Personal stock
25th November 2025
There is a cluster of ideas around "owning people" I propose is significantly under-explored both theoretically and in practice (because of connotations with slavery or otherwise), which could solve many of the problems we have in the world now, and simplify or make legible systems around us.
The basic idea is: trade ownership of shares of a person, which would grant the owner an appropriate percentage of this person's income, or other benefits in line with the particular stock agreement.
Let me list some examples below.
- Income taxes being implemented as the state owning some percentage of personal stock.
- Parents owning some legally-specified portion of stock in their children, thus being incentivised to have kids (as a solution to the dropping TFR, as making collective parent-child relationship more legible in more family-oriented cultures, such as in China or India).
- Marriage incentive structure, alimony payments, prenup etc., being cast as partners agreeing to exchange personal stock when marrying.
- Extension to a special class of 'voting shares' which then have control over decision-making (with the law specifying a set of activities or choices - such as taking a new employment, marriage, further education, etc), codifying and making legible the individualist vs collectivist structure of norms in a given society.
- Recruiters or headhunters receiving a certain amount of personal stock in exchange for finding a better-paying position.
- In general: market forces enabling efficient search for young talent (a function currently fulfilled by underfunded charities), making us better at running the Sort.
- A mechanism to short-sell personal stock in bullshitters etc. And all the mechanisms following this (such as incentivising openly publishing information about someone's shady deals).
- Education loans being paid with personal stock, aligning incentives between universities or funders and students.
- More efficient market in life (and other types of) insurance.
- Treating personal stock as an indicator for dating markets.
- Large legal financial penalties or posting a bond being implemented using personal stock.
- Borrowing against personal stock (which could be legally limited to disallow e.g. "selling yourself permanently" if the society deems it too dangerous).
- Being able to hedge exposure to both one's own career (enabling people to take more +EV risks) and to the careers of people around (e.g. doing a swap on a partner's stock).
- Being able to invest in an entrepreneur instead of being forced to pick a specific company (such as investors wanting "Elon Musk stock", not necessarily "Tesla stock" or "Twitter stock" and having to spend time figuring out which company he is going to be focusing on at any particular time).
- We could even treat founders' stock as primary, and derive all other forms of ownership from that.
And so on, and so on.
There are, of course, many possible arguments against what I outline below, such as moral hazards and principal-agent problems, legibility curse etc. But I'm not trying to defend it as a certainly-good idea per se, just to outline some space of possibilities. Asked for feedback on this post, chatgpt pointed out there is a debate in moral philosophy on whether it is valid to sell yourself (Nozick) or not (Ellerman). But what we're proposing here is a soft/compromise resolution, arguably matching the intuition that the real world operates somewhere in the interior of the spectrum.
Some inspiration / places I've seen it discussed: Robin Hanson specifically on the TFR angle, random Twitter post about marriage, a blopost about personal brand Ponzi scheme, some of my friends (badly) implementing common property in their relationship 🙄, recent conversation with Przemek about prenup for real estate, a conversation with Priyansha about izzat, Matt Levine's newsletter on Elon's stock, "Radical markets" book I read a few years ago. Despite that, I haven't seen a comprehensive write-up of all the angles above.