Why I Call It Citizens' Dividend, Not UBI

Words matter in policy debates. The words we choose to describe an idea shape how people evaluate it, who they think should receive it, and whether they think it is justified or merely charitable.

Universal Basic Income — UBI — is gaining traction as automation accelerates. The policy itself is straightforward: give every adult citizen a regular cash payment, unconditionally, sufficient to cover basic needs. The arguments for it are compelling. But the framing is wrong. And that wrong framing will limit the policy's political viability and obscure its most important justification.

I prefer Citizens' Dividend. Here is why the distinction matters.

The Problem With "Income"

Income, in standard economic usage, is compensation for productive activity. You work, you get paid. The word carries an embedded assumption: the recipient has contributed something to receive it.

This is precisely the assumption that opponents of universal basic income attack. "Why should people get paid for doing nothing?" is the intuitive objection, and it has real political power. It resonates with deeply held values about work, responsibility, and desert. When you call the policy "basic income," you are constantly fighting that frame.

The frame implies that recipients are getting something for free — that they are being given income without earning it. This is not only politically weak. It is also analytically wrong.

What a Dividend Actually Is

A dividend is not a gift. It is a return on ownership.

When a company generates profits, shareholders receive dividends because they own equity in the enterprise. The dividend is not charity. It is not a policy choice made by the company to be generous. It is a return that the owner is entitled to receive because of what they own.

Now consider the question: who owns the productive capacity of an automated economy?

The robots, the AI systems, the automated supply chains — these were not built in a vacuum. They depend on publicly funded research (the internet, GPS, touch screens — all government projects), legal systems that protect intellectual property, physical infrastructure built at public expense, educational institutions that trained the engineers who built the systems, and generations of accumulated scientific knowledge that is freely available because previous researchers published rather than patented.

Automation builds on a foundation of collective investment. Citizens, as members of the society that created and maintains that foundation, have a legitimate ownership claim on a portion of the returns it generates. A Citizens' Dividend is not a welfare payment. It is a return on that collective ownership stake.

The Alaska Model

This is not a hypothetical framework. It is an operational one.

Alaska has run a Permanent Fund Dividend since 1982. The state collects royalties from oil extraction — resources that belong to Alaskan citizens collectively — and distributes a portion as an annual dividend to every resident. In 2023, that payment was roughly $1,300 per person.

The Alaska Permanent Fund is politically popular across party lines because both conservatives and progressives understand the underlying logic: citizens own the natural resources, and the dividend is their return on that ownership. There is no debate about whether recipients "deserve" the money. Of course they do — they own the asset.

The automation economy creates an analogous situation. The productive capacity of AI and robotics is, in a meaningful sense, a common inheritance. It was built on collective foundations. A Citizens' Dividend would distribute a portion of the returns on that collective asset base to those who collectively own it.

Sovereign AI Wealth Funds

The mechanism I find most compelling for operationalizing Citizens' Dividend is the Sovereign AI Wealth Fund — a public investment vehicle that holds equity stakes in highly automated companies and distributes returns as dividends.

The logic is direct. As automation increases, labor's share of corporate income falls and capital's share rises. If citizens collectively hold equity in the companies driving that shift, they participate in the rising capital returns rather than being displaced by them. The fund captures a portion of the productivity gains and distributes them broadly.

Norway's Government Pension Fund Global is the proof of concept at scale — a sovereign wealth fund that manages over a trillion dollars in assets and has generated substantial returns that benefit all Norwegian citizens. The Norwegian fund was seeded with oil revenues; an AI Wealth Fund could be seeded through a tax on automated labor or a requirement that highly automated companies issue equity to a public trust.

Why the Framing Is Political Strategy, Not Semantics

I want to be direct about why I emphasize this distinction. It is not pedantry.

The political coalition needed to implement Citizens' Dividend is broader than the coalition that could pass UBI. A UBI frame attracts people who are already sympathetic to redistribution and alienates people who are not. A Citizens' Dividend frame can attract conservatives who believe in property rights, libertarians who believe in returning government-enabled windfalls to their source, and progressives who want to ensure automation benefits are broadly shared.

Framing it as a dividend — as a return on collective ownership — reframes the political question from "how much do we take from the productive to give to the unproductive?" to "how do citizens receive their fair share of returns on assets they collectively own?" These are very different conversations, and the second one is much more winnable.

The abundance economy will generate extraordinary prosperity. The question is distribution. Getting the framing right is step one.