New Atlantic column: Redistribution in the age of robots

I have a new Atlantic column, about how to prevent extreme inequality after most human tasks are replaced by automation. Excerpts:

For most of modern history, inequality has been a manageable problem. The reason is that no matter how unequal things get, most people are born with something valuable: the ability to work, to learn, and to earn money. In economist-ese, people are born with an "endowment of human capital."... 

But in the past ten years, something has changed. Labor's share of income has steadily declined, falling by several percentage points since 2000. It now sits at around 60% or lower. The fall of labor income, and the rise of capital income, has contributed to America's growing inequality... 

The big question is: What do we do if and when our old mechanisms for coping with inequality break down?..A society with cheap robot labor would be an incredibly prosperous one, but we will need to find some way for the vast majority of human beings to share in that prosperity, or we risk the kinds of dystopian outcomes that now exist only in science fiction. 

How do we fairly distribute income and wealth in the age of the robots?... 

First of all, it should be easier for the common people to own their own capital - their own private army of robots. That will mean making "small business owner" a much more common occupation than it is today... 

More families would benefit from owning stock in big companies...All large firms should be given incentives to list publicly. This will definitely mean reforming regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley that make it risky and difficult to go public; it may also mean tax incentives... 

And then there are more extreme measures...What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?...This portfolio of capital ownership would act as an insurance policy for each human worker; if technological improvements reduced the value of that person's labor, he or she would reap compensating benefits through increased dividends and capital gains. This would essentially be like the kind of socialist land reforms proposed in highly unequal Latin American countries, only redistributing stock instead of land.

Read the rest here!