Every idea carries the fingerprints of a thousand forgotten minds.
Because when you trace the ancestry of any idea, it doesn’t end with the latest startup founder in a hoodie. It goes back through Isaac Newton’s calculus, (and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s competing calculus), through the Greeks, the scribes, the blacksmiths, the anonymous toolmaker who first picked up a stick and realised it could reach the fruit. Every engineer, coder, and scientist stands on those shoulders – not metaphorically, but materially. The sum of that accumulated know-how is civilisation.
So why do we pretend it’s all private property the moment someone adds the latest software update?
A Universal Basic Income (UBI) has usually been framed as an act of mercy or social stabilisation. But there’s another way to see it: not as welfare, but as a dividend on collective intellectual equity. The great compounding stock of humanity’s knowledge – the equations, the discoveries, the languages, the inventions – is the original shared capital.
Every patent, every textbook, every bridge, every app – they all rest on an invisible foundation of unpaid genius. If that foundation belongs to anyone, it belongs to everyone equally.
This isn’t socialism in the “state-owns-your-factory” sense. It’s property rights done properly – the idea that if you build a fortune on common ground, you owe rent to the commons. A UBI funded by this principle isn’t charity; it’s the rightful yield of civilisation’s collective investment portfolio.
No wealth is ever created in isolation. Even the lone inventor is crowded by ghosts – generations of thinkers whispering through equations and tools and techniques refined long before their birth. The “individual genius” is the tip of an iceberg whose base is buried under hundreds of thousands of years of human curiosity and experiment.
To acknowledge that is not to punish innovation – it is to finally recognise the inheritance we all share.
Call it Socialism Done Right (This Time) – the kind that doesn’t seize the means of production, but recognises the means of cognition.
The rediscovery of ownership – not of things, but of everything we know.
The True Commons
Let’s call this pile what it is – the cumulative knowledge of humanity. It is not owned by the state, nor by the market. It is the invisible architecture of civilisation.
Every piece of wealth produced today is an extraction from that shared deposit. Without it, there would be no engineers, no equations, no electricity, no Wi-Fi, and no Silicon Valley billionaires tweeting about meritocracy.
If you were born yesterday, you could not rebuild an iPhone by yourself even with a thousand years and all the parts. The complexity of modern life is not human-scale – it’s species-scale.
So when someone creates something “new,” they are, in reality, remixing the old. They are the latest instrument in a very long symphony.
A Dividend on Civilisation
Imagine treating that accumulated knowledge not as a vague heritage, but as shared equity.
When a corporation builds a product using the freely available knowledge of humanity – everything from calculus to the combustion engine – it should pay a small dividend to those who collectively own that intellectual capital: everyone.
This is not a tax, nor a redistribution scheme. It’s a return on inherited investment. Every human is a tenant in common of civilisation’s intellectual estate.
Just as you might own shares in a company and receive dividends when it profits, you are a shareholder in the enterprise of Homo sapiens.
A Universal Basic Income, in this view, is simply the annual dividend on our shared intellectual property.
Intellectual Property Rights – Extended
We already have a strong tradition of property rights. Patents protect inventors. Copyrights protect authors. Trademarks protect brands.
But what protects everyone else – the billions of contributors whose collective inventions make modern invention possible?
When Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” he wasn’t being modest. He was stating a fact. Without those giants, there is no sight at all.
The calculus he co-discovered underpins almost everything from rocket trajectories to microchips to medicine. That intellectual infrastructure, once patented by none and owned by all, now fuels fortunes beyond imagining.
If those fortunes are built on the uncredited labour of the past, shouldn’t a small portion of the yield return to the collective source?
Not as punishment, but as respect for property rights.
Respecting Property, Properly
This is where the usual arguments fall apart. Critics hear “universal income” and think socialism – the grey, bureaucratic kind where the state seizes the means of production. But that’s not what’s being proposed here.
In Socialism Done Right, nobody touches your factory. Nobody confiscates your code. You keep your business, your trade, your productivity.
What changes is the moral accounting of innovation. If your product draws on the collective intellectual estate of humanity – and all of them do – then you acknowledge that inheritance by paying a small royalty back into the common pool.
It’s capitalism with a conscience.
We already pay royalties for copyrighted songs, licensed software, and patented molecules. Why not pay a micro-royalty to the collective library of civilisation – the shared knowledge that makes all the rest possible?
