Such an investment necessarily involves much risk. The average expected return may be high, but there is wide variation about the average. Death or physical incapacity is one obvious source of variation but is probably much less important than differences in ability, energy, and good fortune. In order to make such loans attractive to lenders, the nominal interest rate charged on all loans would have to be sufficiently high to compensate for the capital losses on the defaulted loans. The high nominal interest rate would both conflict with usury laws and make the loans unattractive to borrowers, especially to borrowers who have or expect to have other assets on which they cannot currently borrow but which they might have to realize or dispose of to pay the interest and principal of the loan. 10 The device adopted to meet the corresponding problem for other risky investments is equity investment plus limited liability on the part of shareholders. The counterpart for education would be to buy a share in an individual’s earning prospects: to advance him the funds needed to finance his training on condition that he agree to pay the lender a specified fraction of his future earnings.

In this way, a lender would get back more than his initial investment from relatively successful individuals, which would compensate for the failure to recoup his original investment from the unsuccessful

There seems no legal obstacle to private contracts of this kind, even though they are economically equivalent to the purchase of a share in an individual’s earning capacity and thus to partial slavery. Continue reading →