A subset of humanity is immortal, how do I stop them from financially dominating?

Question

Modern earth, no magic. Only difference is that a small percentage (~1%) of the population are biologically immortal, they can die by accidents/murder/etc but are immune to old age and disease (they will spend forever in perfect health).

My question is how do I stop these people from dominating the economy? They have all the time in the world so even small investments will grow and grow and grow without their death forcing their money to be redistributed to their children/family/state?

Edit: As this was asked multiple times the fact a subset of humans are immortal is widely known and is a part of society, it's just how it always been.

Answer 1

Wealth tax

In your setting, a wealth tax has been enacted, which is based on the net value of a person's assets. It could be a progressive tax, even climbing to 100% beyond a certain point - this would basically be a hard cap on any individual's wealth, as any additional wealth would go to the government and not the individual. In our world, wealth taxes have been enacted or proposed as a means of combating the "rich get richer" phenomenon where society's wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of people.

Of course, wealth taxes will be unpopular with the super-rich, so for it to work as intended, there shouldn't be too many ways of dodging the tax. You wouldn't be able to implement such a thing in a small country that has easy access to other developed nations without such a tax, as the wealthy elite will simply move somewhere that has no wealth tax.

Answer 2

Struldbruggs

There is a classic solution to this problem, described by Jonathan Swift in his iconic Gulliver's Travels. In there, a nation of Luggnagg had a similar issue with a number of immortal people.

those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public

so the solution was

As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates; only a small pittance is reserved for their support; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands, or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal or economic, not even for the decision of meers (metes) and bounds.

Answer 3

Everyone hates them

You mentioned they can still be killed. Well, human jealousy is definitely a thing, and I imagine most people would consider it "unfair" that a few people can potentially live forever. This isn't a huge problem for the first thirty years or so, but once it becomes "obvious" that a certain person is immortal, society turns against them.

Maybe this is even institutionalized; killing an "immortal" is not only legal, but the murderer is entitled to a percentage of the deceased's wealth.

(Disclaimer: this is pretty much the exact setup of the short story "The Trouble with Millennials" by Robert Buettner. Read it here.)

Answer 4

They are (somewhat) limited by their psychology.

Possible scenarios include:

They can't keep up with rapid advancement of technology...

They live their entire several hundred years before the steam engine. They see society as "not much different" from one decade to the next. After the advancement of steam engine, technology progresses too quickly for them. Their psychology have been accustomed to the slow kind of progress.. and suddenly they see society grew so fast. They can't keep up. They arrive in present-day technology, feeling out-of-place or straight out insane.

...and they aren't adapting fast enough to constantly gain an edge in society.

They're used to the past. They're already accustomed to their lives several decades ago. They aren't much interested in experiencing/trying out new tech. They're fond of doing things the reliable, old familiar way. This old familiar way, however, is almost always less effective/efficient compared to the new stuffs. This reduces their overall chances of dominating the entire world.

They're bored or tired of living.

Simply bored. After living for too long, they don't find anything appealing in living for even longer. They've seen everything. Their young blood is now long gone. They don't find anything that excites joy anymore. This one is a minor plot in 2011 movie In Time.

Answer 5

even small investments will grow and grow and grow

This is a wrong assumption: imagine you are one of those immortals, and at the time of the roman empire you invest your money in a garum factory or in manufacturing purple dye, just to name two industries with good income.

Well, you might be immortal, but your investments will collapse with the empire, and good luck with collecting your wealth in those times of uncertainty.

Even in today world, look at how many companies have survived longer than a human life: Philips was once a big name in electronics, today no more; would you have manage to avoid the derivative crash of 2008, or the dot com bubble?

Long story short, even though you might be immortal, you cannot forecast the market ups and downs. You will end up losing part of the investments, and won't end up really dominating the economy.

Answer 6

we already do this, so it won't be as hard as you think

In fact, I suspect the bigger problem would be the consequence of immortal welfare recipients.

We already have (in the United States, probably different elsewhere) a whole set of laws that make it pretty messy to transfer wealth from parent to child. To avoid those laws, many families (the mortal version of immortality) build companies that live "forever," and put their descendants in a position of retaining control of those companies. Since even compound bank interest would be a serious threat to any economy when measured over centuries and millennia, laws would quickly come to pass that restrict how wealthy any immortal can become.