After all, every modern entrepreneur owes more to Pythagoras, Faraday, and Turing than to their venture capitalist.
Not State Ownership – Stewardship
The wealth generated through trade and production remains private. The means of production stay in private hands.
What’s shared is the underlying means of cognition.
The public pool isn’t controlled by the state but administered transparently, with clear principles: only non-proprietary knowledge – ideas already in the public domain – counts toward the common inheritance. Anything still protected by patent or copyright remains private until it expires.
In effect, we formalise what already exists: the free, global use of open knowledge. We simply ensure that civilisation pays itself for the privilege.
The Long Memory of the Species
No generation starts from zero. The tools of thought, language, and science are gifts passed forward. They were never ours to hoard.
We inherit this compound interest of human ingenuity – hundreds of thousands of years of trial, error, and imagination – and we spend it freely.
Every time we design a bridge, code a program, cure a disease, or publish a poem, we are cashing cheques written by our ancestors.
And yet, we rarely pay dividends back into that account.
A UBI tied to the collective knowledge fund would not be welfare – it would be the rightful income of co-ownership. Each citizen would receive their annual return as a member of humanity’s grandest partnership: civilisation itself.
The End of False Ownership
Private property is a cornerstone of progress. But so is honesty. And it is dishonest to pretend that wealth arises in isolation – that genius is born fully formed, rather than shaped by the murmurs of millennia.
Socialism Done Right does not confiscate your earnings. It merely completes the ledger. It acknowledges that if you stand on the shoulders of giants, you owe them a share – even if those giants are long dead.
It is not redistribution. It is restitution.
The Civilisation Dividend
Picture a world where your income arrives not as charity from the state, but as your rightful return from civilisation’s collective endowment.
Every birth certificate doubles as a share certificate. Every innovation feeds the common pool. Every citizen earns from the slow, steady growth of humanity’s accumulated genius.
A civilisation that values knowledge this way doesn’t suppress innovation – it supercharges it. Because once everyone owns a slice of progress, everyone has a stake in pushing it forward.
We’ve already built socialism’s machinery – public roads, public schools, public science. What we’ve never built is a public accounting for the intellectual wealth that makes all of it work.
This time, socialism doesn’t seize. It pays.
This time, equality isn’t forced. It’s earned – by everyone who ever thought, built, taught, or learned.
This time, the revolution is simply recognising the obvious: that civilisation is a joint venture, and we’re all shareholders.
Marx Hears the News
Karl Marx leans back in his chair, eyes fixed on the glowing tablet. His beard trembles with a chuckle that starts low and grows into something like delight.
“So,” he murmurs, “they’ve done it. They’ve turned labour into light.”
He scrolls with a finger that once inked fury and theory, now tracing the luminous abstraction before him. Ownership, not of factories, but of thought itself – capital measured not in machines, but in memory.
He smiles. “At last, surplus value with manners.”
For the first time in centuries, the old revolutionary looks at an idea that does not need a barricade. It only needs a dividend.
And somewhere between the steam engine and the algorithm, Karl Marx finally nods in approval – not of socialism, but of civilisation catching up.
The Exponential Dividend
And that brings us to the future value of the commons – the dividend that grows as fast as our understanding itself.
The beauty of this idea is that the pool itself is not static. Humanity’s shared intellectual property is compounding at an exponential rate.
Every new discovery doesn’t just add to the sum – it multiplies the possibilities. Knowledge begets knowledge. Each invention opens doors to ten more. Each algorithm births a thousand offspring. Every mind that connects adds new synapses to civilisation’s collective brain.
So while the first dividends from this shared inheritance might be modest – a few dollars a day, perhaps enough for bread and bandwidth – the yield will not stay modest for long. The value of the common pool grows faster than any private fortune because it is not constrained by ownership. It grows by use.
Every new tool accelerates the next. Every new insight accelerates the rate of insight itself. And unlike natural resources, the well of human ingenuity deepens the more we draw from it.
A civilisation that rewards everyone for the growth of shared knowledge isn’t just fair – it’s self-reinforcing. The more we learn, the more we earn. The more we teach, the richer we all become.
Give it a decade, and the daily dividend will not be a token gesture. It will be a living wage – paid not by the state, nor by charity, but by the ever-expanding equity of human thought.
