Robot Takeover Matters Less If We're All Shareholders

Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project recently wrote an article in the New York Times suggesting a policy idea that seems extremely promising and woefully overlooked. That idea is what Bruenig calls a social wealth fund -- a government-owned portfolio of stocks, bonds and real estate whose dividends would be paid out directly to the citizenry.

This is similar to what economist Miles Kimball and others have been calling a sovereign wealth fund, which is the typical name for funds that some natural-resource exporters use to invest the proceeds from their state-owned oil and gas companies. But Bruenig’s name is better. The state-operated funds of countries such as Saudi Arabia are used in a discretionary manner, which often means their benefits end up flowing to the country’s richest. A social wealth fund, while having the same acronym, would guarantee that the income from capital assets gets distributed widely -- perhaps as a universal basic income. A U.S. social wealth fund would rely on tax revenues to purchase assets, rather than natural resource revenues, but the principle is the same.