You Are Owed a Dividend

Most of the world’s wealth belongs to all of us. It’s time to start collecting.

Let’s consider a fact so stark it barely registers: the world’s five richest billionaires have more than doubled their wealth since 2020. Meanwhile, 60 percent of humanity has grown poorer over the same period. At current trajectories, we will see the world’s first trillionaire within a decade.

We have grown so accustomed to statistics like these that they have lost their capacity to shock. But they should shock us. Extreme inequality of this magnitude — the richest one percent owning 43 percent of all global financial assets, while emitting as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity — is not merely an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise functioning system. It is the system working as designed—and it is bad for nearly everyone.

This last point is worth dwelling on, because it contradicts the intuition that inequality is primarily a problem for those at the bottom. The social scientists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett spent decades studying health and social outcomes across developed countries and arrived at a finding startling in its clarity: the strongest predictor of a country’s overall health and wellbeing is not its level of wealth, but how evenly that wealth is distributed. More unequal societies have lower life expectancy, higher rates of mental illness, more crime, more addiction, more homicide, more incarceration. People in Sweden are more than six times as likely to trust their neighbors as people in the most unequal countries. Inequality does not just impoverish the poor — it corrodes the social fabric that everyone depends on to live a decent life.

National Income reflects little correlation with health and social problems…

Whereas income inequality is strongly correlated with health and social problems. Source: Richard Wilkinson, and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level : Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

Political philosopher John Rawls captured something essential about this when he proposed a famous thought experiment. Imagine you are about to be born into a society, but you have no idea where in the social hierarchy you will land — no knowledge of your parents’ wealth, your natural talents, or your social status. You’re behind what Rawls called a “veil of ignorance.” What kind of society would you design? The answer that most of us would choose is one that protects the least well-off rather than giving unlimited advantage to the fortunate few. By that standard — and it’s a reasonable one — almost no one would choose the world we have built.

The AI Enclosure

Now add one more ingredient to this already volatile mixture: artificial intelligence.

The story of how wealth becomes concentrated is ultimately a story about the enclosure of the commons. Our civilization rests on a vast accumulated inheritance — millennia of knowledge, language, law, mathematics, medicine, infrastructure, and culture, built collectively by generations of human beings who are no longer alive to collect their share. When Mark Zuckerberg made a few tweaks to this edifice and collected a personal fortune of $250 billion, he did not build that wealth from nothing. He built it on top of everything that came before: the internet (publicly funded), computing (decades of academic research), literacy (centuries of educational investment), and the entire architecture of modern civilization.

Generative AI now represents the most dramatic enclosure of the commons in human history. In a matter of years, a handful of corporations have ingested virtually the entire accumulated text of human civilization — every book, article, scientific paper, poem, and conversation that could be scraped from the web — and now monetizing it as proprietary product. The knowledge commons of humanity, built over millennia by countless anonymous contributors, has been captured for the benefit of a tiny elite. The rest of us, whose ancestors did the actual work of generating all that knowledge, receive nothing.

And that is before we account for what AI will do to labor markets. Past technologies displaced workers in waves but always left new industries in their wake. AI threatens something more sweeping: a historically unprecedented break in the capital–labor relationship, moving from software into robotics and the physical economy, displacing white-collar and blue-collar work alike. When AI can write code, draft contracts, analyze data, generate medical diagnoses, and automate factories, the bargaining power of workers in those fields collapses. The gains flow overwhelmingly to the owners of the AI systems, while the rest of the population absorbs the disruption.

We risk entering a new age of techno-feudalism — a tiny elite owning the productive systems of intelligence while the rest of humanity scrambles for precarious survival.

Entering the age of techno-feudalism. Source: NY Mag Intelligencer

This is the context in which we need to discuss Universal Basic Income (UBI): not as some extended welfare payment, but as an urgent structural response to a civilizational emergency.

What We Are Actually Owed

Thomas Paine — who helped inspire the American Revolution and wrote The Rights of Man — was also one of the first to articulate the moral logic of aUBI, and he framed it in terms that remain more precise and more radical than found in most contemporary discussions. Rather than proposing charity, he proposed justice. In doing so, he laid a cornerstone for what we can now envisage as an ecocivilization—a world that works for all.

“It is not charity but a right,” Paine wrote, “not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for.” The payment he envisioned was not a basic income but a dividend. A share of the commonwealth that belongs to every person by virtue of being born into a civilization built by their ancestors.

The distinction matters enormously. Welfare carries stigma. It requires means-testing, proof of need, bureaucratic gatekeeping. It is premised on the idea that most people do not deserve support, and that those who do must demonstrate their worthiness to receive it. A dividend, by contrast, is premised on the fact that we are all stakeholders in a collective inheritance. It no more requires justification than a shareholder needs justification for receiving returns on an asset they own.

All human wealth derives ultimately from the commons: from the abundance of nature itself — the air, water, sunlight, soil, and ecosystems that sustain all life — and from the accumulated knowledge and infrastructure that our ancestors built and bequeathed to us. That includes electricity, chemistry, modern medicine, the internet, and now the digital architecture that AI is built upon. This enormous legacy is a commonwealth, and the wealth it generates belongs by right to all of us.

The appropriate policy instrument for distributing a share of that commonwealth is what UBI advocates like Guy Standing call, more precisely, a “social dividend.” Every legal resident of a society would receive a guaranteed periodic cash payment — unconditional, universal, and sufficient to cover basic needs. Not as a substitute for public services, but as a complement to them: alongside universal healthcare, education, housing support, and public transportation, each person would also receive the cash equivalent of their individual share of the commonwealth.

What the Evidence Shows

The concern most commonly raised about UBI — that “free money makes people lazy” — turns out, on examination, to be a projection of the ideology of capitalism rather than an observation about human nature. People do not, in fact, primarily want to avoid work. What they want to avoid is degrading, meaningless, coerced work, what David Graeber memorably called “bullshit jobs.” Given financial security, people tend to invest their time and energy in activities of genuine value: caring for family members, building community, starting small enterprises, pursuing education.

The evidence from UBI pilots conducted around the world is remarkably consistent. A meta-study by the Stanford Basic Income Lab synthesizing sixteen different reviews found decisively that UBI alleviates poverty and improves health and educational outcomes across the board. In Liberia, a group of addicts and petty criminals given unconditional cash spent it on food, clothing, and medicine. In Vancouver, fifty homeless people given $7,500 with no strings attached used it for food, rent, and clothing, and remained financially stable a year later. In India, UBI recipients established fishing cooperatives, pooled income to improve village infrastructure, and enabled young women to gain independence from patriarchal financial control.

In Namibia, petty crime fell substantially because starving villagers no longer needed to steal vegetables. They began planting more, creating abundance where scarcity had generated conflict. Instead of making people passive, a social dividend empowered them to pursue their dreams.

The Question of Priorities

The objection that a robust UBI is unaffordable is, upon examination, a statement about political will rather than economic reality. If every American adult received $1,000 per month — roughly the federal poverty level — the total annual cost would be approximately $4 trillion, equivalent to less than 14 percent of US GDP. That sounds large until you consider that the world’s 3,000 billionaires currently hold approximately $16 trillion in wealth. Oxfam calculates that a 12.8 percent annual wealth tax would merely have kept their wealth constant since 2016.

As Guy Standing puts it, the issue is not affordability but “what are society’s fiscal priorities?”

Here is the deeper issue: if we accept that all wealth ultimately derives from the commons — from nature, from accumulated human knowledge, from millennia of collective labor — then the current situation, in which a vanishingly small number of people have captured a wildly disproportionate share of that wealth while the majority have no meaningful stake in their collective inheritance, represents not merely inequality but more like ongoing theft. On that basis, a social dividend is not a redistribution of wealth that belongs to the wealthy but a return of wealth that belongs to everyone.

Some of the mechanisms for collecting that wealth are well understood: restoring progressive taxation, enacting internationally coordinated wealth taxes, instituting land value taxes on the unearned gains of property ownership, applying full-cost pricing that requires corporations to account for the ecological and social damage they externalize onto the commons. The G20 is already considering a proposal by economist Gabriel Zucman to ensure the world’s 3,000 billionaires pay at least 2 percent of their wealth in taxes annually — a measure that could generate $250 billion per year. It is an important first step, yet it barely scratches the surface.

A Different Social Contract

The transformative power of a social dividend goes beyond the material. It would be based on a postulate that our civilization has not been willing to acknowledge: that each person, simply by virtue of being born into the human community, has a stake in its shared inheritance. That human dignity is not contingent on productivity and that people can be trusted to know what they need.

Martin Luther King Jr., writing shortly before his assassination, understood this: “The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement.”

Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr.: Two vocal proponents of UBI

Future generations, looking back at this period, might struggle to comprehend that in an era of unprecedented productive capacity — when we could, for the first time in history, materially ensure that no one goes hungry or homeless — we chose instead to allow a handful of individuals to accumulate fortunes that no-one could spend in a thousand lifetimes, while billions of people remained in precarity. They might ask: why, when the inheritance belonged to everyone, did so few collect it?

The answer will define what kind of civilization we are building. Demanding our social dividend — insisting that the wealth generated by our collective inheritance be shared with all its rightful beneficiaries — is not so much a political position as a moral imperative. In an age when AI threatens to shred whatever remains of the social contract, what Paine revealed as social justice can now be understood as a foundation for an ecocivilization.

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Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All

Melville House: available May 26, 2026

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Jeremy Lent, is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. He is founder of the Deep Transformation Network and co-founder of the Ecocivilization Coalition. His previous two books were The Web of Meaning and The Patterning Instinct.