This is the compounding miracle we’ve been missing: the exponential dividend of civilisation itself.
Adam Smith Hears the News
Adam Smith adjusts his spectacles, eyes narrowing at the soft glow of the tablet. The room is quiet but for the faint hum of ideas made visible.
“Fascinating,” he murmurs, fingertips resting on the glass. “The invisible hand, now illuminated.”
He scrolls, seeing trade without borders, cooperation without coercion, and profit drawn not from labour alone, but from knowledge itself – the compounding interest of civilisation.
A slow smile forms. “They’ve priced virtue correctly at last.”
The father of capitalism leans back, thoughtful. Markets have not vanished; they have matured. Value is still born from self-interest – yet enriched by the recognition that no self stands alone.
And somewhere between the quill and the quantum, Adam Smith nods – not at the triumph of the market, but at the long-delayed balance of its books.
The Common Code
Some of the most powerful forms of shared knowledge are so familiar we barely notice them. Language, for example, is not owned by anyone. It is a communal invention – the first open-source software. Every sentence we speak runs on code written by countless ancestors, refined across millennia of trial, trade, and poetry.
Money, too, is a shared idea – a collective hallucination that only works because we all believe in it together. And democracy, though often messy, remains our most profound act of shared cognition: a social algorithm for distributing power through conversation.
These systems are not natural laws; they are inherited agreements. We all use them, modify them, and pass them forward. They are civilisation’s core intellectual property, and every other innovation is built upon them.
The Accelerating Return
Futurist Ray Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns – the idea that the rate of progress itself is accelerating. Each generation advances faster than the one before because each has more knowledge to build on. The curve of understanding is not linear; it’s exponential.
That means our collective dividend is compounding not just in value, but in velocity. Each discovery feeds the next. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing are not isolated breakthroughs; they are accelerants poured onto the fire of accumulated knowledge.
The result is that our shared intellectual capital is growing at a pace unprecedented in history. The dividend from this growth – modest at first – will rise in step with our accelerating understanding. What begins as a daily trickle will soon become a flood.
Standing Taller Still
If we are already standing on the shoulders of giants, then with every generation the view grows wider. What we once borrowed as sparks of insight, we now inherit as a blazing library – and that library is writing itself faster than we can read.
The dividend of civilisation is not a fixed sum; it is a living return, compounding with every discovery. The calculus that once took centuries to refine is now replicated in milliseconds by machines trained on all our past achievements. Each idea, once born, becomes an ancestor of ten thousand more.
And so the circle closes. The first human who shaped a stone tool unknowingly bought us our first share in the grand cooperative of thought. Each of us still holds that share today. Our collective wealth of understanding is now growing at a rate that would make even the boldest trader blush.
The miracle is that, for once, the rising tide does not have to drown anyone. It can lift us all.
The dividend will grow – quietly, inexorably – as the sum of what we know grows. From a few coins a day to hundreds, perhaps thousands, as the shared inheritance of knowledge compounds beyond measure.
All we must do is remember whose shoulders we stand on – and stand taller still.
A Reference Implementation
What follows is not a blueprint, nor the pinnacle of best practice – only a simple reference model, the kind a civilisation might sketch on the back of an envelope when imagining what comes next.
Suppose a nation chooses to recognise the shared intellectual wealth that underpins its prosperity. Instead of collecting royalties or policing ideas, it links the civilisation dividend directly to something already measured: the country’s Gross Domestic Product.
Each year, a small fixed percentage of GDP – a fraction of the value created through the nation’s collective knowledge, labour, and ingenuity – is issued as new currency. This new money is not printed in secret, nor extracted through taxation. It is created transparently and distributed evenly to all citizens and permanent residents as the annual civilisation dividend.
This issuance does not debase the currency, because it reflects new wealth rather than diluting old wealth. The capitalisation of the currency increases, yes – but only in proportion to the real economic value that knowledge has generated. The supply grows because civilisation has grown.
In this way, the dividend expresses a simple truth: when a society becomes smarter, everyone becomes richer.
No royalties need be collected. No intellectual police need patrol the commons. The dividend flows automatically from the measured growth of the nation itself.
To prevent abuse, the mechanism could be written into the constitution – its percentage fixed, its distribution equal, its purpose beyond the reach of political winds. A government could not suspend it, inflate it for favour, or weaponise it for coercion. It would stand as a structural acknowledgment of something deeper than policy: that prosperity is a team sport played across generations.
