The Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share
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It seems to completely remove the joy and satisfaction that comes from raising children. Only a few things should be viewed from a financial lens. Wealth is not money, wealth is discretionary time.
Having kids whose lives you very probably won't even be allowed to be a part of is a reality for many guys too. Even if you have kids in marriage the reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay.
Why risk it if you know you can avoid it? Having kids it's a guarantee of joy or satisfaction. Writing books, creating epic things can give just as much joy and satisfaction.
10 year at a time male birth control is coming so vasectomies will no longer be necessary. http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-home
Having had occasion to debate about this on /r/childfree, I feel like a lot of their arguments are based on one of the following fallacies:
1) That there are "too many people." That may be true in parts of Africa, but in the developed world, the positive economic contribution of each additional person still vastly outweights the cost of their incremental strain on natural resources.
2) That depopulation in the future doesn't affect people in the present. If you're thinking of investing in a startup, what does it do to your calculus if you know that your customer base won't be any bigger in 20 years than it is today, and will be older?
3) There is no positive externality to having kids. Your average person is going to contribute millions of dollars in labor and social value (how much would you pay to save the life of a loved one?) over his or her lifetime.
4) Failure to look at the value of alternatives in incremental terms. The question isn't: what is the value of having kids versus doing a startup, it's: how much does having kids reduce my probability of doing a startup, and what is the weighted value of that relative to having kids.
5) Failure to account for the correlation between parent-child incomes. I'd say 90% of the kids from my high-income suburban middle school are now making median or above incomes. Maybe 7-10% are in the top 1% of income for their age bracket. High income people create a larger positive externality when they have kids.
6) Failure to weight the value of alternatives by probabilities. Your average person has very few alternative courses of action that is going to generate as much economic value as raising kids. Your high income person has has a greater probability of doing these things, but writing a best-selling book or founding a successful startup is far from guaranteed. So the relevant question is not: what has higher external social value, doing a startup or having a kid, but rather which of those has higher social value weighted by the probabilities that your startup will have any real success (low), or by the probability that your kid will achieve at least median economic success (quite high).
This is of course not to argue with anyone who chooses not to have kids. Nobody needs to justify personal decisions like that. But to the extent that they do try to justify it (and that's largely what /r/childfree is--people who feel the need to justify their decision), it's useful not to rely on fallacious reasoning to do so.
For individuals who weigh the risks and rewards in our society it is easy to make the judgement having kids does not make sense. A lot of things we do in modern society is that individuals value their own welfare more than the welfare of the group, and are unwilling to sacrifice in exchange for the group's future prosperity. I refuse to be a disposable slave. I value my time and my life, and I am worth more long term by not taking what seems to me as stupid risks.
My objection, again, isn't to people who choose not to have kids. My objection is to the people (and I think they make up the bulk of /r/childfree) who rely on specious arguments to justify their decision, and act like they're doing society a big favor in not having kids so they can focus on their music career.
Since the value of children vis-a-vis retirement planning is no longer as significant as it once was several centuries ago, it seems to me that there are few good material reasons to have children for most middle and upper-middle class people. Very high income people can reap benefits via inheritance, but most people don't have enough wealth for that benefit to outweight the costs (both actual and opportunity) involved in raising children.
This isn't to say that the non-material benefits of raising children cannot be significant. But these benefits are highly individual and should average out over a sufficiently large sample, so I'd expect large scale societal trends in childbearing to closely follow the financial cost/benefit analysis inherent in the decision.
It's just as significant as it always has been--we have just decoupled the relationship and created a free-rider problem in the process.
Every scheme of retirement depends on the existence of successive generations. That is true whether you're talking about traditional societies where children take care of their parents, or modern societies where the childrens' generation makes payments to the parents' generation through either social security taxes, or dividend payouts from equity ownership.
The free rider problem we've created is that everyone is eligible to take social security, even if they haven't produced offspring that will labor in the economy while the retired generation lives off their production.
Indeed, we've also created a free-rider problem along another dimension: we have lots of people in the present who benefit from the governments' taking out debt to fund services and infrastructure, but who won't create any offspring that will pay the taxes that will pay that debt.
We could say that we probably won't have enough younger people to take care of the older people as birth rates decrease, but I think robots and AI will be more developed by then that either more people will be available to take care of the elderly and or the robots will do it along with all other service and manual labor jobs.
No matter what happens we will adapt.
I was referring to individual-level retirement planning. That is, does it make sense for me to invest in one or more children based on the expectation that those children will directly help me (financially and otherwise) during retirement?
Social security originated in a time when, barring catastrophic wars, it was inconceivable that the U.S. population could ever decrease. It has worked thus far because a productive younger generation has always been able to pay for a retired older generation. However, as far as I know, it was always a program whose ethical justification was that you get back what you put in, plus some return. Whether or not you have children is irrelevant.
Furthermore, if we presume that the ethical justification for social security is that one's children are going to be productive members of society, how can we adjust for unproductive children? Should parents whose children die before entering the workforce be denied social security? What if their children live, but are unemployed for many years? These are serious questions that would have to be addressed, but doing so would simply not be possible in many cases since parents tend to die before the productive output of their children over the course of their working life is known.
This is also true even when applied to future generations as a whole. A future generation can be less productive than the present one, just as one's future child can be less productive than you. If social security is an intergenerational contract that involves a transfer of wealth from the young to the old, then it's an unjust Ponzi scheme that will collapse as soon as demographic trends are no longer able to sustain it.
Ideally, the benefits received from any retirement program, whether public or private, would be dependent upon an individual's productivity over the course of their life. Any other system inevitably involves some centrally managed authority attempting to equitably transfer wealth from one set of people to another, which is a prescription for corruption.
I understand. I was pointing out what impact our national retirement policies had on individual incentives and how that translated into group incentives.
> However, as far as I know, it was always a program whose ethical justification was that you get back what you put in, plus some return. Whether or not you have children is irrelevant.
That's an abstraction. It doesn't matter if you only "take out" what you "put in." At the end of that day, somebody's kids are producing what you take out. Any retired generation inherently depends on the production of the working generation, and for a generation to retire, there has to be a working generation to take their place, which means having kids. Social security versus investing versus whatever is just a way of accounting for that basic transaction.
> Furthermore, if we presume that the ethical justification for social security is that one's children are going to be productive members of society, how can we adjust for unproductive children?
I'm speak at the group level. It's fairly irrelevant whether one person does or does not have kids, so it's useless to try and account for that at the level of Social Security. However, Social Security as an institution reduces the incentive for everyone to have kids, because they can just depend on the production of the kids of people who did. It's a free-rider problem.
> If social security is an intergenerational contract that involves a transfer of wealth from the young to the old, then it's an unjust Ponzi scheme that will collapse as soon as demographic trends are no longer able to sustain it.
It's a Ponzi scheme, but what makes it unjust? It's the circle of life, man. Your parents took care of you, and at the other end of the cycle you take care of them. The really useful insight is that it's a Ponzi scheme that's unavoidable, at least with existing technology. By and large, the human life is bookended by periods in which people are not self-sufficient and not able to produce. No matter how you abstract the underlying intergenerational transaction, you can't get away from it. We're engaging in the same intergenerational transaction people did tens of thousands of years ago--we just have a different, fancier way of accounting.
This describes retirement in general, which I have no issue with, not social security.
The unjust aspect is that you have no control over the future productivity of younger generations, which provides for your retirement. As an extreme example, how do you think China's population is going to deal with retirement once the full effect of the one-child takes effect on Chinese retirees? They didn't set that policy, but their retirement will suffer from it.
My contention is that a person's retirement should be proportional to their own life's productivity, which it is if you have built sufficient invesments and assets by your old age. I'd just prefer that governments not make promises to entire generations they can't ultimately keep.
This is the unfortunate fallacy that most make when looking to social security and its apparent dwindling in funding. You are insinuating that social services must come from taxation of individual labor, whereas our economy has successfully and continuously been moving towards a more capital based economy.
In short, where will the money come to fund future social services? More from capital, less from the individual labor of your children.
"But America as a whole won’t have gotten poorer: the money is still there to support the programs, it’s just coming in the form of capital rather than labor income. There would be no problem, at least in economic terms, in continuing the programs by adding revenue from general taxation, maybe even from dedicated taxes on capital income." - Paul Krugman http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/policy-implicati...
