294
UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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The answer seems simple. Digitise the wills and any of historical value as identified by an independent body made up of Twitter historians can keep the originals for prosperity and research 😂.
Digitise the lot and start with new wills. I understand the value to historians of keeping old pieces of paper but at some point the costs of that have to be evaluated against the benefits. You can't just say "it's of an unquantifiable amount therefore we need to keep them", that's such a lazy cop out.
In fact I'm increasingly frustrated that all legal documents aren't digitised. Shuffling paper around is so backwards and a nightmare to search and index efficiently.
What can it even cost, at a ceiling? A few hundred thousand a year? I million? Even a hundred million? I expect it's way less, but even if it's half a billion, that is pocket change in the first world. If your government can't afford to write off an expense that miniscule, you live in a failed state.
That money can be put to better use though, no?
Why? Better in what sense? Better for whom? I think spending the money on ensuring that paper records are preserved is worth it solely because it monkeywrenches tampering and fraud, so diverting that money would always be worse no matter what it goes to. Money spent on maintaining public parks would be better spent on curing cancer, does that mean we defund parks? Money spent on a necessity is not a waste just because there are other necessities.
Also, even assuming you're right, who cares? I just spent $1.50 on a cup of coffee. That money could have been put to better use, but it wasn't, and it doesn't matter, because it's $1.50. This was my original point, functional states don't have to even think about this cost, they can literally afford to forget it.
Yeah, I hear you and I'm not averse to spending money on things that don't bring "direct" value. I fully believe that historical documents are important.
What I'm weighing it against is this: Governments have a fixed annual budget. It's costing 4.5M a year to keep those documents. As the number of historical wills increases over time, so will the cost so there has to be some kind of cutoff point. Given that fixed budget (for example) how many homeless people could be housed versus the downside of having the documents stored in digital format (and it is a downside compared to having the original). I'm only talking about ones for people long since dead btw.
When you have a fixed budget, every penny you spend has an opportunity cost.
And of course I acknowledge that the budget could be increased in ways that allow for the originals to be saved while taxing the ultra rich more to pay for it. The current UK government is unfortunately not going to do that.
Academics have already run those numbers. It's already a decided issue among those who will actually do the preservation what the preferred method is, for which purposes. And no one is saying you can't have multiple purposes or preserve multiple formats, (in fact, that, too, is preferred) except those arguing cost, who, like they do with climate change, want to ignore established science as well as what those actual costs will be.
I cannot stress this enough, that is nothing. You're hand-wringing over an amount of money that falls under the scope of a rounding error in any first-world country's budget. If you want to talk about proper use of resources, a properly-functioning legislative body shouldn't even be able to afford to think about it, let alone discuss it, they should be dealing with a full session's-worth of projects that cost 100—100,000 times as much. If you want to talk about proper use of the taxpayers' money, it doesn't involve elected officials derelicting their actual duties to hem and haw over something that costs under $50 million on the national scale. For a government to have taken any action on this at all is a greater wastage than any potential savings. Seriously, imagine being paid by the public to ensure things are run properly, and then spending your time on the clock discussing whether or not the government should save $4.5M per year by switching brands of floor wax in all of the public schools. People have been tarred and feathered for less.