Dias comments on Human Capital Contracts - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Dias 10 March 2015 01:21AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (21)

Comments (21)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwillen 10 March 2015 03:56:29AM 4 points [-]

I think this is an interesting idea and I am intrigued by most of the applications.

The parenting one, though, seems kind of insane unless you terminate it at age 18, but most people just don't earn much before 18 so it wouldn't have very much effect. If you don't terminate it at age 18, you've effectively extended the age of legal childhood up through the point at which it does terminate; parents will continue to have cause to nag and berate their children long into adulthood, and they will. Even if you give them no legal right to control their children, you will have given them -- in both their children's eyes and their own -- a moral right to do so.

The relationship between a parent and a child has a MASSIVE power imbalance. You suggest that you might prohibit the situation where someone's output is part-owned by their employer -- presumably for that reason -- and you similarly should not let it be owned by their parent.

Comment author: Dias 10 March 2015 11:56:49PM 1 point [-]

Yeah, that section is called speculative for a reason!

I guess the attractiveness of this option partly rests on whether you think parents generally have too much or too little influence/incentive/involvement in their children or not.

Comment author: ilzolende 11 March 2015 05:04:41AM 3 points [-]

As a minor: considering that I:

  • can't own things (I can buy them, but if someone can legally take the object which is legal for me to possess without some special, explicitly-legally-defined reason to do so and prevent me from accessing the object for arbitrarily long periods of time I wouldn't call it ownership)
  • seriously, even if I get a job on my own through connections I made on my own, people can just take away arbitrary objects I legally buy with that money, and it's not like taxes because I can't predict it in advance and I lose non-interchangable resources (I can't decide that I would rather lose [amount of money equal to the cost of renting a computer for a few days] in place of [access to my computer with my files for a few days])
  • have no legal right to privacy beyond rather limited forms of confidentiality when talking to doctors/lawyers/certain religious leader types (if my parents want to copy my backup drive and have someone decrypt it for them, the only thing stopping them is software, I couldn't file a police report)
  • have no real right to freedom of religion, people could punish me for refusing to attend religious services if they wanted to
  • have no right to view my own medical records, my parents can see the results of IQ and psych tests I spent an entire Saturday taking and I can't

I am kind of slanted towards the view that parents have too much influence over minors. I would, however, gladly give up some of my earnings to be able to own property and have the right to privacy.

Comment author: Dias 12 March 2015 12:36:54AM 0 points [-]

Yes, I meant over adult children. I don't think this has much impact on minors.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit