In 2021, Sam Altman proposed something called the American Equity Fund. The idea: tax large companies 2.5% of their market value each year, tax land at 2.5% of its value, pool the proceeds, and distribute them to every American adult. He estimated AI alone could generate enough wealth to pay each person $13,500 per year within a decade.
Altman also funded the largest basic income study in the United States. For three years, 1,000 people in Texas and Illinois received $1,000 per month. The results, published in 2024, showed that recipients spent more on food, housing, and transportation, supported their families at higher rates, and did not drop out of the workforce.
The study proved what UBI supporters have long argued: people given unconditional cash use it responsibly. The question it did not answer is the one that matters most. Where does $13,500 per person per year come from, and on what basis does anyone receive it?
That question is the difference between universal basic income and what I call a commons dividend. I wrote a book about it.
What UBI Gets Right
UBI gets the distribution right. Cash, unconditional, universal. No means test, no behavioral requirements, no bureaucracy deciding who deserves what. The Catalonia pilot launched in 2024 gives 5,000 residents unconditional monthly payments with no strings attached. The Welsh pilot gives care leavers a basic income for three years. Eighteen U.S. states have run some form of guaranteed income program. The evidence keeps saying the same thing: people spend it on necessities, they stay employed, their health improves.
That is real. I am not here to argue against it.
What I am here to say is that how you distribute money is only half the question. The other half is why anyone is entitled to receive it. And UBI, as currently framed, does not have a strong answer.
The Funding Problem Nobody Solves
Most UBI proposals fund the payment through taxes. Income tax, wealth tax, value-added tax, some combination. Altman’s American Equity Fund would tax corporate market value and land value. Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend proposed a 10% value-added tax to fund $1,000 per month for every American adult.
These are all redistribution mechanisms. They take money generated by the economy and redirect it. The political problem is obvious: every dollar distributed is a dollar taxed. The funding depends on political will, budget cycles, and whoever controls the legislature. When the economy contracts, tax revenue drops at the exact moment people need the payment most.
Canada’s carbon rebate proved this fragility. The system worked. The rebate was popular once people understood it. And it was killed anyway, because a new government decided to scrap it.
Tax-funded UBI is a policy choice. Policy choices get reversed. That is the structural weakness at the center of every major UBI proposal.
Ownership Changes Everything
There is a different way to frame the payment. Not as redistribution, but as a return.
The economy runs on shared inputs. Natural resources extracted from the earth. Knowledge accumulated across centuries of human effort. Data generated by billions of people every day. These inputs already generate revenue. Spectrum auctions have raised over $233 billion. Carbon pricing generated over $100 billion in 2024. The global advertising industry, built almost entirely on behavioral data, generated $1.14 trillion in 2025.
None of these figures come from taxes. They come from companies paying to use shared resources, or from monetizing inputs that belong to everyone. The revenue already exists. The question is who receives it.
When Alaska distributes its Permanent Fund dividend, it is not redistributing tax revenue. It is returning a share of oil royalties to the people who own the oil. When Switzerland redistributes its carbon levy, it is returning revenue collected from companies that used the atmosphere. These are not acts of generosity. They are returns on shared ownership.
The economist Guy Standing calls this a “social dividend”: a share in the surpluses produced by collectively owned inputs. The framing matters because it changes the political durability of the payment. A tax can be repealed. A dividend on an asset you own is harder to take away, because the argument for it does not depend on a politician’s generosity. It depends on a fact: you are a co-owner, and co-owners receive returns.
What Shareholder at Birth Proposes
The book lays out a specific framework. Every person born on this planet is a shareholder in three categories of shared inputs: Earth (natural resources, atmosphere, spectrum), Light (inherited knowledge, public research, open-source code), and Signals (behavioral data, digital interactions, sensor traces).
When companies use these inputs, a small royalty is collected at four existing institutional gates: Customs (border adjustments on goods that use shared resources), Exchanges (stock market disclosure requirements), Licenses (spectrum auctions, drilling permits, patent offices), and Platforms (app stores and ad networks that already withhold at settlement). No new bureaucracies required. These are new rules applied at chokepoints that already exist.
The royalties flow into a global public trust, are invested, and the returns are distributed equally as a monthly dividend to every person alive.
This is not UBI funded by taxes. It is a commons dividend funded by rent on shared assets. The difference is not just semantic. It determines whether the payment survives the next election.