Now, we could have a future where capital really does generate production by itself (everything is automated by robots). We're not anywhere near that point yet. For the foreseeable future, even to the extent that profits from Google, Facebook, etc, are counted as "income from capital" for tax purposes, it still depends fundamentally on human labor.
That's a point. Also, a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries. ;)
I do not have kids and I do not plan to. If I had kids I would want to raise them right, and I know that I really wouldn't be able to do what I want to do in life and that.
Everyone dies alone.
It's all hormonal response, sure, but ultimately anything that gives you satisfaction is ultimately just ways of manipulating your neurotransmitter levels. Having kids just happens to be one for which your body has a built-in response that gets you seriously drugged up.
How old are your kids? Even with the special bond parents can have with their children that's not a guarantee things will be good. I know awesome parents who have raised horrible people. I know awesome kids who turned into horrible people after they left the nest. Most people seem to eject their aging parents into nursing homes when they are too old, because people would rather live their lives than take care of their parents. Good friendships last forever and don't require you to change diapers in the early years while convincing yourself its all worth it for the few golden moments if you don't happen to be forced to miss them because of work or just chaos.
Convincing me to want to have kids would first require me being convinced that I should want to ever get married. :)
Be wary of friendships which are one sided. If a person doesn't value their own person and they constantly need you to help them that's not friendship it's dependency. I've never ejected people out of my life the first time they needed help, but I have given up on people when I realized I was wasting my time. Many people who need help can only change with their own effort.
Every relationship is one of opportunity. Think about that!
This is true. However, if the causes for this attitude (biological or cultural) are in some way heritable, we can expect that over several centuries the attitude should disappear, or at least be significantly curtailed. (It is not clear exactly to what extent this is actually the case.)
No opinion is offered on the moral import of these matters. However, any future anthropologists will have something fun to study, surely.
Most people who seem stupid are only stupid because they lack what equally capable, but perceived as gifted or intelligent, people have. Most people have much the same genetic wetware capabilities - brain damaged people an exception - the biggest biological differences between most people are in hormones, and changes in hormones are largely a product of environment and can be changed just as knowledge can be changed. A human's potential is able to be expressed with an abundance of knowledge and the lack of enforced ideology. Allow people reference, perspective, and freedom and they will seem like smarter people than whose without. The sooner people have the best situation the better but it is never too old for someone to get smart.
Somehow, this line reminded me of Huxley's "Brave New World".
"many people who do have kids regret it entirely"
"can't live your dreams and raise your kids right"
"reality is you will probably get a divorce, the kids will go to the mother, and you will pay"
It's the truth. Raising children without being neglectful takes a serious amount of time and money. If you don't have the money you have to go and make the money and that means paying someone else to watch your kids to take the chance of them raising them for you.
Yes, that's the reality. Statistics of divorce say so. Not only are you likely to get divorced, as there is usually more incentive to wives to ask for one, but if you live in a state which has alimony lives you could be stuck paying money.
I'm not jaded or negative. I'm an an extremely realistic (data is emotional) person who is very excited to live life well and do a lot of great things - I live in the real world, but I'm also very optimistic with what I do choose to do.
Which of my opinions do you want me to show are informed by data?
That's absolutely not true.
Here's the details: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr049.pdf
Look at table 6. You'll see a 44% base rate of divorce over 20 years. Note that couples with children (specifically have children after marriage) have a way lower divorce rate (from 48% to 22% after 15 years).
And this is highly education dependent. Only a high school grad? 53% chance of divorce. College degree (the vast majority of the HN crowd)? 35% percent. (even lower for masters)
Another relevant detail is age at first marriage. Getting married < 20? 54% chance of divorce within 15 years. Married >= 25? 32% chance.
The proportion of children born outside of marriage, and more likely to not have strong father figures, is growing every year. Most mothers get custody, and most children don't have a strong father figure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most...
The marriage rate in the US is dropping drastically as well. Marriage doesn't make sense. Guys have nothing to gain from marriage and only things to lose. No, you don't get loyalty when you get married, and you don't get any of the other things you want. Most guys say they get less of what they want from their spouse after marriage.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s...