But you might ask, "so where does the welfare come into this? Why wouldn't the immortals be CEOs forever and get around those laws?" Lots of reasons. Boards of Directors (who love to oust people who aren't doing what they think is best for the company) and shareholders (ditto). Also anti-trust laws that prohibit monopolies.... But when push comes to shove, there are really only so many companies that can boast the kind of prolonged wealth you're talking about.

So there really isn't enough economic space for your immortals to be more than a minor impact on the world's wealth. If they chose to focus on crime for their wealth, competitors would set them first in line to be bumped off. If they chose to be Captains of Industry, everyone from competitors to activists to politicians would be driven to keep them from becoming the Ruling Elite. In either case, rules and laws already exist that are intended to keep individuals (and their descendants) from acquiring too much wealth (yes, I know, it doesn't seem to be that way... but it is. You don't want to stop all wealth-mongering, it has value whether you agree with it or not. Necessity being the mother of invention, after all.), which would naturally glom on to your immortals.

This is why you'd have a bigger problem with immortals on welfare. You don't describe them as unreasonably intelligent or powerful, just long-lived. How many reasonably smart people do you know who are near or below the poverty line? More than most of us want to admit. And an immortal on welfare in many ways represents a problem just as nasty as an immortal with a trust fund.

Besides, while everyone wants to live forever, no one wants their neighbor to live forever. And the natural development of law would prohibit your immortals from ever having so much economic traction that they could move the world.

...Well, assuming we don't believe in the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, the Trilateral Commission or the Roswell aliens, whom we all know are really still alive because any sufficiently advanced civilization would have figured out how to gene-splice perfect health and made sure every citizen got it, right?

Answer 7

Along with immortality comes a penchant for bad choices.

When they say "a fool and his money are soon parted" these are the fools they are talking about. These are the some of the people you can fool all of the time and that is what happens. They are immortal but they struggle even worse than ordinary folks to hang on to their money. They should live in constant fear of getting ripped off because it happens often. But they do not, and so it happens often.

The penchant for bad choices and susceptibility to death by accidents means that actually most of these immortals don't get really old.

Answer 8

Communism

You cannot dominate the economy when wealth is equally distributed among all, comrade. As the saying goes: from each according to their capacity, to each according to their needs.

Interestingly, since your immortals should eternally be able-bodied, they should eternally be able to produce for the good of everyone.

Or...

Eat the rich

Enough said.

Answer 9

It seems to me that there is very little difference between an immortal and a certain type of family where generation after generation are working to increase the wealth and power of the family. Both can take a long view, both can have variations in direction over time (because people change, even long-lived people). Both are affected by external factors like the collapse of markets, war, devaluation of currencies and so on.

In fact Old Money families are more likely to be successful over the long term because they can recover from individual failures more gracefully. The death of a family head isn't going to bring it to a halt. Even criminal conviction can be recovered from, because while one or more people go to prison there are plenty of other family members still actively managing the family's fortune.

In the real world there are old families that have incredible amounts of money and power, developed over centuries. I'm not talking (relatively) young money like the Rockefellers, whose progenitor JD was worth (in modern day equivalents) around US$500 billion, I'm talking about Old Money. Aristocratic families that have been around for several centuries and look down on upstarts like JD Rockefeller.

In this world your immortal might not be even particularly wealthy unless he was a financial genius.

Answer 10

The last 300 years have been a historical anomaly. In addition, that anomaly suffers from survivorship bias.

If you took some money 300 years ago, and invested it in the right kinds of assets in the right corner of the world, you'd easily be insanely wealthy today.

But pick the wrong corner of the world, and your investment would be worth nothing. Do the same thing 3300, 2300, or 1300 years ago, and your investment would probably be worth nothing.

The last 300 years has experienced multiple chained economic singularities we call steps in the industrial revolution. From water power and canals, to steam power and railroads, to oil and the internal combustion engine, to electricity and computers, each has been a wave of insanely fast change and growth.

In this environment, putting aside money to bet on the future being richer than the present tends to come up aces a lot. What more, doing so in the set of superpowers that won the global conflicts -- the East-Atlantic British Empire (UK), followed by the West-Atlantic British Empire (USA) -- is going to do even better.

