Selling shares in oneself doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/content/bec4d9aa-1ee3-48f2-974c-db5d369f760a
As the brothers at the centre of the New Yorker article mentioned in Jemima Kelly’s column “Selling shares in our future sheds light on past” (August 4), we would like to respond to some questions she raises. First, she seems to state that one’s younger self has not really earned the share of wealth that one’s older self will possess. Could we not say that one’s younger self is the one who works hard to make one’s older self’s wealth a reality? Transferring the entirety of the wealth of one’s older self to one’s younger self is not fair and balanced. That’s why the model we propose implies that one’s younger self will get a share corresponding to their contribution (even though the result is perhaps significantly delayed). For example, the five years spent in college is about 10-12 per cent of one’s work-life/career years. This is why we can say that students have earned the 10-12 per cent of statistical risk-weighted earnings of their future financial output. Second, is raising capital against future financial output just a zero-sum game between you today and the future you? Or does it create potential for additional wealth growth at both points of time? To answer this question, we can look at the example of raising investment for a company. Start-ups raise capital not to smooth their own highs and lows but to achieve more. Capital is raised not to avoid suffering but to take risk. The majority of the most renowned companies today were built using venture capital and we can say with reasonable certainty that these companies would not have been able to achieve the same heights without it. As for whether early access to capital would negatively affect the motivation of young people, we must admit that no one can fully predict that. The individuals who we personally invested in using the model experienced more, and in some cases have already managed to achieve greater results.