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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

What an incredibly bad idea!

How do you underwrite the sale of female equity? My wife has taken about 3 years off to raise our kids. This would have a negative impact on a bankers ownership of her.

If this is the future, let's skip the bankers and form trade guilds. I'd rather payoff somebody to get my kid into the IT Guild than sell a piece of him to some banker. This is the kind of excess that sparks revolutions.

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"How do you underwrite the sale of female equity? My wife has taken about 3 years off to raise our kids. This would have a negative impact on a bankers ownership of her."

Oh, jeepers, you're not even trying. The banker obviously gets equity in your children.

Am I kidding? Am I?

There is nothing in the article that suggests that the bank would be entitled to anything but a fixed share of your income, female or otherwise. In theory [0], if women on average earned less than men because of taking time off to raise children, then they would have to pay a higher percentage of their future income for their education. But on average they would pay the same total amount (in an efficient market). I'm not sure why you think this would be unfair. This would not differ from the present market where women and men also pay equal amounts for education.

[0] Personally I don't think that selling equity in oneself would ever be possible for practical/legal reasons. As mentioned in another post, the only thing that comes close is Australia's higher education loans.

I'm just thinking about the practical aspects of such an idea. Bankers like their cash flow. Shouldn't people who work more and make more get a better deal? It's only fair!

Bankers like their cash flow, but they also have to compete with other bankers. My claim (and the claim implicit in the article) is that people will get an actuarially fair rate for their education. And given this, they will not pay back more (on average) than if they paid up front, or if they took out a loan under a competitive loan market. I don't think your parody of how bankers think makes sense. Our economic system is not perfect, but it has a certain logic to it, and refusing to engage with that and instead making up nefarious motives, is not productive.

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