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irsa.institute › library › the-perpetuity-trap
The perpetual endowment is a capital structure, not a neutral container. A real-terms preservation mandate forces the duty to the corpus to dominate the duty to the mission, optimising the institution for its own survival. Three failure modes follow — corpus primacy, the payout floor as ceiling, and horizon inversion — reproducing regardless of trustee quality. Reforms soften symptoms while leaving corpus primacy intact. The paper reframes the fiduciary question from stewardship of a corpus to stewardship of a problem.
Where it sits. Diagnostic of the perpetual endowment. The governance half of the philanthropy critique (fiduciary inversion); pairs with the single-use grant diagnosis and points toward mission-cycle-aligned, recycling capital architecture.
The long-form argument for this work still lives on the existing explainer at /explainer/the-perpetuity-trap. This page carries the abstract and the corpus metadata — the frame the argument would move into unchanged.
The works either side of this one in the canon order — what it builds on and what builds on it.
Where to go once you have the argument — the paper it comes from, the instrument that measures it, or the next thing it depends on.