No family units means kids lose out on the value of a strong family with strong parent figures worthy of being role models.
While a 44% divorce rate is nothing for any society to brag about, I imagine it's even worse than these statistics indicate. This study didn't include marriages longer than a 20 year period. The probability of a marriage surviving also decreases in a relatively linear fashion. It's speculation, but from the data a best case estimate for the divorce rate at 25 years would be about 54%, and considering that kids typically get out of the house and go off to college in the 20-30 year period, a further increase seems likely since "staying together for the kids" ceases to be an excuse then.
I'm sure the longer term data exists, I just don't have time to look it up at the moment. If anyone has a link, it would be great to see it though.
How did you arrive at this conclusion? Looking at the rates, it is definitely far greater than linear, indeed the 5 year survival point from point X is constantly increasing (81% survival first 5 years; 90% years 15-20). Also bear in mind that "survival" includes not dying, which might throw inferring divorce rates off by a few percent at 20+ years.
Extrapolating to 25 years, you'd get a 49.5% divorce rate.
Again, demographics must be accounted for. Almost the entire audience here is in the higher education demographic which has radically lower divorce rates; you're looking at sub-30% divorce rates.
As an unmarried person, it's the latter that is of concern to me. If I had been married for 15-20 years already, the probability you cite would be more pertinent.
Parenting isn't for everybody, and I think that's a Good Thing. If it works for you, then you have my respect and support. But conversely, if you know it /doesn't/ work for you and you choose to not be a parent, that is also a decision I can respect and support.
Arguably not true. Population growth rates have been decreasing in a variety of countries[1] and economists have found connections between economic growth and population growth[2].
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Coming-Generational-Storm-Americas... [2]: http://scholar.harvard.edu/kremer/publications
Will it soon be my civic duty to have kids? I'll still say no.
This comes from the UN convention on rights of the child. (http://www.unicef.org/crc/index_30177.html)
America, along with Somalia and South Sudan, has not ratified the convention.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_ratification_of_the_Convent...)
I don't know much about law, but I am a fierce advocate of state rights based mostly on the idea that it is far more feasible to have a democratic government that involves millions or tens of millions than one that involves hundreds of millions. This issue is however one place where my ideas trip up. It is kind of embarrassing that we are 1 of 3 (assuming the grandparent comment is correct) countries not to ratify the treaty and the other two are an (essentially) failed state and a brand new one that has to sort its internal self out before working on such things as UN treaties.
Corporations don't usually make babies.
So who would be ultimately responsible for these children?
That said, in less developed countries having many children is a form of retirement planning, so I'm not sure he's even right about them being a bad investment.
If this is what he's into, I ain't in any position to judge - except where it hurts other people who didn't consent, such as McCormick.
That said, I agree that it was selfish of him to start that game without fully getting her on-board.
Do you think this guy would publicly admit to having sex with another guy if he couldn't disclaim responsibility to his investors? But hold on:
>A reminder for others: shareholders don't dictate what's tabled. We can only vote on what's proposed, the implication being that K5M is fine with either outcome.
His friend's words. Here's Wired: "Feeling the weight of investor expectations, Merrill spent a drunken night “fooling around” with him. "
Note that I'm not saying he's bisexual; I'm not a mind-reader. I'm just pointing out the obvious difference between who made the decision in the story and who made it in reality.
So everyone is wondering how this will end, here's your answer:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/04/the_near_death_of_a_s...
What? You can't sell stocks of your children?!
Parents in the story get something like a customary 25-50% of the child's shares at birth.
A man who compulsively watches youtube(tm) videos on his ipad(tm) all night can be show many more ads than one who spends the evening reading to his kids.
Modern life is a constant assault of sophisticated propaganda(advertisements) imploring us to identify as consumers of brands and to be materially dissatisfied.
/rant ;-)
EDIT: /prophecy
On the other hand, without demand, you can't sell your product, so as long as people are around then you have an interest in making them want your product.
It was, at one time, a saying more closely associated with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism than with Mein Kampf.
If you're making a sober economic assessment of the cost of children, it's not a different issue, it's a typically-very-large cost that must be considered.
