Common Wealth Dividends

Common wealth dividends are universal cash payments funded by fees on the private use of common resources like land, minerals, and the atmosphere as a carbon sink. Thomas Paine’s 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice and Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend are staples in the literature on Basic Income, but there is much more to common wealth dividends beyond these highlights, and common wealth dividends have a distinctive ethical justification and distinctive policy implications that merit discussion. This monograph, the most comprehensive study of common wealth dividends to date, will be of interest to students, teachers, and advocates of Basic Income and those in the field of environmental studies, including sustainable development, natural resource management, and climate policy.

• Common wealth dividends
• Basic Income
• Universal Basic Income
• Thomas Paine
• Commons
• Alaska Permanent Fund
• Carbon dividends

“This book blazes a new frontier in economic thinking: the potential use of co-inherited wealth to pay lifelong dividends to everyone. It is must-reading for heterodox economists — and anyone else seeking ways to share the fruits of markets more equitably.”

-Peter Barnes, author of Who Owns the Sky?, Capitalism 3.0, and With Liberty and Dividends for All

 “This outstanding work by Brent Ranalli delves deeply into the morality, history, and practicality of the needed reform of dividends from our shared common wealth.”

-Gary Flomenhoft, Sustainable Minerals Institute, University of Queensland

 “A tour de force of the history of wealth sharing and a welcome addition to the literature exploring ways to mitigate the harmful effects of concentrated natural resources. Ranalli helps to keep alive the spirit of Alaska's pioneering Governor Jay Hammond.”

-Todd Moss, author of Oil to Cash: Fighting the Resource Curse through Cash Transfers and The Governor's Solution: Alaska’s Oil Dividend and Iraq’s Last Window.

 “This is a book I’ve been waiting for.”

-Gregg Erickson, economist, former director of research for the Alaska Legislature, trustee of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation

 “Brent Ranalli’s book Common Wealth Dividends represents a real advance in the literature on the idea of a universal basic income. . . . Too often the UBI is argued for as a streamlined welfare state redistribution program or as a pacification program for the AI-unemployed without realizing that there is a stronger rights-based argument . . . . This book fills in that gap in the literature.”

-David Ellerman, University of California at Riverside, author of Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy

 “Much of [today’s] inequality in wealth arises, directly or indirectly, from the appropriation of revenues associated with the ownership or control of land and natural resources by a small minority. In his important new book Brent Ranalli challenges this appropriation. Drawing on theoretical positions first articulated more than 200 years ago as well as actual current arrangements, he argues for broad sharing of the revenues arising from our common wealth, in land and natural resources and in other areas as well.”

-John Stutz, Tellus Institute

 “Brent Ranalli has been thinking about common wealth and dividends for a long time, and the result is this superb, concise book that covers the history and theory of common wealth dividends, from Thomas Paine's proposal for a tax on land to fund a lump sum payment and a pension, through Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, to current proposals for carbon dividends. . . . Particularly distinctive and illuminating is Ranalli’s rich historical narrative of the origins of this idea and its practical realizations. . . . For anyone interested in common wealth dividends, and their relevance to current debates about inequality, poverty, and sustainability, this book should be considered essential reading.”

--Michael Howard, University of Maine, co-editor of the journal Basic Income Studies

• The Cadmus Group, Waltham, USA

  Brent Ranalli

Brent Ranalli is a policy practitioner who consults for public-sector clients at The Cadmus Group, LLC. His writings on common wealth dividends, Basic Income, and other policy topics have been published in Basic Income Studies and Basic Income News and in the USBIG discussion paper series, as well as in the Journal for Refugee Studies, the Journal for Sustainability Education, Foreign Affairs, and Controversies in Globalization, 2^nd edition. Mr. Ranalli co-edits Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology for Yale University Press and serves as editor of the Thoreau Society Bulletin.

Policies and ethics