Problems:
-there are still common and public goods that people will underpay for due to free rider problem. Hiring a security agency may protect you from robbers etc, but it doesn’t deal with large threats (invasions, groups of religious fanatics etc. Oh wait, everybody is rich in this world so they are neither nationalistic or religious. One problem – that argument didn’t hold in 1914 or Sept 11, 2001)

-Huge assymetric and imperfect information problems.

-sharecropper problem. Essentially, everyone (except the very rich) are sharecroppers. They keep a portion of the profits they generate. Doesn’t work, which is why most societies have gotten rid of the practice. Why bother working hard if most of the fruits of your labor are kept by others.

- overemphasis on the role of money in motivating people. I could earn far more working on Wall Street than my current job as a journalist, and have turned down several offers. In the book, I probably wouldn’t be able to because I wouldn’t own a majority of myself. Is it really good for society to force people into the most remunerative job?

First of all, as a proposed system, the individual incorporation is not spelled out nearly well enough to be given detailed consideration. This must be some kind of limited individual incorporation. If I put together a majority coalitiion in you, then I can elect the board, choose the CEO, etc., so I have complete control of the assets, i.e., you. But the asset is you, what if you don’t do what I tell you? If you were a person, my option would be to fire you, perhaps sue you. But you are the asset, I can neither fire you nor sue you. Your stock would go down if you didn’t obey your board/CEO but who cares? Once you have lost control of yourself and/or have sold the max of yourself you can sell, your only self-interest is to have a low stock price.

And what if you are a financial analyst? Robin keeps re-saying, we only own product of labor, not your assets. But if your expertise and brilliance is used in enhancing your own portfolio, then your stock holders don’t have much to invest in. So professional investors get to almost automatically be free (have their majority)? What we have here is a failure of the paradigm, the authors want you to be owned, but they also want you to develop your own property. They need you to be two things, a you that is owned and a you that owns and can buy up the you that is owned.

It seems to me this book does not rise to thought-provoking as far as politico-economic suggestions. As allegory or story it works: rise against the machine, stick it to the man (even if you are the man, especially if you are the man). My recollection of Heinlein is he was much clearer in his political economy.

Whatever else I say about the book, I enjoyed reading it and zipped through it pretty fast. I think it is good science fiction, with story elements that surprised and pleased me.

Also, many, many human mammals are willing to receive resources from their children when they are old. Yelling ‘Darwin! Darwin!’ won’t change that.

Something like this would be a way of testing that hypothesis. Anyone who thinks they have some highly effective nurture techniques would have an incentive to buy up lots of kids contracts. You’d have to have a long investment horizon though.

Presumably governments would have a pretty big incentive to not recognize foreign shareholders as a way of attracting high-value immigrants.

Of course that’s essentially the system we have now–governments invest education, etc. in their young and don’t recoup much if they immigrate to another country for their productive years.

Anyway, under corporate law the right that shareholders have is little more than the right to vote for a board of directors, and since the director of your corpus is you by ineradicable right of birth . . .

You could create non-voting shares in a person without a lot of difficulty, but creating voting shares would require a whole constellation of legal changes, to the point that you might as well just call it something else.