You toss down a fortune in Germany in the inter-war years when it looked like it was going to become a superpower, and you'd have lost it all if you picked the wrong side of East/West Germany after the war.

The world is full of places where it looked like it was a good idea to invest, then within the century every investment would be lost.

What more, such investments would be extremely alien to someone used to the previous thousands of years of history. The idea you'd take wealth and hand it over to someone to make it bigger would be a short term thing as far as the immortals are concerned; every society crashes, and when it does your investments are worth nothing. What more, in most of history, holding onto your investments requires political and military power, as if you get rich someone else will just take your stuff.

And even after all this, your immortals wouldn't be much better off than random Dynasties. Dynasties who pass down assets to a single heir are economically very similar to immortals, especially if the previous heir gets to pick the next one. Such Dynasties where quite successful -- the top ones we know as "Kings" and other nobles -- but not universally so. As your immortals can suffer being killed, such immortal single-person dynasties would typically end with simply killing the immortal.

Long-lived immortals would be aware of this problem; those that have lived a long time will have adapted their lifestyles to avoid it.

The immortals might not have the "stupid heir" problem, but they are in a sense their own stupid heir. They'll get set in their ways and not adapt to the current situation, and their financial empire will fall.

In the post-industrial-revolution singularity states, some of these concerns don't apply. The need to guard your wealth with guns is a bit less (until your society collapses), the need to guard your wealth politically remains the same (or greater).

You'll still be about as well off as large dynasties that have passed their wealth down to one person. Your investment habits that are successful in one era will fail in another, and if you chase the rabbit and change with what habits have recently been successful you'll always miss the initial growth surges.

So your return on your savings will probably be, on average, no better than the financial giants of the past. In the UK, that would be the nobles; while they are (on average) not so badly off, they aren't the titans of the world economy you seem to imply the immortals are.

In the USA, similarly, the heirs of the robber barons of 1800s are not the top of the economic pile today.

Answer 11

The same thing that made them immortal makes them stop WANTING any sort of dominance.

Was it a medical technology/drug, or a mutation? Make it suppress a social domination instinct.

If it was a mutation, then carriers of the gene that was NOT connected to a suppressor of hierarchical domination ended up dying violently, for the last N thousands years, because competitors, though mortal, are much more numerous.

Have they uploaded their minds into a computer? They realize that the process didn't bring most of their instincts over, and emulating hormonal influence in silico tends to drive the digital personality crazy.

Was it magic? Well, then, it's magic that did the same thing.

Answer 12

You could compare this to the entailed estates of English aristocracy. While individuals were not immortal, the estates - passed down from eldest son to eldest son - were intended to be. Yet it took just one or two generations to be bad gamblers, or back the wrong side in civil wars, for the estate to become bankrupt.

Answer 13

a small percentage (~1%) of the population are biologically immortal

How does that 1% work? If some immortals are killed by accident, are new immortals born to take their place? Are 1% of babies born immortal? Or is it a fixed population of immortals that may be depleted over time by accidents?

they can die by accidents/murder/etc

Rare events and freak accidents start to become a bigger threat the longer you live. Extremely improbable causes of death do happen, and if somebody simply exists long enough, they are likely to succumb to one of them. It could be anything, from a bad slip while stepping out of the shower, to an asteroid hitting their house.

If you have no mechanism of replenishing immortals, their population will eventually approach zero.

Regardless of whether new immortals are born, existing immortals may become extremely risk-averse, withdrawing from society. Knowing that they are vulnerable to murder as well as accidents might make them think twice before doing anything to provoke the ire of the rest of society. This might inhibit them from financially dominating.

Answer 14

Frame challenge: They already dominate the whole world, because they are the ones who actually built the modern world.

You say that:

it's just how it always been

I'm going to arbitrarily take this in the almost literal sense that no recorded history exists of a time when these people were not alive. This can only happen in two cases:

Case 1: They have been alive since before history was recorded. If this is the case, the most likely scenario is that they have already amassed great wealth and power, and of course great knowledge (don't underestimate how much a person can learn in a millenia or two). In fact, they already had great wealth, power and knowledge well before the modern world began to take shape, and should have been perfectly capable of shaping history as they saw fit, effectively building the modern world as it is (either directly, or indirectly through preventing some particular things from happening). As such, it's difficult to argue that they don't already dominate the whole world.

