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Everyone should be treated as a shareholder in the Age of AI
There was a time in America when productivity growth and wage growth moved together. From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, as productivity rose, pay rose with it. Workers produced more and earned more. That was not charity. It was the natural result of an economy that shared its gains with those who generated them.
That relationship is dead. It has been dead for half a century.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, since 1979, productivity has annually grown over twice the rate on average as typical worker pay. Before the late 1970s, these lines were practically the same line. Then policy choices — the erosion of the minimum wage, the dismantling of unions, tax cuts for the rich, deregulation — broke the link between what the economy produced and what most people received. The income generated by rising productivity did not vanish. It went into the salaries of top executives, into corporate profits, and into returns to shareholders.
A February 2025 study by the RAND Corporation put a number on it. Carter Price estimated the gap between what the bottom 90 percent of American workers earned in 2023 and what they would have earned had income growth remained as evenly distributed as it was in 1975. The annual gap in 2023 alone was $3.9 trillion. The cumulative total since 1975 was $79 trillion. Seventy-nine trillion dollars flowed upward, away from the vast majority of Americans, over five decades, because we allowed it to happen through deliberate policy choices.
Some will suggest raising the minimum wage would fix this. It wouldn’t. A higher minimum wage helps the lowest-paid workers but does nothing for the millions above it who have still seen their share of productivity growth erode. Some will point to unions. Restoring union power would help, and we should do it, but even at peak union strength, not every worker was unionized, and unions cannot reach into every home where unpaid care work — raising children, caring for aging parents — produces enormous value invisible to the labor market. No minimum wage increase or collective bargaining agreement will ever put a paycheck in the hand of a parent staying home with a child. Neither would a tax cut.
Universal healthcare? We should have it. Decoupling survival from employment is critical. But universal healthcare distributes healthcare, not the gains of productivity. Shorter work weeks? Worth doing as AI makes it possible to produce more in fewer hours. But shorter work weeks distribute hours of employment, not the wealth generated by the economy. A negative income tax? The net outcome can look like UBI on a spreadsheet, but an NIT phases out as income rises which is the same as taxing the incomes of only those in the phaseout range. It does not provide the same amount to everyone. It does not say to every person: you are a shareholder.
Only universal basic income does that. Only UBI distributes the same amount to every person, unconditionally, as a foundational floor beneath everyone’s feet.
Here is the strongest and most fundamental case for universality, and it goes beyond wages and productivity charts.
As the political economist Gar Alperovitz argued in his essay on technological inheritance in 2016, the overwhelming source of modern economic output is not the labor any individual performs today. It is the accumulated knowledge and technology inherited from every generation before us. MIT economist Robert Solow demonstrated that nearly 90 percent of productivity growth in the first half of the 20th century was attributable to “technical change” — a catch-all term encompassing technological innovation, accumulated scientific knowledge, improvements in education, better organizational methods, and any other factor that made a given amount of labor and capital produce more output than before. US per capita output grew roughly sevenfold over the 20th century. None of us individually earned that sevenfold increase. We inherited it.
This inheritance argument applies with full force to AI. Large language models were trained on text that billions of people wrote. Audio and video models were trained on audio and video that billions of people created. We all generated that training data. But it is impossible to determine who contributed what, whose data is being used most in any given output, or whose data is qualitatively more valuable. The complexity is irreducible. What we can recognize is that everyone contributed, and therefore everyone should benefit.
This is not an abstract philosophical claim. When someone puts up capital to fund a corporation, they often receive a dividend when that corporation matures and generates profits. Our collective human output — our language, our knowledge, our creative work — is the capital that built AI. We are the shareholders. UBI is our dividend.
The case for a universal dividend is further strengthened by the fact that the foundational technologies behind AI were funded by public dollars. Federal investment through DARPA has been the dominant source of AI research funding since the 1960s. The internet emerged from ARPANET. The NSF funded the research behind Google’s PageRank algorithm. DARPA’s Grand Challenges launched the self-driving car industry. Federal agencies have poured billions into the computing infrastructure, neural network research, and reinforcement learning that made modern AI possible.
We all funded the research that created AI. The appropriate return on that investment is not being told to go find another job. A return on investment is a dividend. We invested. We deserve our cut. And we all deserve to benefit even if we keep our jobs, because productivity will continue to grow, and the benefits of everything that got us here should not only go to one percent of people.
Do not offer us a new job as our dividend. A job guarantee is not an alternative to UBI. If someone loses their job to AI and a job guarantee helps them find another, that is useful for that person. But it does nothing for the person whose wages have been suppressed for decades. It does nothing for the parent at home. It does nothing for the retired person or the person with a disability. It benefits only those who take the guaranteed job. Everyone should directly benefit from productivity growth, not just those whose employment situation happens to qualify them.
The same applies to benefits targeted only at those who lose their jobs. Unemployment insurance is a net with holes. It only catches those who fall through a specific kind of floor in a specific kind of way. Meanwhile, everyone watches productivity grow and their share shrink.
We don’t tell stockholders that we can’t trust them with cash, so instead of a dividend, they’ll receive food or housing. That would be absurd. Cash allows people to determine for themselves what they most need. Universal basic services are fine as complements, but they are no substitute for cash in people’s hands.
The RAND study provides a useful benchmark. If the bottom 90 percent of Americans were shortchanged by $3.9 trillion in 2023 alone, that number has only grown since. Divided among every adult in the United States, we are looking at a dividend that should be about $1,390 per month here in 2026. Factor in a smaller amount per child — roughly $500 per month — and we are talking about a dividend that would end poverty in the United States.
The poverty line for a single adult in the US sits at $1,330 per month. Therefore, a UBI of at least $1,400 per month for every adult, with $500 per month for every child, would abolish poverty as we define it. This is not fantasy. This is the money that should have been flowing to all of us for decades and was instead funneled to a relative few at the top. The $79 trillion cumulative gap since 1975 represents what was taken. A wealth tax on a significant percentage of that accumulated concentration is not punitive. It is corrective.
Ideas like AI token taxes can help with the narrative for this. So can land value taxes, which connect to the oldest argument for UBI — the one Thomas Paine made at the founding of this country, that the earth is the common inheritance of all. Alaska has operated on this logic since 1982 with its Permanent Fund Dividend, and no Alaskan considers it welfare. They consider it their rightful share. That logic supports both a national resource dividend and an AI dividend.
But we should not get stuck on the tax question first. What matters most is settling on the amount and the principle: every American rightfully receives a universal dividend. Then we assemble the tax mix. If the annual figure is now north of $4 trillion, that is the full dividend target. Perhaps phase it in over five years to avoid a demand shock. But do it.
We cannot start crowning trillionaires while millions of Americans line up at food banks and millions more live stressed out lives of chronic financial insecurity. Those like Elon Musk exist at the end of a long chain of human achievement that every person who ever lived contributed to. It is wrong for one person to accumulate a trillion dollars based on what all of humanity built, while the rest of us are told to go retrain and compete on price with a robot or survive on gig work.
Productivity growth used to be widely shared. It has not been for fifty years. The inequality we have now is already worse than the First Gilded Age. We have the productivity and the resources to end poverty and significantly reduce economic insecurity for all. We have the moral and economic case for a universal dividend. What we lack is the political will to treat every citizen as a shareholder in the economy they comprise.
UBI is our rightful dividend. It is time to start paying it.
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