AI Will Bring Universal High Income. To Two Countries.

Qatar pays you for being born Qatari. Everyone else does the work.

The application runs to a short list of conditions. The applicant must be a newly married man from the emirate of Abu Dhabi. He must already have a housing request on file with the state, whether for a grant, a plot of land or a subsidized loan. Neither he nor his wife may be drawing a housing allowance from anywhere else. If he qualifies, the government helps pay his rent, up to 75,000 dirhams, roughly $20,000, scaled to his income [1]. One more condition does most of the work. The bride must be Emirati too, with marriages to foreigners considered case by case as humanitarian exceptions [2].

In May 2025, one country over in Riyadh, Elon Musk told the US-Saudi Investment Forum that humanoid robots would one day number in the tens of billions and that the result would be a “universal high income,” an economy so productive that goods and services would be within everyone’s reach [3]. He has been making the same promise since at least 2023, when he told a British summit on AI safety, “We won’t have universal basic income. We’ll have universal high income” [4].

He was running two promises together. One is about prices. If robots and models drive down the cost of making things, goods and services get cheaper for anyone who can buy them, wherever they live, and every paycheck stretches further. The other is about income in the stricter sense: cash, or an enforceable claim on what the machines earn, paid to people whether or not they work. Cheaper prices can cross borders on their own. An income has to be paid by someone to someone, which means somebody keeps a list of who counts.

One region of the world has run the income version for decades. The Gulf monarchies pay their citizens out of wealth the citizens did not produce: houses, land, weddings, university abroad, public-sector jobs that double as a distribution channel. Their arrangement has rules. The money goes to members and only to members. Someone else does the work. And the largest Gulf state has learned the hard way that a payment you receive because you belong is weaker than one you receive because you are needed, or one a court will make someone pay. If universal high income arrives anywhere, it is likely to arrive in the two countries that build frontier AI, and even there only through a claim that someone still has to create.

What the Passport Buys

Qatar is the purest version. Of roughly 3.2 million people living there, about 330,000 are citizens, roughly one resident in ten, and nearly everyone else is a foreign worker [5]. Across the six Gulf monarchies, foreign workers make up more than half of 62 million residents [6]. Membership is inherited. Qatari nationality passes to anyone born to a Qatari father, in Qatar or abroad [7], while a foreigner can be naturalized only by decree of the emir and only after at least 25 years of residence [8]. The citizens hold the claim on the oil and gas revenue. The foreigners build the towers, staff the hospitals, clean the houses and drive the trucks, and most of them leave when the contract ends.

The money often reaches citizens in a form presented less as a welfare check than as a royal gift. In May 2026 the crown prince of Abu Dhabi approved a housing package worth 1.54 billion dirhams for 1,074 citizens, announced “under the directives” of the president and timed to land before the Eid al-Adha holiday. It was the emirate’s second such package of the year, and its housing authority counts more than 133,000 benefits delivered since it was founded, worth over 182 billion dirhams [9].

The presentation does as much work as the size. A housing program can rest on detailed administrative rules and still be announced, timed and experienced as the ruler’s generosity, which teaches citizens where the money comes from. A statutory pension that a court will enforce teaches a different lesson. Political economists have described the Gulf bargain for forty years under the name of the rentier state [10]. A government that lives on resource income does not need to tax its citizens, so it does not need to bargain with them. The usual summary turns the American revolutionary slogan around: no taxation, so no representation.

Three conditions keep the arrangement stable. The citizen pool has to be small relative to the rent. The ruler has to own the rent, because the oil sits under state land and the revenue reaches the state before it reaches anyone else. And the citizens’ consent has to be cheap, because no budget depends on their taxes or their labor. Qatar has all three. Saudi Arabia, it turned out, could not keep the first.

The Soldiers Kept Their Bonuses

Saudi Arabia ran the same bargain at a far larger scale, with a citizen population dozens of times the size of Qatar’s drawing on one oil economy. It held while the price held. After oil collapsed in mid-2014, the kingdom ran a budget deficit of nearly $100 billion, and in September 2016 the cabinet cut government pay. Ministers lost 20 percent of their salaries. Overtime bonuses were capped, annual leave was limited, and housing and car allowances for members of the appointed Shura Council were trimmed. One group was spared. Troops fighting on the southern border and in the Yemen campaign kept their benefits [11].