You can argue the costs down from 'house note' to 'very-nice-car note' or even 'cross-your-fingers-and-maybe-it's-almost-nothing' -- one can certainly (effectively) self-insure with the same sorts of outome-roulette as not providing for your child's education.
But you can't just hand-wave away the issue.
I'm not saying that things are exactly the same as when you don't have kids, but it's not nearly as bad as some make it seem. Being socially well connected with family & friends help too. When we need babysitting, grandparents are more than happy to help. We tend to attend parties where other parents will be and the babysitting often gets older kids in the party. I've never appreciated having close community connections as much as I do now before having children.
Blanket expensive is not the status quo. But I must admit, if you're a single parent with little to no family and community support, it can certainly be expensive.
Most people I hear complain about how afraid they are of the expense of raising a child are more in my position where it wouldn't affect them that much. It's more reflective of the fear and negative bias then what the reality is. Having lots of money on kids is definitely nice though and will make lots of things in life easier for them, but it's not a must.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/03/dont_hate_her_because...
That kind of discussion doesn't have any understanding or appreciation for the actual situation. Its a view looking from the present into the future versus a view in the present looking to the past.
But you can't miss what you've never experienced. So some decisions look correct when viewed from one direction in time and incorrect when viewed from the other. So far the number of people I know who have never had kids and wish that they had, exceeds the number of people I know who have had kids and wished that they didn't. Its not scientific of course, just another anecdote. Since I get a lot out of having had kids and raised them I feel sorry for people who won't have an opportunity to experience that, but I recognize that their experience could just as easily not be a positive one.
Private school puts a lot of education in other people's hands, but you can choose a school which holds your values and works to inculcate them in your children.
Public school is free, but you have little control over value education, and the overall quality can be pretty crappy. You can improve this by living in a less desirable home in an area that has good schools for the same price as a nicer home in an area with bad schools. (Housing prices tend to following public school quality very closely.) You can also make up for it by spending time with your kids, filling in the gaps in their education and instilling values you consider important, or you can farm this work out part-time through youth organizations and lessons from private providers at some expense, but probably less than a fulltime private school.
Home schooling gives you complete control over education, but requires an immense amount of time and the quality is capped by your own teaching skills unless you farm out some of the education as mentioned for the public school.
My family selected the public model with a heavy emphasis on adding value through our own time, with some investment in private education, mainly for music lessons.
The values we worked to instill were self-reliance, compassion, practicality, and stability. We added to the quality of public education through encouraging reading, asking questions, and keeping a close watch on the educational quality of the schools and teachers and helping out whenever we could.
Instead of signing our kids up for a lot of "enriching" classes and activities based on what we thought they should do, we encouraged them to find their own passions, and supported those passions financially only as needed. For example, we paid for music lessons for our kids interested in music, because neither my wife or I are musically skilled. When my oldest became interested in movie-making in middle school, we provided him a used video camera, blank tapes (this was back in the early 2000s), cheap editing software, and technical advice as needed.
When they wanted to learn something we could teach, like cooking or answers to general questions, we made sure we were available to do those things.
All-in-all, we tried to keep it low pressure and self-guided, aside from some clear boundaries that evolved as they grew older and more responsible, and some expectations that we monitored and corrected when needed, including that they would do their best in school, and that they would behave at all times like civilized human beings who raise the overall happiness of the world by being here instead of reducing it. (For example, not tormenting siblings, acting properly according to the context, such as in a restaurant or public gathering, being polite and treating others with respect, not breaking things, especially things that don't belong to them, etc.)
Some of the results are already in. My oldest spent over three years in a youth gap-year volunteer service organization after high school, first as a participant, then as an intern, then as an employee. Now he is completely self-sufficient in his first year as a full-time student at a community college, with the intent of transferring to a four-year university and getting a credential to teach history to high school students. He sings and plays in a band at a church, and is engaged to a very nice young lady he has known since middle school.
My middle son went straight to the University of Chicago after high school, where he is pursuing an economics major, possibly with a minor in physics. Almost all the expenses (including housing and meals) are being paid through scholarships and grants through the University. We are kicking in a small amount (several thousand a year, mainly for health insurance), and he is paying about $4000 a year + books and incidental expenses through a combination of loans and part time work. He has a 3.8 GPA so far.
