An early version of a book, Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its Suitability as a Model, is now available for free download on my personal website. A summary, from the first chapter of the book (2012), is reprinted below. If you want to cite or quote it,...
Alaska’s House of Representatives has passed a bill which sets the state’s annual PFD (Permanent Fund Dividend) at approximately $1,600 per person next year, an amount which has been confirmed after a hard-fought legislative battle over the size of the payment. The...
Alaska’s provision of regular, unconditional income to its inhabitants has had no overall effect on employment, a recent study has found. The Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), provided by the Alaskan government to all citizens who apply for it, currently stands at...
The Economy Security Project has published the results of a new survey of Alaskans’ attitudes towards the state’s Permanent Fund Dividend.
Alaska’s Permanent Fund, Dividend and the central idea that minerals are a shared inheritance have inspired numerous social and political movements across the globe.
The amount of this year’s Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend was announced by the Governor on Friday, September 23: every Alaskan will receive $1,022, less than half the amount of last year’s dividend.
On September 16, Alaska senator Bill Wielechowski filed a lawsuit contesting Governor Bill Walker’s veto of half of the funding for the Permanent Fund Dividend. It is unlikely to be resolved before payouts begin on October 6.
New research from economists at Hallym University in Chuncheon and Korea University in Seoul found that Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend has helped increase birth weights for Alaska newborns. According to the study, from 1978 to 1984, the dividend cash transfer...
In 1797 Thomas Paine suggested that, because in principle the land belongs to everyone equally, those who occupy it should pay a ground rent to the whole community. We can generalise the profits that landowners reap from the occupation of land into the concept of ‘economic rent’: if someone uses natural resources that belongs to all of us in order to make money, then any income greater than the cost of production is ‘economic rent’. Paine would have made the point that the economic rent belongs to all of us.
Written as response to the article, “Six Lessons from the Alaska Model,” by Karl Widerquist, C.A. L’Hirondelle, Frederik Schenk, and Eric Manneschmidt argue that resource dividends are not a good source of funding for a basic income because, “The Alaska Permanent Fund...
Karl Widerquist and Michael Howard, Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its suitability as a model, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, xvii + 267 pp, hbk, 0 230 11207 0, £62.50 In 1967 oil was found in the relatively new state of Alaska; in 1976 a constitutional...
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 3:00pm to 5:00pm As part of the University of Alaska Anchorage's Institute of Social and Economic Research series of lunchtime talks, “Understanding Alaska,” Todd Moss discussed whether something like Alaska’s Basic Income, the Permanent Fund...
Michael Howard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maine and co-editor with Karl Widerquist of the forthcoming book “Exporting the Alaska Model: How the Permanent Fund Dividend Can be Adapted as a Reform Model for the World” (Palgrave MacMillan).
I was recently asked four questions about Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, and I think the answers provide a pretty good overview of what people who are interested in UBI need to know about the fund. 1. When was the Alaska policy passed? The enabling legislation was...
BIEN | Congress Papers BIEN 2019, Hyderabad Videos of all the plenary sessions are available on youtube. Abstracts of all the concurrent sessions are available here. Full papers and slides of some presentations are available below. Joffre BalceFrom Austerity to...
An early version of the book, Exporting the Alaska Model, is available for download for the first time. This is possible because most academic publishers allow authors and editors to post early versions of their works on their person websites. A preview, written in...
A new kind of news-documentary interactive presentation has been delivered by Frame, a digital newsmagazine that uses human-centered stories to illuminate key topics in the news. Its latest issue features the Alaska Permanent Fund, named "The Alaska Model". The piece...
This is the first guest post on The Indepentarian Blog. Welcome, Rahul. Author: Rahul Basu The Future We Need This is a comment on Karl Widerquist’s excellent proposal for a People’s Endowment. I’m a member of The Future We Need (TFWN), a global campaign to make the...
This page contains a list of links to free versions of pretty much everything I’ve ever written. Free versions are possible because most publishers allow authors to post early versions of their publications on their personal website. Where the published version is...
This article is an early version of a paper that was published as: Karl Widerquist, "The people’s endowment." In Axel Gosseries and Inigo Gonzalez (eds.) Institutions for Future Generations, Oxford University Press, pp. 312-330 The proposal Governments should start to...