When the money ran short, the payments that held were the ones going to people the state could not do without, whether to fight a war or to keep the regime secure. The rest turned out to be adjustable.

Citizens complained, and for a while the complaints worked. The monthly allowance of 1,000 riyals paid to state workers from 2018 was itself a response to public anger over the earlier cuts [12]. In May 2020, with oil prices crashing again, the government suspended it and tripled the value-added tax, from 5 percent to 15 [13]. The citizen of a rentier state has a voice, the voice of a valued customer, which carries weight when the seller can afford to listen and loses it when the seller cannot. What he lacks is the leverage of someone the system cannot run without. In 2016 the soldier had that leverage. The minister did not.

Riyadh Puts a Job Under the Stipend

After the cuts, Riyadh leaned harder on an older policy. Saudization, the push to make private companies hire Saudi nationals into jobs long filled by foreigners, dates to the mid-1970s [14], and its modern quota system, Nitaqat, to 2011 [15]. Under the Vision 2030 plan unveiled in 2016 [16], the quotas have pushed steadily into skilled work, and in mid-2026 the labor ministry extended a 30 percent quota to 46 engineering professions [17]. Unemployment among Saudi citizens fell to 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026, while their participation rate slipped to 49 percent [18], so the numbers are mixed.

A job held because a quota requires it is still protected by politics rather than by need. Riyadh appears to be betting that the protection turns into need over time, as citizens build the skills that make them hard to replace. Other causes are at work too, from a young population to an economy that needs a second leg, but the policy fits what the cuts showed. Riyadh is keeping the stipend and trying to put a job underneath it.

Two Countries Hold the Wells

Musk’s abundance is meant to be global, but the machines that would produce it are concentrated. Stanford’s AI Index counts 59 notable AI models released in 2025 from the United States and 35 from China, far ahead of any other country [19]. The United States alone hosts 5,427 data centers, more than ten times as many as any other country [20]. If frontier intelligence becomes the oil of the coming economy, two countries hold most of the wells.

Laid over that map, the Gulf model assigns the roles quickly: Americans and Chinese as citizens, everyone else as the guest workforce, paying the subscription and usage fees that fund a dividend. The assignment skips a step. Qatar’s gas revenue reaches the Qatari state first. Frontier AI revenue reaches a few companies first, and three different claims can sit on top of it. Shareholders hold the first, a claim open to anyone with savings, a pension fund or a public fund that buys the stock, whatever their passport. Employees hold the second: the researchers, chip designers and data-center builders the companies cannot yet do without, a claim that lasts as long as the skill stays scarce. Citizens hold the third only if a government taxes the revenue or takes a share of the companies and pays it out. Only the third claim resembles the Gulf, and in the United States it does not yet exist.

Why two countries, and not more? A government can pay a dividend out of AI only if it can reach the money, and the easiest reach is a tax on companies that sit inside its borders and book their profits there. Countries without frontier labs have other routes. They can tax the extra profits and wages their own firms earn by using the models, but that is ordinary income, rising and falling with how competitive those firms stay, and it pays people for working. They can buy a share of the rent by owning the companies’ stock through a public fund, but that route is open mainly to countries already rich in capital, which is to say Norway and the Gulf monarchies themselves. On present evidence, a payment that arrives whether or not anyone works has two natural homes, a handful of capital-rich buyers, and no obvious third route.

China shows what reaching the rent can look like without a right attached. In 2021, while regulators were fining Alibaba $2.8 billion and pressing the whole sector, Alibaba pledged 100 billion yuan to President Xi Jinping’s “common prosperity” campaign, and Tencent doubled its own social pledge to the same amount [21]. A state steered company surplus toward social spending through a political campaign, by pledge rather than by entitlement.