My daughter is a sophomore in high school and she is mainly interested in art, so besides the normal high school classes, she is taking an art class at school and participating in the art club, along with drawing at home.
We have been lucky to have healthy, reasonably intelligent kids. Our main expenses for them have been food, routine medical care, the cost of a larger living space, extra gas for taking them places, and occasional fun stuff like going to a theme park or movie (which we enjoyed too!). It was all stuff we could achieve on an average American family income, including some periods of unemployment.
I think when deciding whether to invest time or money, time is better for the kids, more fun for the parents, and definitely builds a better relationship both immediately and in the long term.
I think the question of whether or not to have kids should not be addressed from a financial standpoint. Instead you should ask yourself: "Is being successful in my career more important to me than raising happy children who can contribute to society?" If the answer is yes for both husband and wife (and I think a long-term, legally-committed relationship between the parents is a major factor in raising happy kids), then maybe you shouldn't have kids. No problem. The world needs dedicated people who pour all into their work. If one of the parents is willing to put raising kids above career (I don't mean to not work, just to put the kid's well being above career success), then having kids might be a great idea. In our case, initially I worked a lot and my wife spent a lot of time with the kids, now she is working a lot, and I'm spending a lot of time.
Personally, I think my wife and I made the right decision to have kids. The joy far outweighs the hassles, and more than pays back the expenses. Plus there is the potential added bonus of grandchildren!
Exactly, the financial factor does not play a strong role in the decision to have children. Once someone wants to have a child, all other factors become irrelevant (for good, or for bad... for people that get to have 5 children and do not have enough money to maintain them). As you say, the joy kids bring to these people cannot be measured in terms of money.
OTOH, for people who do not want to have children (like me, at this time), there is no way to 'convince' that it is worth it.
And that is exactly how it should be. Because if you have to be "convinced" to have children, then you shouldn't have children.
Also, well-socialized, capable children add value to society, and society should invest in educating people how to raise them, and reduce barriers for (or even subsidize to some extent) those who do it well.
Growing up, I had no doubts in my mind that I wanted kids. Today, I am confused. By the time we have pay for rent, student loans and "basic" expenses, it doesn't seem we have a whole lot left over to retire. And this is WITHOUT having to pay for kids. More than likely, we will take the plunge - just biological needs and such - but it seems like one of those times you know you are shooting yourself in the foot.
We address it from an unusual angle for Americans. My wife is Japanese, and we lived in Japan for a time. We feel the typical Western concept of seniors quitting their useful work at 65 and going off by themselves to play in an RV or at a retirement community is not natural. In Asia still, the expectation is that the parents will live with their children when they get older. My wife's parents, for example, live with their oldest son and his wife, very harmoniously (although her father has since died). This can work very well if parents and children have good relationships with their children, which we do. It also means the time, money, and love spent raising kinds can make up for some of the money that didn't go into a retirement account.
My oldest son and his fiancee (who we have known for many years) like this idea (he grew up partially in Japan, and she is half-Japanese). My middle son also likes the idea, but of course we have no idea what any eventual spouse of his might think). Also from Asia comes the idea that looking after parents when they are older is a reciprocation of them looking after you when you were young, with the parents in turn taking some of the burden of raising their own kids off their back.
This setup has benefits for the children as well as for the parents. I intend to work at least part time as long as I can (a lot of my work is freelance brainwork) and that money plus our combined social security will help pay for a much nicer home for all, and also help pay the additional expenses we bring with us. We can help our kids in many other ways too. For example, we can help with housework and looking after their kids while they work, which makes the decision to have kids less burdensome for them than it was for us.
Also, both the grandkids and grandparents receive a lot of benefits from being together. Grandparents can offer a kind of unconditional love that balances the more strict affection parents need to give. Grandparents can also offer a lot of wisdom brought about through their years, plus a lot more time to be available to the young ones. Just like raising our kids, the focus in preparing for our older years is more on building relationships than on financial considerations.
Hopefully this will work out for us. If not, we'll probably just hole up in some cheap mobile home, and live off our social security and meager savings until we die. We'll read books and watch movies, look at the sunset together, and throw ourselves on the mercy of Medicare when we near the end.
