What is Universal Basic Capital?
- Team members:
- Nicolas Berggruen,
- Nathan Gardels
It is now becoming clear that AI innovations are increasingly decoupling productivity growth and wealth creation from jobs and income. The value created by intelligent machines is flowing mostly to those who “own the robots.” In the US, the top 10% who own 93% of all equities. Meanwhile, the value of labor — and its bargaining power to reap a piece of the pie — is rapidly diminishing. Indeed, the public, whose data is exploited to train AI models, generally has no claim to the new wealth created from the raw material of their information.
A social contract that addresses this dynamic would foster an ownership share for all in the wealth generated by intelligent machines built on the public's data and that are displacing gainful employment. The aim is to enhance the assets of the general population in the first place — predistribution — instead of only seeking to patch up inequality by redistributing the income of others after the fact. We call this “universal basic capital”.
The return on equity shares of UBC in the AI economy will compound over time and grow in value unlike ‘universal basic income,” which is only a welfare transfer that doesn’t change the dynamic of inequality.
The idea is not only to reduce the concentration of wealth at the top, but to build it from below.
The best way to address inequality in the digital age is to broadly share the wealth by spreading the equity around. This can be done through universal savings and investment accounts that are individual or family owned.
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