121–130 of 150 posts
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Down this path is the requirement that politicians be independently wealthy, so that we can require them to earn no money and take no money-related actions, as those all risk corruption. Is that really what you want?
I kind of think that lawmakers should have to live off of the median income of the area people governed, so that in order to improve their own finances, they have to improve the situation for everyone.
Radical proposal: Rather than trying to police leakage of insider information, level the playing field for both politicians and fed employees by creating a dozen or so national mutual funds of at least 1,000 equity positions each that intend to model the US economy as a whole. Anyone can invest in them, but all US Federal employees and immediate family members are required to liquidate all other positions and hold on…
Even more radical proposal: Make this restriction on senior corporate officers. Your salary can depend on how well the company does, but your investment portfolio depends on the broader market. I mean, as long as we're using investment restrictions for social engineering.
There's no restrictions on insider trading, except that the disclosure requirement is immediate (upon trade execution) and non-anonymous. AKA, the price of a stock is reflective of the information available - and any insider that tries to take advantage of such information will necessarily reveal it the nano-second they make the trade.
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I figure most people on HN know that @dang doesn't do anything and it's shorthand for "dang, if you happen to be reading this, [...]".
But... how do we know that @dang doesn't do anything?
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> That would of course dramatically limit the people who pursue public office to you know, only ... people convinced that the graft in office would offset the loss of opportunity from investment gains.
There are actually people that aren't self interested in public service, they do exist. You can find them at state parks, libraries, museums and schools even. I've met plenty of scientists for instance, that work at universities, places like MBARI and JPL and for the city/county at lower salaries without stock options for the opportunity of public service. They're real, we just need to get more of them in higher offi…
relying on altruism is not what i would call scalable nor stable.
The rules of the system should be such that the optimal/desirable behaviour is also the selfish behaviour. If something selfish or damaging is beneficial to the individual at the expense of someone else, then the rules must be changed to even it back out.
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Wouldn't that just incentive those people to always favor the items in that fund, therefore providing an advantage to anything that makes in on the fund? Given two competitors in a market, what if the existing but inefficient one is in the fund but the new one that is trying to shake thing up and/or do a better job is not? You might see a lot more protectionism, and not just against companies of other nations, but ag…
i think thats the point? better than favoring just a few stocks you have insider info on...
A free market is a system that's based on emergent behavior. As we see time and time again, even the best and most useful and narrowly focused regulations that are beneficial when first implemented need constant review to make sure they aren't later doing more harm than good. Carving out a big chunk of the market as likely to get special behavior regardless of the normal inputs and outputs could outright be disastrous, IMO.
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If you’re holding elected office or have other regulatory/lawmaking powers you should only be permitted to hold index funds, or preferably you should have to move all your investments into a blind trust. Then there’s little chance you’re benefiting personally from inside info
Down this path is the requirement that politicians be independently wealthy, so that we can require them to earn no money and take no money-related actions, as those all risk corruption. Is that really what you want?
For lots of jobs your ability to trade in stocks is restricted. For example when I worked in the securities division of Goldman there was a restricted list of stocks that I was not allowed to own (because we were publicly doing something for them) and then I had to send all my trades through the employee trading desk because they had another list which was the restricted list where the deals weren't public yet so say we were going to be advising XYZ corp on a potential takeover of MNO corp. Only the people on that deal team would know anything about it, so XYZ and MNO stock wouldn't be on the restricted list but if I tried to buy or sell either of those stocks in my personal account I wouldn't be allowed. And there were other restrictions as well.
When I worked for a software company I wasn't allowed to trade in any stock of any of our clients or prospective clients and I had to sign a thing saying I wasn't going to trade based on any client information that was disclosed to me in the course of doing business with the client. etc
These kinds of restrictions are absolutely normal in business. Additionally, in other countries, politicians don't have this sort of carve-out on insider trading laws. This wouldn't be some kind of slippery slope. For example in the UK, members of parliament have to publish their financial interests to avoid these kinds of conflicts https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/contents22...
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Are you saying they shouldn't be allowed to buy stock at all? Because you could cherry-pick any period of time to highlight that they have outperformed the market.
That would be a very reasonable restriction. Anyone who works on Wall Street can only own broad index mutual funds.
See another comment where I explain more but how it used to work for me was you have to trade through the employee trading desk (and aren't allowed to have unmonitored brokerage accounts) then any trade gets vetted against various lists (some but not all of which are available to you ahead of time to protect deal confidentiality) and then there are static criteria about how long you have to hold particular positions etc.
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Pass it into chatgtp see what it comes up with.
Now that it’s multimodal you can pass it the photo and it will probably output whatever data you want.
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There are actually people that aren't self interested in public service, they do exist. You can find them at state parks, libraries, museums and schools even. I've met plenty of scientists for instance, that work at universities, places like MBARI and JPL and for the city/county at lower salaries without stock options for the opportunity of public service. They're real, we just need to get more of them in higher offi…
> There are actually people that aren't self interested in public service, they do exist. relying on altruism is not what i would call scalable nor stable. The rules of the system should be such that the optimal/desirable behaviour is also the selfish behaviour. If something selfish or damaging is beneficial to the individual at the expense of someone else, then the rules must be changed to even it back out.
Without dropping volumes of research, you can derive this intuitively. Think about how people respond in disasters. Running into danger to save strangers is common for things like floods or bystanders trying to save someone in a car crash. Prosocial is the norm.
These days extreme selfishness is an indicator of autistic spectrum disorder.
So when you pivot everything around selfishness what you in practice do is reward people with a certain flavor of autism and those who have that learned behavior. For example, Elon Musk, Richard Sackler, Adam Nuemam, Sam Bankman Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Martin Shkreli, Mark Zuckerberg...
Selecting for those traits exclusively to administer the public commons sounds fairly dangerous