[hiddencost]

Russia tried that. When the USSR ended, they gave every one vouchers to bid for shares of state owned companies. The little people had no idea what they were doing and got screwed brutally. It created many of the ridiculously wealthy Russian oligarchs you see today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia

[nhaehnle]

Interesting. The fundamental goal seemed a noble one, but it was badly implemented. Any lessons to take away?

One immediate idea is some kind of vesting, i.e. you can't actually sell your vouchers for X years (or stages, being able to sell certain percentages after a certain number of years).

A second idea is to encourage the formation of public interest associations to manage the ownership. There are already some non-traditional funds run with some social goals in addition to the goal of making money, perhaps that would help. (But I'm really just brainstorming right now.)

[ambicapter]

My knee-jerk reaction is that these people got bit because they weren't educated on the matter, so free education would've been helpful. Incidentally, I feel like that would help with the original problem as well.

I am really starting to think that government should reduce the cost of education as a public good.

[Florin_Andrei]

It could be argued that the population over there was very unprepared to make these choices - 3 generations of communism tend to shape your thinking in interesting ways.