate. Your young self does labor for which your older self collects rewards. But there are also inequalities that extend longitudinally, from the past into the future. We usually think of inequalities as extending from bottom to top: I earn a little wealth over eight hours Bill Gates earns much more. If you could take some of your wealth and send it backward in time, to your younger self, you would. The kid you were had different dreams it strikes you as unfair that you sit pretty on the spoils of that person’s efforts. Now, living in the California sun with some success, you reflect on your poor, wan, sleepless younger self and feel a wave of gratitude, and then of prickly regret. Another version of yourself, in another time, though, is.

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