Investing in a Singularity

The math governing compound interest offers an enticing proposition to investors with patience and an eye for the distant future. A great piece in Lapham's Quarterly surveys this siren's call and some of the characters, fortunes and court cases wrecked on its shores:

'A few years before [Benjamin] Franklin drafted his will, philosopher Richard Price rhapsodized in a sober treatise on the national debt, "One penny, put out at our Savior's birth to 5 percent compound interest, would, in the present year 1781, have increased to a greater sum than would be contained in two hundred millions of earths, all solid gold.'

Thanks, Kurt!