CONCEPT
The Job Mortgage
Jerry Kaplan’s financial instrument for bridging technological unemployment—a loan to retrain displaced workers whose repayment scales with future earnings, turning human capital into collateral and aligning the incentives of lenders, employers, and workers in a way that no existing instrument achieves.
Most commentators on technological unemployment, having diagnosed the disease, retreat into vague gestures at retraining or resignation.
Jerry Kaplan refused that retreat. As a serial entrepreneur constitutionally incapable of leaving a problem at the level of complaint, he set out to design a mechanism—something concrete enough to argue about, refine, and build. The job mortgage is that mechanism: a financial instrument in which a displaced worker borrows the cost of retraining and repays the loan as a function of her subsequent earnings, so that the investment in human capital is financed on terms that reflect the actual risk rather than the credit history she happened to accumulate before the machine replaced her. The elegance of the design is that it aligns the incentives of every party who currently has no good way to cooperate: the worker gets funding without a fixed debt that could crush her if the bet does not pay off; the lender