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

Game Theoretic Formation of a Centrality Based Network

We model the formation of networks as a game where players aspire to maximize their own centrality by increasing the number of other players to which they are path-wise connected, while simultaneously incurring a cost for each added adjacent edge. We simulate the interactions between players using an algorithm that factors in rational strategic behavior based on a common objective function. The resulting networks exhibit pairwise stability, from which we derive necessary stable conditions for specific graph topologies. We then expand the model to simulate non-trivial games with large numbers of players. We show that using conditions necessary for the stability of star topologies we can induce the formation of hub players that positively impact the total welfare of the network.Comment: Submitted to 2012 ASE Social Informatics Conferenc

The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend and Membership in the State’s Political Community

Despite decades of unmitigated administrative success, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) is not immune from political and legal controversy. The symbolic and financial importance that Alaskans ascribe to their annual dividend checks has generated disputes between ordinary residents and executive agencies over eligibility. Litigation concerning three dominant status requirements—minimum residency, U.S. citizenship, and felony incarceration—reveal not only the extent to which Alaskans will pursue what they believe to be valid claims on their share of natural resource wealth, but also the limits of full political membership in the state. This Comment frames a sample of the Alaska Supreme Court’s decisions on PFD eligibility in terms of membership in Alaska’s political community. The PFD reflects the Alaska Legislature’s opinion about valid beneficiaries from oil revenues, and the state courts police eligibility at the margin. This Comment therefore argues that the Alaska Supreme Court implicitly determines, on the basis of statutory intent and administrative rule interpretations, “insiders” and “outsiders” within the state’s political community