Case 2: They have altered recorded history and collective memory to make it seem like they have been alive "forever". They might have been alive for merely 100 years, or 200 or 500, but they have so much power that they can rewrite history. As such, it's difficult to argue that they don't dominate the whole world.

Answer 15

Limiting wealth alone isn't enough

This is interesting, because there is more than one kind of dominance.

There are several answers already with various schemes to degrade the wealth and influence of immortal individuals, but let's consider how this might really play out.

Imagine an immortal person who is forced to completely start over every so often; they retain only the clothes on their back, and their identity, experiences, and memories, to the point where they might even need to spend the first night in a homeless shelter. Even so, such a person could eventually accumulate the equivalent of several PhDs and multiple life-times of business leadership experience.

Of course, not every immortal would do this, but even those of average ability would eventually start to trend this way, and such a person would be in high demand for top administrative positions in any industry or sphere of influence.

Now imagine even 0.01% of the population has this ability. This is already enough people for there to be precious few of these top positions remaining for "normies", even less so as these individuals start to rise to move in the same circles and get to know each other. They would almost certainly end up with reputations among each other, creating a de-facto network to make getting appointed or hired into top positions even easier.

And all this in a society where they still periodically have to start over from scratch, and only their experiences and identities remain. Individually there would be times for each of them where the influence is reduced, but collectively they would be almost certain to dominate the highest levels of economic leadership.

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Instead build in an intrinsic liability by limiting their memory capacity to roughly one "normal" human life-time

One solution is to design your immortals so their memory is limited.

Sure, I may be 4,000 years old. I may even have memories of certain ancient events and people that were especially important to me. However, by and large I have an extremely difficult time remembering anything that happened more than roughly 100 years ago, and sometimes even things more recent.

This limits the ability of your immortals build up the kinds of skill and experience that make them so valuable for those premiere jobs, such that other factors to limit wealth and influence have more of a chance.

Tune the memory limits just right, and you can have it be just enough of a liability to make it naturally difficult for your immortals to accumulate wealth and influence over centuries. For example, they tend to "forget" about investments, which are later declared abandoned and claimed by the government, and are rendered actively undesirable in leadership roles for a perceived tendency to be "flaky".

The limitation doesn't even have to be anything supernatural or unique to immortals. If you want, you can tie this memory issue to a biological limitation of the normal human brain... after around 100 years something just "runs out" on the brain's capacity to store and recall memory data, either like filling up a hard drive in a computer or a performance limit for retrieval speed for older records.

This can work really well, because it doesn't require any other alterations to the real world as it is — no new laws or societal norms — and because readers can believe this limitation is real and part of the normal human condition, whether or not it ever turns out to be true, because no real person has lived long enough to find out.

Both the size limitation and the recall speed limitation can be good hooks for a story. With the former, an immortal could be found at a critical moment to have forgotten something they knew earlier in the story to create tension or suspense, and in the latter they could finally remember something late in the story that has been puzzling them for some time, to help the protagonist get past a problem.

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Finally, I would further suggest reducing the proposed numbers of immortals. 1-2% is too high, and closer to 0.01% (1 in 10,000) seems better. This reduces the frequency they would encounter each other naturally and limits the ability for social networks among immortals to develop that might otherwise lead to them collectively having too much influence.

Answer 16

No arbitrage!

As financial theorists insists, there is no risk-free profit in a healthy market. Anything that is "theoretically risk-free" should earn no more than what is necessary to counter inflation, or someone is monkeying with the financial system. At least on the long run. (This is similar to the answer by L.Dutch, but putting it into modern terms ...)

Answer 17

NO WAY.

Right now, we fail to prevent a small percentage of mortal people from dominating the economy.

If some of them are immortal, this doesn't change much of the equation, compared to the usual lineage of rich people. Sure, some middle- or lower-class people get rich, some of those rich go bankrupt, but one cannot really fight the Paretto principle.

On the other hand, do these immortal people procreate? If they don't - problem solved, they will disappear because of one reason or another for a millenium or two. See the micromort concept.

