Special Delivery from Heller Highwater & Co.: The Brothers Liberman

Selling Your Future

Readers of this newsletter might have noticed my ongoing interest in the problem of inequality, which looms larger every year. Egalitarianism sounds like something everyone agrees on; then you open the boxes of brass tacks and realize how many incommensurable ways of getting there exist. In the August 1st issue of The New Yorker, I write on two eccentric Russian brothers, Daniil and David Liberman, who have an answer of their own to the inequality quandary. It is one of the most unorthodox I've seen. 

These brothers—who do everything together and who, at nearly forty, share a bed—have two convictions. One is that, in considering inequality, we too often fail to consider the dimension of time. Some people earn more than others on payday, it's true, but the really big money is made not on a particular Friday but in investment structures over time. The really big inequalities, the brothers reason, must arise that way, too.

Their other, related idea is that corporations and people aren't treated equally when it comes to gathering wealth. When we talk about companies, we talk about their "valuation": their expected worth over their lifetimes. And we let them draw on this projected future wealth by selling shares. When we talk about people, on the other hand, we talk about "net worth": the assets and debts on your books this particular Friday, even if there are more coming down the pike. People can move future wealth back in time only with onerous, often predatory debt. No wonder corporations—and individuals with early access to their shares—come out on top, the brothers say. What if people could sell shares in their futures like companies, thus getting direct access to the same big investment capital, and getting it earlier? They're trying the idea on themselves. 

That's the financial bit. More broadly, I understand the story of the Libermans as one of the long stories of Soviet Russia: a portrait of the generation that came of age in the teetering late years of the old regime—and then in the terrifying new market era—and fled west with a utopic sense of opportunism. And I understand it as a portrait of the United States today: the ideal of stabilizing your financial prospects by selling shares in yourself is of a piece with N.F.T.s, crytocurrency, and other unregulated markets that increasingly pressed young people are entering. This is the way we live now, at an extreme.

Mostly, though, I understand it as a parable about family bonds. Our families invest in our futures; we invest in their narratives. That the brothers are financializing this transaction—they are literally investing nearly everything in a moonshot unified theory that their scientist parents devised—just sharpens the stakes. This is a story about the pathos of investing in the people we believe in, and the social risks of that exchange. 

"Share and Share Alike," The New Yorker, August, 2022: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/01/is-selling-shares-in-yourself-the-way-of-the-future

What makes the world go round? 
Nathan