Resource rents, universal basic income, and poverty among Alaska’s Indigenous peoples

The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) program provides universal basic income (UBI) to all residents from investment earnings of a state sovereign wealth fund created from oil rents. This paper evaluates the effect of the PFD to mitigate poverty among the state’s rural Indigenous (Alaska Native) peoples: a population with historically high poverty rates living in a region with limited economic opportunities. Errors in recording PFD income in data used to calculate official poverty statistics cause them to misrepresent poverty in Alaska and understate the effect of the PFD. Estimating poverty rates with and without PFD income therefore requires reconstruction of family incomes from household-level data. Estimated poverty rates from reconstructed income show that the PFD has had a substantial, although diminishing mitigating effect on poverty for rural Indigenous families. The PFD has had a larger effect on poverty among children and elders than for the rural Alaska Native population as a whole. Alaska Native seniors, who receive additional sources of UBI derived primarily from resource rents besides the PFD, have seen a decline in poverty rates, while poverty rates for children have increased. Evidence has not appeared for commonly hypothesized potential adverse social and economic consequences of UBI.Ye

On the structure and stability of magnetic tower jets

Modern theoretical models of astrophysical jets combine accretion, rotation, and magnetic fields to launch and collimate supersonic flows from a central source. Near the source, magnetic field strengths must be large enough to collimate the jet requiring that the Poynting flux exceeds the kinetic-energy flux. The extent to which the Poynting flux dominates kinetic energy flux at large distances from the engine distinguishes two classes of models. In magneto-centrifugal launch (MCL) models, magnetic fields dominate only at scales $\lesssim 100$ engine radii, after which the jets become hydrodynamically dominated (HD). By contrast, in Poynting flux dominated (PFD) magnetic tower models, the field dominates even out to much larger scales. To compare the large distance propagation differences of these two paradigms, we perform 3-D ideal MHD AMR simulations of both HD and PFD stellar jets formed via the same energy flux. We also compare how thermal energy losses and rotation of the jet base affects the stability in these jets. For the conditions described, we show that PFD and HD exhibit observationally distinguishable features: PFD jets are lighter, slower, and less stable than HD jets. Unlike HD jets, PFD jets develop current-driven instabilities that are exacerbated as cooling and rotation increase, resulting in jets that are clumpier than those in the HD limit. Our PFD jet simulations also resemble the magnetic towers that have been recently created in laboratory astrophysical jet experiments.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, published in ApJ: ApJ, 757, 6

Stakeholding Through the Permanent Fund Dividend: Fitting Practice to Theory

Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) is the United States’ most significant, if not its only attempted, experiment with universal asset policies. This chapter helps clarify where the PFD fits within the larger portfolio of economic rights and obligations guaranteed by the liberal state. Is the program a realization of “real-freedom-for-all” basic income, or might it have foreshadowed Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott’s Stakeholder Society decades before their proposal emerged? I argue that neither categorization is entirely correct or entirely mistaken. Core features of the PFD demonstrate Alaska’s implicit belief in stakeholding but currently fall short of the sweeping citizenship agenda identified by stakeholding theorists. Like true stakeholder initiatives and basic income schemes, the PFD distributes shared resources on a means-independent basis, does not require recipients to work or otherwise participate in economic affairs, and commits the government to monetary distributions rather than in-kind transfers. Nevertheless, the PFD does not - and in its current format cannot - enable Alaskans to pursue their individual life plans independently of other income sources. This chapter also moves beyond definitions and addresses the PFD’s special characteristic, what I call the “endogeneity condition,” or funding through existing natural resources rather than the public fisc. I focus on how this feature allows us to abstract away from the particulars of financing basic income or stakeholding and analyze the consumption side of the system. The chapter concludes by considering how the State of Alaska might reorient the PFD toward a more comprehensive stakeholding structure and calling for more research into the use of resource-based asset systems so that governments can more aptly choose among basic income, stakeholding, and other funding schemes

What do we know about the effects of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend?

The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) has been distributed to Alaska residents for 37 years, providing each resident an equal share of a yearly government appropriation based on the earnings of the Alaska Permanent Fund. While support for the program is high, work assessing the PFD’s influence on the lives of Alaskans is limited. Recently, a number of researchers have analyzed the causal effect of the PFD on a variety of socio-economic outcomes including employment, consumption, income inequality, health, and crime. This paper summarizes this empirical literature and highlights future areas of research.Summary / Background on the Permanent Fund Dividend / Paper structure / Employment / Health / Consumption / Poverty / Income inequality / Crime / Where does the research on the PFD go