If they do procreate, they will outbreed the mortal people in the same timespan.

The only more or less stable possibility is that they are born to mortal mothers and fathers with low probability and:

• they are either sterille
• or their fertility is matched to their longer half-life and their offspring has the same probability of being immortal.

No problem, then. Family relations are a good recipe to get poor. More so if you have a great deal of relatives in your lifespan.

Answer 18

It's not a problem.

You might thank that an immortal will eventually gain lots of wealth. But in actual practice the financial situation of an immortal is not different from a non-immortal with a family. One normal person accumulates, passes that down to their child, who uses it to accumulate more, and so on. If "parent" and "child happen to be the same person that makes no difference to their ability to accumulate wealth. They have the same time available to do it. There is no reason why immortals should be better at it than non-immortals, excepting a better ability to think long term.

Throughout most of European history there were families who accumulated huge amounts of wealth and handed it down through their families, dominating the financial landscape of their time. They were called "nobles", and achieved this by largely handing down their estates intact from father to eldest son.

The only thing that makes a difference between families and immortals is inheritance tax - coincidentally the same thing that put paid to the power of the wealth of the nobility. Abolish this and the situations are the same. If you want to prevent the accumulation of wealth by immortals, just make an inheritance tax that gets applied every 150 years to someone even if they are not dead.

Answer 19

Legal Reincarnation

This is close to Alexander's Struldbruggs answer, but a bit more forgiving. Struldbrugging a person makes them poor and useless for the rest of time, but there are other ways to do it where you allow them to start over just fine. So, every 80 years of their life, they must distribute inheritance, quit their jobs, forfeit their investments, and move away a minimum distance from their previous life.

But, instead of making it illegal for them to work, you just make it illegal for them the work in the same industry or with the same people in 2 consecutive life times. So if they are a politician in their first life, then when they hit 80, they may not pursue a political carrier again until they are 160. So when they hit 80, they pretty much have to go back to college, learn a new skill, and work their way up to again. By the time they hit 160, they could go back to being a politician, but in that span of time working in an unrelated trade, nearly all of the influence they gained in their first life will have evaporated away and their knowledge base stagnated too long to jump right back into it meaning any edge they have over mortals is small.

Another way to look at this is that a 1940's medical degree that you have not had to use or think about in 80 years is not going to be applicable enough to modern medicine to just jump back in. They won't know the first thing about how to install an artificial heart, or operate a medical laser, or how to use a balloon embolectomy catheter... so, even if they do return to an old carrier a whole life time later, they will not be able to rely on old knowledge to be competitive in that field anymore without significant re-education.

Answer 20

YOU NEED A DIFFERENT LEGAL FRAMEWORK FOR THEM

The current economical framework of our civilization is based (among other things) in the assumption that we all are going to die. And I am talking about the length of the bank loans, the age for retirement, the retirement policies, the social security policies, life and medical insurance and many many other topics that revolve their statistics in the fact that, soon or later we will all die (and in more or less predictible situations depending on specific characteristics).

So, if some part of your human population becomes immortal, unavoidably you will need a differnet legal/economic schema for them. You cannot apply the same policies for an insurance, or for a loan, or birth control (talking about China here).
If a bank lends money to an immortal, the clauses must be different, because the bank knows the immortal can be paying for centuries (unless an accident happens, of course, and that consideration should be specified in the contract).
Taxes and benefits also must differ, and also the situation of the childs of the immortals (An immortal could theoretically have hundreds of childs if he/she wants, so birth control policies should also be applied).

Answer 21

Inflation and Currency Resets

Society only operates financially so long as the perceived value of goods and services are appropriately established.

As the wealth of any particular individual grows, the value of their wealth will begin to devalue. At first, this would be through inflation - society would charge more money for things, knowing that those who have accumulated too much wealth can pay for it.

In the longer term, inflation would outstrip earnings for most of the non-immortal people. And suddenly, most people wouldn't be able to afford the prices... but would need to survive in order to produce the goods/services in the first place.

A counter-movement would form, in which people would begin using an "underground" currency, to exchange goods and services without needing to go through the hyper-inflated normal market.