For example, he was able to convince them that he wanted to date the second girl, but that's not something any of us have likely had to deal with. The one exception being if you're still at home and you try to convince your parents you want to date a specific person.
In that context, the statement was a little chilling, but no more so (to me) than all the other decisions. The entire thing was chilling to me.
The fact that for some people it is 100% worth it is a separate issue. I've got friends who are suffering because money is not enough (having to work two jobs living here in Mexico), but they won't change their children for a 'more confortable' life. For some people, children are worth more than all the resources they would spend... a thousand times.
For me, someone who doesn't want to have children, it is not worth it (maybe not now at 31... maybe in the future I'll change my mind, who knows). So I agree with the reasoning that having children will only imply funneling resources to something that won't just give me any satisfaction.
http://www.amazon.com/Future-Wealth-Stan-Davis/dp/1565113942
David Bowie sold bonds backed by his IP in 1997:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond
The book talks about equity being a logical next step and about the value of being able to diversify and distribute risk. I think there is definitely one possible future where this is very common. It probably starts with athletes and celebrities - as you can see, this guy has gotten a terrible valuation (for several reasons).
For years, I have been talking myself out of starting a company that serves as an exchange for people selling equity in themselves. It is inevitable that someone tries this because the crowd-funding industry is so sexy. It will be an interesting experiment, but I'm not sure the effects on society will be net desirable. At its best, it would give people the ability to sell a fraction of themselves for some up-front cash and give them the ability to take bigger risks in the projects they do. Anyway, if you want to talk more about this, hit me up.
To get some idea of what the present-time value of a person's work is, if you make $50,000 a year and work for 20 years, you make $1M in that period of time. He could make the $100,000 by working another 4 hours a week over the next 20 years and not need the $1K.
I mean, my wife and I regularly make small business investments in our activities of up to $500 without ever asking each other. We'd usually ask each other if it's more than that.
This guy is having to talk to a committee just to make a $90 investment that's just nuts. But I guess it's just a matter of time before cargo cult investing gets celebrated in Tired magazine.
The latter, clearly :).
Anyways, the point was well taken; he did undersell his IPO. Newcomers on the block will surely learn from him and offer shares for more inflated prices ;).
In fact, his IPO earned him a pittance <$1k (nine-hundred and something shares sold to 'friends and family').
You might be on to something...
I found the article a fascinating read, but the more I think about it, the more I realize how very, very wrong this is. It reminds me of ‘We Live in Public’, the documentary about Josh Harris' experiments. http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2010/11/709256/s...
Of course. How else can they raise funding for the remaining few items they have any real initiative in?
I want to buy me some of them new college-educated kids, I tell you hwut.
Also, selling only 10,000 shares lets him back out if he where to encounter a problem (such as one person buying all his shares and then demanding he act in ways he's uncomfortable with).
"Why can I buy 2 weeks worth of food for my dog, which she seems to love, that sits in a bag, requires no refrigeration, no preparation, and providers her all the nutrients that she needs for such a low price? Why can't I also eat dog food?"
> He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting: He’d let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life.
So how does that really let him back out?
I'm Doug Stewart[2] (mentioned in the interactive "Who Owns Mike Merrill?" graph). If anyone has questions, I'll try my best.
[1]: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/putting-... [2]: http://www.kmikeym.com/users/137
He wouldn't be the first person in history to work two jobs when one paid more than the other.
I'm glad you see the inherent humor/fun in it.
A reminder for others: shareholders don't dictate what's tabled. We can only vote on what's proposed, the implication being that K5M is fine with either outcome.
some of the examples in the article make this abundantly clear:
* the sleep experiment, where he was obviously suffering by the end
* the gay relationship which, while the article doesn't mention whether Merrill is bisexual, certainly seems to imply that he isn't and went through with the relationship to appease his shareholders
He changed his sleeping routine and had a homosexual relationship, found out they didn't work out for him, gave up on them. Nothing insane about that.
That's a pithy cliched phrase, but it's not the definition.
