My Name is Bond, Youth Bond
We should invest in the ideas and projects of young people, enabling their dreams and furthering their capacities. With Youth Bonds!
The English poet, Wordsworth, once wrote of new-born children that they come “trailing clouds of glory” (From: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, William Wordsworth, 1807). He meant that, whether we understand it or not, human beings are not born of molecular collision. They come from somewhere, bringing with them talents, innate skills and interests. Above all, the potential of the biographies that then unfold. Indeed, it is these that then become the next step of history.
Writers such as Wordsworth, whose very name means poet of high standing, belonged to a time when the deeper aspects of history were becoming occluded by the dark shadows cast by the Industrial Revolution, in whose mechanistic terms all life has ever since been conceived. The aridity of industrial society – with its close companion, mere finance – has resulted in humanity seeking meaning in science or in past history, when we should seek it in the freely unfolding lives of young people.
- Investing in young people is never a waste of money.
It is these lives we should invest in. These dreams we should capitalise. These hidden capacities we should irrigate from the colossal pools of liquidity in which modern existence is otherwise drowning.
Intent on preserving rather than circulating capital, we make everything the subject of a financial market, indebting rather than enabling young people. Especially when we lend them money to study, ignorant of the non-recognition and begrudging of youth that this demonstrates – and blind to the fact that life-time earnings statistics disprove the calculations whereby student loans are justified.
With such a huge vote of no confidence Wordsworth’s “shades of the prison house” begin to close. But how different it would be if young people everywhere were advanced the liquidity they needed as and when they needed it? To be returned as and when the circumstances of their borrowing allowed, rather than on terms set by the lending.
For this we – that is, they – need but issue youth bonds to the public (see www.youthbonds.com), to be bought at risk by people with money they can afford to lose or, better put, allow to flow on from them. Transforming it from stockage in ever-more unreliable real estate and financial markets, into flows that underwrite the development and application of new talents, new biographies – and so also new values.
Youth bonds are the missing instrument in today’s financial world. Their absence – that is to say, the refusal to allow capital to ‘die’ – is the reason for the excess scale and inherent instability of modern finance.
Where to start? They already exist wherever young people find themselves advanced credit so that they can make good their aims in life. Mostly this is familial or through friends. It occurs informally. But it is also the economic meaning of tax-funding education, whereby a community transfers some of its income to its youth as grants. No contract is expected in such cases, because it is normal and natural to trust to life and that young people will put their education to good account – not in terms of what income they can generate from their education, but what service they can provide to society. Doctors, teachers, trades-people – there need be no thought of lending on condition of a future income stream. Capital needs to flow; then gifts and giving will also flow. No one derives an income through self-serving, only by serving the community.
What is needed is to add to the myriad informal instances of trusting to young people, the formal arrangement of youth bonds.
Christopher Houghton Budd
"Youth bonds are the missing instrument in today’s financial world."
