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Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its Suitability as a Model.
Edited by Karl Widerquist and Michael W Howard. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012. xvi+267pp, $100.00.
ISBN: 978-0230112070
.;
Exporting the Alaska Model: Adapting the Permanent Fund Dividend for Reform around the World.
Edited by Karl Widerquist and Michael W Howard. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012. Xviii+291pp, $105.00.
ISBN: 978-1137006592
.
Both of these books examine the Alaska model -- the combination of a publicly held asset fund financed by income from publicly held assets and known as the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF), and the dividend paid from that fund to all citizens of the state, called the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). Part I of the first book discusses the history and impact of the model, while Part II considers its ethical justification. The second book investigates the applicability of the Alaska model to a variety of economies, including those without vast resource wealth, asks why most of the sovereign wealth funds (SWF) around the world do not pay dividends, and ends with a proposal for an expansion of the Alaska model. Most of the articles in these two books were presented at the 2011 Basic Income Guarantee Congress, held in conjunction with the Eastern Economic Association, or at the Conference entitled "Exporting the Alaska Model," held at the University of Alaska in Anchorage that same year.
The attraction of the Alaska model is simple: every year since 1982, every child and adult in the state has received an unconditional payment. The dividends are typically on the order of US$1,000 - $1,500, although 2008 was a bonanza year in which each state resident received $3,269. The editors of these books were initially attracted to the Alaska model because they see it as an application of the idea of Basic Income (BI), an idea that has occupied Karl Widerquist for many years, and more recently Michael Howard. The very idea of BI is controversial. The Alaska model, by contrast, can be characterized as an application of BI that continues year after year as one of the most popular government programs in the country.
In Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend , Cliff Groh and Gregg Erickson recount the storied beginnings of the APF and PFD (Chapter 2), describe...