Before, not After

Recently I shared with you my rant on the phenomenal and dangerous wealth gap in this country. Fortunately, and not surprisingly, others, including academics and journalists, are also troubled by this situation, and some have ideas of ways we might actually DO something about it.

Often the first thing that comes to mind is TAX the RICH! There is both appeal and potential there. Taxes are a way to Redistribute wealth in a society. But there is another concept that I came across that asks us to think earlier in the process. Look to the source of some of the great wealth and seek to keep it from all flowing to one pocket in the first place. This is Predistribution.

One scholar distinguishes between the two this way “If redistribution is about redistributing the rewards of growth after the fact, predistribution is about making sure the rewards of growth are well-distributed before government taxes and provides benefits.” [Hacker, noted below.]

Some types of wealth can be seen as coming from assets that are not individually owned. One example might be natural resources on public land. The state of Alaska addressed this in the creation of the Alaska Permanent Fund in 1976, which takes at least 25% of the royalties from these oil, gas and minerals and puts them in a sovereign wealth fund. Since 1982, every eligible Alaska resident has gotten a payment from this fund each fall. It can be done.

Today, many are belatedly acknowledging that AI systems have been built upon, generally without compensation or recognition of any kind, the knowledge, skill, language, creativity, performance and more of thousands of authors, scientists, actors and others. This has generated lawsuits, but all will never be compensated. Also, the communities hosting these sites should benefit, not be burdened by, utility costs, water usage, traffic etc. Consequently, it is easy to argue that the benefits and financial rewards of AI should not go solely to the tech firms. They should be broadly shared. Why not create a sovereign

wealth fund to predistribute some of the phenomenal gains of these systems that are invading everything we do.

Now this will never happen out of the goodness of a techno-billionaire’s heart, so how could it happen? It will not be easy, because, as has been noted “we need a wholesale shift in how the economy works.” [Foroohar, cited below]

I began thinking about this this summer after two fascinating discussions on “On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti.” [a production of WBUR and heard in the Twin Cities on KNOW 91.1] The first show that I heard was a conversation with Political Science Professor Jacob Hacker, of Yale University on August 4, 2026.

As so often happens, even with interesting topics, I am in and out of the room with the radio, so I don’t hear all of a program. When I followed the link above to try to fill in some gaps, I also discovered an earlier program on a related economic topic, a conversation with two women who write about finance and the economy, Rana Foroohar and Michele Singletary.

If you are troubled by the skewing of wealth, and the consequent skewing of power, not just the skewing of the comforts of life, I encourage you to listen to these two conversations (or read the transcripts). Another interesting discussion of how to deal with the gains from AI can be read in a New York Times piece from August 16, 2026 “With AI Riches at Stake, Pressures Mount to Share the Wealth” by Tony Romm. Find what you connect with. These would be big changes, but they merit our effort to understand them. No one likes to give up money or power once grasped. We need to short-circuit excess, unfair gains. As Rana Foroohar says “We can either allow 1% of the population to take all the gains, or we can

say this is almost like a… natural resource.”

Can we, as a nation, find ways to make growth benefit the masses not the few? Can we (p)redivide the pie?