Policy & Implementation
The Funding Problem UBI Supporters Don’t Talk About
On January 10, 1901, a drilling crew near Beaumont, Texas, hit something at a depth of 1,139 feet.…
A Book by Emin Medić
Shareholder
Shareholder
at Birth
“Keep Your UBI, Give Me What’s Mine”
Earth, Light, and Signals can’t be owned, but you are a shareholder of their benefits. From birth.
The Problem
Every dollar wears a mask
Companies ride publicly funded science, shared natural resources, and the behavioral data of billions — and none of it shows up on the balance sheet. Profits look self-made. The commons are invisible.
When you remove the mask, you see three silent donors behind every product: Earth, Light, and Signals. None of them have ever sent an invoice.
See the full picture →
$100B+
Generated by carbon pricing in 2023 alone. The principle works. We just haven’t applied it to everything we share.
“Every dollar wears a mask; take it off, and you see the commons underneath.”
What We All Own
The Three Commons
Three shared foundations that the economy runs on — yet none appear on the bill.
Commons I
Earth — The Finite Ground
Atmosphere, oceans, minerals, forests, spectrum, orbital slots. Finite. Shared. Used as if they were free. Every extraction is a withdrawal from an account that belongs to all of us.
Commons II
Light — The Inherited Knowledge
Science, mathematics, open-source code, medical research, engineering standards. Built over centuries by humanity. Inherited by all. No company built itself on an empty intellectual field.
Commons III
Signals — The Intimate Patterns
Clicks, searches, purchases, movements. Your data trains algorithms worth billions. The invoice for your phone listed a price. It did not list you.
The Fix
Use the commons, pay a small royalty,
Use the commons, pay a small royalty,
fund the dividend, pay everyone equally.
Not charity. Inheritance.
Royalties collected at four existing gates flow into a global fund — paid out as a monthly dividend to every person on Earth. No new bureaucracy. Existing institutions. New rules.
Customs
A royalty intensity line added to import/export manifests at ports worldwide.
Exchanges
A micro-levy on trades in companies whose profits depend heavily on commons inputs.
Licenses
Resource extraction and spectrum licenses include a commons royalty component.
Platforms
Digital platforms pay a data royalty proportional to their behavioral data usage.
The Book
Shareholder at Birth
“Keep Your UBI, Give Me What’s Mine”
A rigorous, readable argument that every person alive is a shareholder of the benefits generated by the three commons that power the modern economy — and a practical framework for how that stake should be priced, collected, and returned as a monthly dividend.
What’s Inside
- 01What We All Own
- 02The Missing Invoice
- 03Beyond UBI: From Safety Net to Stake
- 04When Machines Inherit the Work
- 05Earth: The Finite Commons
Get the Book
“You came into this world as a beneficiary of everything humanity shares.
It is time the economy reflected that.”
— Emin Medić, Shareholder at Birth
From the Blog
Read all articles →
Latest from the Commons
Earth & Resources
Introducing Shareholder at Birth: The UBI Conversation Rewritten as Ownership
In 2021, Sam Altman proposed something called the American Equity Fund. The idea: tax large companies 2.5% of…
Earth & Resources
The Three Commons: Earth, Light, Signals — A Simple Framework
When you type a question into an AI chatbot, the response arrives in seconds. It feels effortless, like…