Comment by jamestimmins

There's an interesting precedent to this: Biblical Israel. Individuals/families within tribes received an allotment of land, which they were free to trade or sell over time. But every X number of years, the land would revert back to the family of the original owners. The idea here was that everyone had a stake, with an upper bound on how long they could lose that steak. It also set an upper bound on the corresponding wealth inequality that resulted directly from the land.

Seems like there's two primary considerations when looking at a concept such as this. The first is how to implement within our current political climate. The second is how it aligns incentives moving forwards. The first is an obvious challenge, so let's assume for the moment that it is solved, and only worry about the second.

Ideally we want incentives aligned in such a manner that citizens:

1) focus on long term health over short term benefits. It may be tempting for people to reject immigrants because of the perceived cost of a bigger denominator, without appreciating the long term numerator upside.

2) recognize that all benefit from the success of everyone. Put differently, suddenly I care about the state of the individual with limited opportunities on the other side of the country, because it could impact my own wallet in future years.

3) don't somehow become more disenfranchised or powerless through a secondary market of these "shares".

I think it's wise not to ascribe direct political purpose to the various shares. It would be tempting to try to address power inequality directly via share ownership, but that seems misguided.

I assume there's many more incentive issues to consider, but that's just an initial list. I don't know what the answer is to any of these, but if I were to do a full analysis, I would continue to ask questions about what we wanted to incentivize, and what we wanted to de-incentivize. Then whether this actually addresses/mitigates those considerations in a realistic manner.