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Right, so: many of those who will benefit significantly from hiring career agents will have already hired them - in which case, government-funded career advice is unlikely to help much. There will be plenty more who think they can manage themselves better than an advisory firm could do. Others will receive career advice from friends and family - who also care about their welfare. In practice, career advice also comes from employers - who probably won't tell their own employees to switch careers, but can help those who want to climb internal career ladders. I think it all eats into the scale of the benefits.

However, if the benefits are possibly significant, a pilot program with economic experiments that bear on the issue seems appropriate. Privatizing career advice services does seem like a reasonable idea to me - one that's at least worth trying. Privatizing numerous other aspects of government has worked quite well. We already have privatized tax collection - which seems related.

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Tax farmers have a lot of discretion re who to make how much in taxes. These tax career agents, in contrast, have no powers over how much tax is collected from who.

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Not sure if I've asked this before, but how is this different from the idea of "tax farming", where the rights to taxation in an area were sold to an individual? Would you expect different outcomes from this than from historical tax farming, and why? My sense is that a lot of political entities used to use tax farming, but it was exceedingly unpopular -- Lavoisier was executed for his past as a tax farmer -- and I'm not aware that it led to financial growth in the local area. No entity with any reasonable amount of state capacity uses it now.

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The point is that these tax career agents are free. The agents you could create on your own cost you large fractions of your income.

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Significant competition for the "career agent" idea comes from those being taxed. If career agents are so beneficial, why don't people spend more of their own money on them? They would get 80% of the proceeds - not just the 20% cut the government gets. Since the goverment only has a quarter of the funds available for this task, why would they think that they can compete? Surely their career agent will simply be redundant.

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This particular suggestion needs a government to implement it, and all democratic governments have numerous ways of accepting suggestions. In particular various parliamentary committees and enquiries accept submissions from the public and consider and make responses to those submissions. These committees and enquiries are normally restricted to particular topics, but there are a lot of them. Perhaps you can find one with a scope that covers government finance or career development.

I have heard of governments issuing GDP linked bonds as a risk mitigation strategy. Perhaps one of these governments might be considerate of your suggestion.

There are a lot of democratic governments in the world (including state and national) each with many committees and enquiries running. I think if you wanted to put in the work you could cause them to generate quite a lot of feeble and even incoherent excuses to not do anything. But perhaps a small number might do something.

Is there scope here for bank loans to be income denominated and thereby create a similar incentive for career advice? A 30 year mortgage only covers part of a person's life, but it is still a significant portion.

I note also that the market for income linked university loans seems to be failing. This would be another possible avenue for the type of career advisor incentive you imagine.

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Do the agents create value or do they mainly extract value from employers? I could see Hollywood agents being quite creative, sports agents not so much

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>And yet even with a simple easy-to-explain idea

It's not all that simple to explain. I think the vast majority of people would need to take some time to wrap their heads around it, if they're even able to ever really understand.

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