Taking "Me, Inc." Public: Market Caps for Individuals | Hacker News Reader

Taking "Me, Inc." Public: Market Caps for Individuals

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12 pointspeter12316 comments

I don't think the author realizes this, but what he is really doing is pointing out that sometimes slavery can be beneficial for slaves.

Selling your future output net of cost-of-living is essentially what slavery is, after all; and the argument the author is making -- that if one could buy someone's future output (or the future output of a group of people) then one would have an incentive to invest in education and health care and other services which would maximize that output -- is one which dates back to at least the Roman republic, and probably earlier: Roman slaveowners would often pay to have their slaves educated or trained, because it increased the slaves' value more than the education or training cost.

It's not slavery if one is willing to be enslaved.

I downvoted because I believe that slavery can be created as a best alternative. Imagine if someone said to a starving person, "If you become a slave you'll have food every day."

That person may become a slave by choice, but only at the loss of freedom. Because the negative ramifications of slavery are not presented to the potential slave, they are making a choice with limited information.

"Its not stealing if you don't get caught" bullshit!

More like "it's not rape if they consent".

Arguably it would be slavery if they agreed at first and then decided they wanted out, but the statement is not obviously bullshit.

There's a reason that freedom is usually held to be an 'inalienable right' (one that can't be sold). Even if, theoretically, it might benefit someone to sell their freedom, its too dangerous to allow such a transaction to be considered legitimate.

Even if, theoretically, it might benefit someone to sell their freedom, its too dangerous to allow such a transaction to be considered legitimate.

That is simply untrue. We sell our freedoms all the time. I sell big chunks of mine in two-week increments when I work; I sell my freedom for other times when I go home to an apartment where there are certain limits on my behavior.

There is an implicit quantifier in the phrase 'sell their freedom'. You read 'any', I meant 'all'.

Right. If you're okay with selling it in increments, but not selling all of it, there's probably a cutoff. And your cutoff is probably lower than 99%.

Public companies can always spend cash on buying back stock so they can go private again.

sounds more like indentured service

Of course it can be beneficial to slaves. If they're an asset, and the appreciation in that asset's value accrues mostly to the owner, that owner has every incentive to maximize their value.

As Mencius Moldbug (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-car...) points out, one modern version of this is the Japanese lifetime employment system. If a company pays 2% on money it borrows, and gets to keep employees for twenty years or more, it can afford to spend years training them without getting any revenue from their work.

We used to have a market for private ownership of individuals; thanks to Wilberforce et al., we don't any more (at least, publicly, in OECD countries). Is there some reason to believe that public ownership of individuals would be less evil?

Debt by individuals is still allowed, though. Generally you can do anything with debt financing you can do with equity financing, no? Student loans are an example of this, as applied to personal development.

Some "intellectual property" laws are another gray area. If someone becomes an expert in a patented process, the owner of the patent gets to decide, essentially, how much that person is allowed to earn with that expertise — and how much they have to pay in rent back to the owner of the industrial property. Utility patents and trade secrets have this property; copyrights and mask-work rights less so; and trademarks and design patents least of all.

appreciate the commentary, however i was really only using the individual market cap example as a way to calculate an estimated value for the overall asset class... in all likelihood, the financial instrument in question would likely be for an aggregate group, not for one individual. (see my updated clarification)

that said, i'm sure there are ways to limit moral hazard in the individual case, and most certainly there would be a regulatory if anything like that ever came about that would not allow anything approaching slavery -- or at least no moreso than credit card debt and/or personal bankruptcy.

(seriously: it's an imaginary financial engineering exercise, not a moral liberty question. you folks can now get your panties unbunched & proceed with the discussion ;)

ahem.

I'm sure that in practice it's a quagmire of ethical and practical details, but the idea is quite intriguing. It opens the possibility of divideds, (hostile?) take overs, stock buy backs, options for people who take a risk on someone.

It could be great.

Mike Merrill is an American individual who already has succeeded in becoming a publicly traded person:

http://kmikeym.com/

Shares are valued in real time by trades made on his open public market, implemented as a web application. Shareholders vote on major life decisions, such as whether he should engage in certain business ventures, and even on very personal questions, such as whether he should get a vasectomy.

Buy some shares, try it out!

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