One really needs to read through the DSM (it's a flawed political document firmly embedded in the prejudices of its day (i.e. today) that's more pre-scientific taxonomy than science), but the short version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity
Insanity, craziness or madness is a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity may manifest as violations of societal norms...
No, that's a pithy quote attributed to Einstein.
The actual definition of insanity is very different.
this is kind of a neat idea, an investment in future potential writ small.
His share price might then collapse, and he has a substantial financial stake in himself.
It's the same as any company - all the staff could refuse to cooperate and walk out, and it would be worth nothing overnight.
Sounds to me like he doesn't have the power to decide for himself.
Here's another quote that makes me think he seriously only gave himself nonvoting shares:
“shareholders don't dictate what's tabled. We can only vote on what's proposed, the implication being that K5M is fine with either outcome.”
He's not a literal slave.
I do think that as this experiment goes on and the Kmikeym stock price goes up, the stakes increase and it becomes harder to back out. Imagine: an organized crime syndicate could buy $1 million in Kmikeym stock to launder money – if he does anything that adversely influences Kmikeym share price, he might be in for a world of hurt. Or another scenario: his parents might be so convinced in their son's success that they mortgage their house to pay for shares in Kmikeym. If he screws up, his parents lose their home.
At least on average, the more robotic you live your life, the more money you get. 9 to 7 instead of 9 to 5? Working on weekends? He is taking it to the extreme, he will be working 24/7. He is selling responsibility for his life for anyone giving enough money.
At a minimum, any attempt to expand one relationship type (in this case, reciprocity) to encompass an entire life can be expected to entail high levels of awkwardness - the feeling a person gets when they realize their understanding of a relationship type with someone else is different from that other person's understanding.
The evidence also indicates that when the norms of reciprocity are imposed on erstwhile communal relations, the reciprocity paradigm consumes the communality paradigm and the relationship changes from communal to reciprocal. In effect, turning your entire life into a market transaction makes communal/familial relations impossible.
For most people, I can't imagine this would be conducive to good mental and emotional health. (Presumably, psychopaths won't have a problem with it.)
It makes sense, assuming you pick your candidates wisely and aren't scammed (and that's a big if!):
$40,000 down-payment for 10%
10% per year for $3,500 per year [1] over a career of around 30 years:
30 * 3,500 = $105,000
Average profit: $65,000
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...
"Upstart.com, a company founded last year by Google exec David Girouard, offers a bit of capital in exchange for a cut of a college graduate’s future earnings."
What I meant, was funding 18-30 year olds to actually go to college, obviously, something like "history of art" would probably not have significant returns, but a Masters in CS? They would rake the money in.
(P.S. It's US only unfortunately and I'm in the UK)
Isn't this called a 'student loan'?
Hm, I'd be wary of investing in someone who was more interested in having nice things than focusing on their education. Is it really that bad for students these days, living without a dishwasher and cocktails three times a week? I know students in NYC and London who don't seem to be complaining about poverty.
They aren't a terrible meal if you add some real meat and vegetables in the mix.
Also, if you are using real meat and vegetables why not splurge on real egg noodles and spices also :)
That aside, if you have, say, The Nations Noodle (UK), it's cheaper than "Super Noodles" but still a quality Ramen - the price difference is 300%, but when we are talking about $0.60, it's not much to be honest.
As for spices, I tend to add a bit of Mixed Spice, otherwise it would spend the next 20 years sitting on my top shelf, and Hot Chilli powder gives a nice kick, especially if you add it to the meat during preparation.
...With meat and vegetables in the mix.
sure, it might be a little "capitalist" to have the idea of selling your life's work for start up capital but it's the same as any other industry - you get a mortgage for your home, you get a student loan for your college, you sell equity to fund your start up.
In all honesty, I don't see the issue with this, it will force the college loan office to be more competitive, at the moment it holds a monopoly, which is more capitalist? One "company" (because it IS a for profit organization) which controls every single loan, or multiple entities/individuals competing to give the best one?
“He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting.”
There's also no mention of it in the FAQ on kmikeym.com, I'd say it'd be pretty important information to disclose to (potential) investors.
The reason that we don't allow people to sell shares in themselves is because it will inevitably result in indentured servitude, or even de facto slavery.