[dangoldin]

I had the same discussion with a good friend a while back. We were thinking of starting an entire new market where people can sell some shares in themselves and then those shares can be traded. Some issues that we though about (I'll add more as I remember them):

- As author mentions, once you get paid you have less incentive to work.

- In order to make an investment, you would need access to confidential information - risk of diseases, test scores, etc. Not sure the ethical/privacy implications of this.

- The type of people willing to sell may likely be the people who don't have faith in themselves - why would you want to support that?

[byrneseyeview]

Can you tell me how these objections do not apply to buying shares of IBM? Clearly, the people who work for IBM would work a lot harder if they owned the company -- and yet billions of dollars ride on the assumption that they will work hard anyway!

You can probably decide on which information to disclose in advance. This is how it works with OTC securities -- some companies don't give any information in their annual report, and others will tell you down to the last dollar how much they spent on their secretary last year.

Unfortunately, if the government somehow allowed this, it would almost certainly mandate consistent disclosure, making this a market for people who have whatever cookie-cutter preferences the first bureaucrat thought up. Oh well. Maybe if you list people in Dubai you'll have better luck. They seem friendlier to new financial products.

[dangoldin]

Well they are compensated by the managers who have an incentive to make them be as productive as possible, otherwise they'll get replaced by the shareholders.

I'm sure there's some way to structure this to make it legitimate - maybe if we can tax it!