Stakeholding through the Permanent Fund Dividend: Fitting Practice to Theory

Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) is the United States’ most significant, if not its only attempted, experiment with universal asset policies. The PFD’s political successes are well-documented,1 as are its financial returns; residents have received $1,400 per year on average over the past decade from state oil revenues.2 Other contributors to this volume query whether the “Alaska model” is fit for export and adaptation in other US jurisdictions and countries.3 But before approaching that question, theorists and policymakers must be precise about the reasons for implementing a natural resource-based dividend. That is, we must clarify where potential program outcomes fit in the larger portfolio of economic rights and obligations guaranteed by the state. In the case of the PFD, applying the right label among the standard list of liberal economic programs remains an important and unfinished task, one that should help other institutions apply its principles better and understand its promise and limitations. Is the PFD a realization of “real-freedom-for-all” basic income? Might it have foreshadowed the stakeholder society decades before the proposal emerged in public discourse? Or does it belong in some entirely separate category, perhaps a hybrid of basic income and stakeholding theories?