A country adopting such a model would not merely redistribute wealth – it would recognise the wellspring from which wealth arises. It would align its currency with its civilisation, tying value to understanding, and dividends to the accelerating growth of shared knowledge.
A simple implementation, imperfect by design, but enough to show that the idea is not only possible – it is inevitable.
Worked Example: United States
To see how the model might look in practice, imagine it applied to the United States.
- Nominal GDP: approximately US $29 trillion
- Population: approximately 345 million citizens and permanent residents
- Dividend allocation: 10 % of GDP
Ten percent of US $29 trillion is US $2.9 trillion.
Divided evenly among 345 million people, this equals roughly US $8,400 per person per year – about US $160 per week.
That payment is not welfare and it is not debt.
It represents new money, issued to reflect new wealth – the real increase in productive knowledge and capacity captured within GDP.
Because the issuance mirrors genuine growth in national value, it does not debase the currency nor add to the national debt. No borrowing occurs, no interest accumulates, and no future generation is burdened. The dividend simply expands the money supply in line with the civilisation that earned it.
This is not a government hand-out, but a structural recognition: that each citizen is a co-owner of the intellectual and cultural capital that underlies their nation’s economy. As the country grows smarter and more capable, its people share directly in the return on that collective intelligence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q 1: Doesn’t issuing new currency debase the currency and cause inflation?
A: Not if the issuance corresponds to real growth in the economy’s productive knowledge-capital. Because the dividend is tied to the country’s GDP (which reflects the value created by the shared intellectual and material stock), the money supply grows in step with real wealth. The dividend is not simply a handout: it’s a payment from the new value created by civilisation. Currency isn’t diluted: value is expanded.
Q 2: How do you measure the share of GDP that comes from shared knowledge?
A: In this simplified model we don’t separately calculate “knowledge output.” Instead, we assume that the economy as a whole rests on accumulated knowledge, so a fixed small percentage of GDP is used. Over time, more refined metrics (R&D, human-capital indices, open‐knowledge contributions) could calibrate the rate. But the strength of the model is its transparency and simplicity – tied to an existing national statistic (GDP).
Q 3: If corporations benefit from the common pool of knowledge, why isn’t there a royalty system instead?
A: A royalty system introduces complexity: identifying beneficiaries, enforcing payments, and tracking usage. The alternative presented here is simpler: by expanding issuance of currency tied to GDP and distributing evenly to people, the system honours the commons without direct intervention in corporate payments. It flips the burden: instead of companies paying, the system pays people. The effect is similar (a return on civilisation’s co-owned intellectual estate) with far fewer transaction costs.
Q 4: Does this model discourage private innovation or production?
A: No. Innovation remains rewarded. Private production remains in private hands. What changes is the moral accounting of innovation: those producing new value using the common pool recognise the commons indirectly through the dividend mechanism. So individuals and firms still profit from new inventions, markets still operate, but the dividend ensures the society that enabled that innovation also benefits.
Q 5: Could this be abused by the state – e.g., printed excessively or politicised?
A: That risk is real. Hence the recommendation: embed the dividend mechanism in constitutional or statutory law, fix the rate (or a ceiling), ensure distribution is automatic and equal, and ensure transparency. Because the issuance is not discretionary spending but a structural flow to individuals, the political risk is reduced and the system is less vulnerable to manipulation for short-term gains.
From Dividend to Destiny
Civilisation has always paid its dividends – only, until now, they have been hidden. They’ve flowed through roads and books and schools and satellites, enriching everyone invisibly while rewarding only a few visibly.
But the story of wealth has never been about hoarding; it’s been about remembering. Each tool, each theory, each fragment of understanding was a down payment on the next age. We are its beneficiaries.
The civilisation dividend simply brings that truth into the light. It does not rewrite economics – it fulfils it. It restores the feedback loop between human progress and human prosperity.
When a society grows wiser, its people should grow freer.
When knowledge expands, so should dignity.
A future built on that principle would not be utopian. It would simply be honest.
For the first time in history, civilisation would see itself as what it truly is – a partnership across generations, bound not by coercion or ideology, but by contribution.
And perhaps, centuries from now, someone will look back and say:
This was the moment when we stopped asking who owns the present – and remembered that we are all heirs to the past.