From: Robin Hanson (hanson@econ.berkeley.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 07 1998 - 12:33:50 MDT
Greg B. writes:
>> 5) Bad luck - if your industry/career gets less in demand, you may have to
>> accept being less in demand. Insurance can mitigate this loss.
>
>Insurance is the solution. How it's implemented is of course another whole
>set of questions. Monolithic state-supported unemployment insurance tends to
>be inflexible and a poor tool for creating the kind of loss-history/premium
>feedback that is essential for effective operation of insurance mechanisms.
>An extropian approach would be to encourage wherever possible the creation and
>implementation of a diverse marketplace of private unemployment insurance.
I think that securitizing fractions of future wage income offers a great potential
for flexible wage insurance. If I can sell some of my future wages in trade
for some of yours, or in trade for corporate stock, I'm less at risk from
variations in my future wages. Of course you would probably want to guarentee
that you held some minimal fraction of those assets, so buyers could be assured
you'd have incentives to work.
Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
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