In the UK we already have Child Benefit, which functions as a universal benefit for children. We have already discussed the UK's NHS: a universal, unconditional, nonwithdrawable and highly efficient public service. In this chapter I shall discuss the social dividend (a form of Citizen's Basic Income) distributed in Alaska, Citizen's Basic Income pilot projects conducted in Namibia and India, Iran's cash benefit, and a number of other experiments.

Alaska

Since 1977 the State of Alaska has been receiving royalties from oil extraction on state-owned land at Prudhoe Bay, and about 20% of the royalties have been saved in the Alaska Permanent Fund. When the fund was established in 1976, the state legislature decided that the principal of the fund should accumulate, so that future generations could benefit from what was bound to be a temporary income stream. No decision was made about how income from the fund's investments should be used, except that sufficient was to be added to the capital to inflationproof the fund. When in 1979 Governor Jay Hammond proposed that some of the surplus interest might be distributed to Alaska's citizens, the idea was warmly received. The initial proposal was that the dividend received by each citizen should be proportional to the number of years that they had lived there, but a legal challenge on the basis that this would discriminate against recent arrivals succeeded, and the outcome was an equal annual payment to every citizen of Alaska who had lived in the state for at least a year. In 2017 the Alaska Permanent Fund had a total value of $58.9 bn, and the annual dividend paid in 2016 was $1,022 to each eligible resident. The world had its first Citizen's Basic Income: although in some ways it has not behaved like one because the payments are made annually, so the income does not function as a regular income, and the amount fluctuates with the profits generated by the Permanent Fund, meaning that the dividend cannot be relied upon to provide a firm income floor.

When he had been Mayor of Bristol Bay Borough, Hammond had tried unsuccessfully to establish a social dividend on the basis of fishing revenues.