Give it a bit of time, and most people would be using the new currency. Meanwhile, the immortals would be starting at square one, just as everyone else does. And as all economic activity switches to the new currency, the old currency rapidly becomes worthless.

The interesting thing about this is, there's really nothing the uber-wealthy immortal can do about it. They could try to create the new currency themselves, but that's likely to backfire.

Answer 22

Several things can be done to assure that immortals are poor and adequately explained:

• Cursed to be poor
• Make the world post-apocalyptic
• Being hunted down
• Make them nomadic wanderers
• Island Amish people that never associated with modern society
• World = dystopian nightmare (ruled by tyrannical tribal communities)
• "I just wanna live in peace..." (got this plot from a hentai manga about an immortal oni who watched her children grew and spread after her husband died, and waited until he's reincarnated again)
• Go full The Highlander mode ("HERE WE ARE! BORN TO BE KINGS!...")

Answer 23

When you are immortal you have no particular interest in worldly possessions any more. Been there, done that. Material wealth comes and goes; material possessions decay. Immortality changes your perspective. It makes you humble.

From the perspective of an immortal, the only things that persist through the ages are the ones that are not bound to physical matter. The immortals almost exclusively pursue scientific, spiritual and artistic quests.

Answer 24

Give ownership of money a time-limit

In our modern world, this would entail something of a fundamental re-write of banking, but conceptually shouldn't be impossible.

Essentially every penny in existence is associated with a date that it changed hands.

After say.. 10 - 20 years, money that hasn't changed hands legally will revert to the State.

This essentially requires that money be moving routinely and makes hoarding money long-term much more difficult. You can't just dump billions of dollars into a bank account and expect to leave it there long-term.

The problem I see with this is that the solution is simple. Enter into an agreement with a friend to buy things from them and they from you. Two people making "modern art" and selling it to one another for silly volumes of money in order to avoid their money melting away..

Alternately, you'd get billionaires keeping their money in literal vaults of cash so that it can't degrade in value.

Obviously there are some kinks to work out in the plan.

Answer 25

Wealthy and influential immortals are bad for business

Every time some local stable system forms (company/government/...) where immortals are in power, it soon becomes stuck developmentally because of a lack of change in leading personnel, and the consequent accumulation of status quo bias/technophobia/overpromotion of incompetents. Other less stable or less immortal-friendly systems can then begin to dominate and are able (and intent) to completely destabilize that system from the outside.

Since this pattern is historically known, even intelligent immortals knowing not to influence mortal dealings too much will be unable to acquire influence/wealth - and even those rare that do, often fall prey to overconfidence and/or the lure of power, not being able to simply live in comfort and ignore everyday affairs (some few immortals were able to resist, and are living "eternally" stable somewhat-rich lifes by making fruitfull deals with groups of mortals - until they are inevitably betrayed by those).

Due to this dynamic, all long-term successfull societies impose some limits on immortals - in some, everyone living past their 60th birthday is executed (which incidentally saves on pension costs), others simply have age-dependent (as well as wealth-dependent) tax (making handing down ones wealth down to ones descendents the only way to "at least keep it in the family"), and still others restrict them to certain jobs/living conditions (eg. historians, or special kinds of advisors always paired with young mortals) (and in some societies, old immortals are simply treated as pariah by all companies in terms of financial dealings).

Also, frequent collapses of societies that do not have immortal restrictions in place just as effectively prevent the accumulation of wealth, since property rights will no longer be guaranteed, and material assets might be acquired by mortals/destroyed in the chaos until a new system stabilizes.

Answer 26

The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. Not even stupidity exceeds it. If they have access to compound interest, they will dominate, there are no factors that can change this. Even without immortality, compound interest is so extreme as to challenge my ability to describe it... note that the other answers have been attempted in the real world and yet have always failed against compound interest without immortality. How could those hope to succeed in a world with immortality?

I propose that your question has no plausible, valid answer.

Answer 27

In order of dramatic effect in your story:

1. They must keep it secret. Anybody (mortal or immortal) found to be obscenely rich is suspected to be in immortal and lynched. The smartest immortals have managed to hide their assets extremely well, others have to feign illness or even death periodically to prevent lynching.

2. There is a widely accepted religious prohibition against compound interest.

3. Some immortals have become kings and queens. Their fortune is indistinguishable from the fortunes of the countries they lead. They have to deal with wars, foreign invasions, rebellions, technological breakthroughs, pandemics, etc.

4. This is the price they paid for their immortality: They made an ancient pact with the source of their immortality to give 9/10 of their wealth every year at summer solstice to charity. If they don't, they lose their immortality for a year.

Answer 28

The big problem with immortals is that they all the time they need to find whatever loopholes there are in your rule set.

Money, property, goodwill, information. And these are just some of the metrics which are more or less exchangeable into each other. To make sure your immortals can't game the system, you'd have to limit each and every one of these metrics, which seems hard to do.

So, my idea would be instead of trying to build a system, make the reason why they can't dominate something biological, and therefore out of control. Many of such limitations were already mentioned: Naivety, memory loss, decreasing learning speed, dulling emotions.

My suggestion would be synchronized, generation long hibernation. To regenerate their bodies, the immortals need to go into a deep slumber. So, every ~30 years, they feel the deep drowsiness coming, which lasts one or multiple generations. They all do it at the same time, forced by some global trigger.
(Depending on how realistic you want the hibernation to be, you'll have to use some kind of variation).

Hibernation this long means almost everything they have in society will be gone - properties redistributed, money confiscated, information obsolete and goodwill withered. Even worse: If you have angered the people, it is now their chance at payback, and there's little what you can do about it. After all, even if you employ mortals, what reason do they have to do their job? You can't punish them for breaking a contract, and there's little hope that their goodwill lasts multiple generations. Your best bet would be entrusting your safety to other immortals … but those are all asleep as well.

Answer 29

Even with modern medicine and much better life style, it is very likely these people will live on average 300 years. There was a calculation about this but I don't remember where I saw it. The number was even lower, but lets round it to nearest 100. Living 5 times longer (excluding childhood) than average person will help them to accumulate wealth and knowledge, but they will probably not be as rich as the richest people. Some answers mention wealthy families, it is very unlikely for these individuals to get that far, even though they have a better chance. Remember these families start with a lucky or brilliant event that makes them rich at the start and they keep accumulating wealth by using the wealth. They represent less than 1 in a million of the population, since the immortals are rare too, chance of a very rich immortal getting extremely rich is of a very low chance. And the ones they do, will die one day, and their riches will be split to 100's of grand grand kids.

There are two exceptions though. If immortals have immortal children, %1 will raise to 100% in a few millennia. If immortals are there and no new ones are born, they will be extinct in a millennia or so.

Answer 30

I propose two solutions to the question that are quite different:

The immortals want to be Monastic Archivists

For ethical reasons they don't believe in money.

Perhaps in the past, some immortals did become filthy rich, and the elite immortals became so corrupt and unbalanced that a schism or revolutionary purging was required. The surviving group was not the wealthy immortals, but the ones who wanted to guide society on a spiritual path rather than gaining wealth. An interesting implication of being immortal is they would remember the history of bloody cultural revolutions and never want to go through it again. This might lead to a much stronger belief. What they believe holds value could be something other than money: maybe passing on their unique knowledge, experiences, and memories.

There are historical or real societies like this. It is possible they are like Tibetan buddhists, walling themselves up in remote Abbies and living communally in their own marketplace, or more like Menonite farmers, trying to push back the hands of time? Some modern day Abbies function as museums, vineyards, and breweries, co-operatively saving away money for the institution, but the individual monks don't live a lavish lifestyle.

I can see how being immortal might eventually renounce materialism, because they have seen governments and powerful rich mortals come and go.

Immortals are a hunted endangered species

There is an explanation why the immortals haven't proliferated and become Humans 2.0.

This is a variation of the "Everybody Hates them" scenario, in which the immortals are the victims of discrimation, the minority victims of brutal hunting. Their lack of wealth might be the result of common conspiracy theories about them, genocides, and unethical scientific experiments.

In this scenario, the immortals are still endangered despite their lifespan. Perhaps little is known about their regenerative abilities, and some bad actors are still holding them captive in labs, illegally attempting to dissect them for research, or harvest their organs to sell as medical transplants. In this scenario,some liberal governments and groups would be more benign than others, granting immortals asylum, and legally protecting them, or even trying to negotiate restitution for them.