Risk and the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend

Abstract

If people expect to receive resource rents on a periodic basis, they may come to regard this as, in part, a kind of income insurance, given the many threats to people’s incomes posed by the capitalist marketplace. Whether or not people actually do regard resource rents as income insurance, in this paper I will regard them as such. This is simply because resource rents do function to help meet people’s economic wants and needs and, therefore, can help them weather the threats to economic security that come with living within a capitalist system.