The state also sits inside the companies. Since 2021, state-backed entities have taken 1 percent stakes, known as golden shares, in domestic units of ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, in ByteDance’s case with a seat on the board [22]. The stakes are tiny, and what they buy is oversight. And China already keeps a list. Its household registration, the hukou, ties each citizen to a home locality, usually inherited from the parents, and has long decided where a person can claim schooling, health care and a pension. In May 2026 the State Council told local governments to start serving people where they live instead, and left them the bill [23]. If a Chinese AI dividend comes, these precedents suggest one plausible form: large, real, adjustable, and paid to whoever is on the right list.

None of this condemns the rest of the world to poverty. A Vietnamese factory running on a foreign model can earn higher profits, pay higher wages and owe more tax, and a country that pays foreign providers may still come out well ahead. Foreign ownership of the model is not foreign ownership of everything the model helps produce. The periphery’s exposure is narrower and harder to escape. It depends on an input whose price and terms are set abroad, and when those terms change it bargains as a customer rather than as an owner. That exposure bites hardest for whatever machines cannot cheapen: land, housing in crowded cities, and electricity once data centers are bidding for it.

Oil Fields, Suppliers and Guest Workers

The rest of the world will not occupy one position. In the Gulf itself the foreign workforce runs from Western bankers to South Asian laborers, and their bargaining power differs enormously. The same sorting is likely at world scale, and what decides a country’s place is less its size than what it sells.

Countries holding physical scarcity have leverage the core cannot write its way around. Indonesia banned exports of raw nickel ore in 2020 to force processing onto its own soil. The ban drew a wave of smelter investment, and by one industry estimate the country now holds more than 60 percent of the world nickel market [24]. The leverage came with a catch: Chinese firms controlled about three-quarters of the smelting capacity as of 2023 [25], so part of the gain flowed back to a core country. A country that has something the machines physically need can set terms, though who inside the country gets paid is a political decision the geology does not make. The Gulf states, sitting on cheap energy, are building data centers for the same reason. In the new economy they are positioned to play their old role, the oil field, and oil fields get paid.

The countries that make the hardware sit higher still. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the Netherlands do not hold the frontier models, but the models cannot be built without what those countries make. A supplier the core cannot replace quickly is in a stronger position than a citizen collecting a dividend, because a supplier is needed. The position belongs first to the firms that hold it, and to the country only as far as its government can tax, regulate or license them.

The most exposed countries are the ones that grew by selling educated labor cheaply: software outsourcing, call centers, back-office processing, the remote work rich-country firms bought because it cost less than doing it at home. What they sold sits close to what frontier models now sell. Those countries risk losing their product while keeping their population, which is the guest worker’s position without the guest worker’s paycheck.

Two Cores, Two Appetites

The two core countries are not the same kind of buyer. China imported $207.4 billion in farm products in 2025 [26] and buys about 80 percent of the soybeans it consumes from abroad [27]. It also imports most of the oil it burns. A core country that needs the periphery’s food and energy has to keep bargaining with it, through long contracts, ports, loans and a standing presence.

The United States has been a net exporter of energy in every year since 2019 [28], and it grows more grain than it eats. It does need metals and minerals it cannot dig at home, and that is where the rest of the world keeps leverage over Washington. A core that needs little from you beyond your subscription fee has less reason to negotiate than one that needs your harvest. For a country deciding which core to lean on, the hungrier partner may be the safer one, provided the country is hard to replace and has other buyers to turn to. Dependence gives a core a reason to keep talking. It can also give it a reason to lean on the supplier, or to buy the supplier out.

If Intelligence Gets Cheap

The whole picture depends on intelligence staying scarce, and it may not. The same Stanford report finds the performance gap between the best American and Chinese models effectively closed, at 2.7 percent as of March 2026 [29]. For the rest of the world, the gap that counts is the one between closed and open models. It nearly closed in 2024 and then widened again in 2025, to about 3 percent [30]. If open models catch up and stay caught up, any country can run near-frontier intelligence for the price of the chips and the power, and the rent drains out of the models and into energy and silicon. The winners then are whoever holds electricity and fabrication plants, and the two-country dividend thins out.

Norway offers a different ending, built on a device rather than a virtue. The state’s entire net cash flow from petroleum goes into a fund, and a fiscal guideline ties spending from it to the fund’s expected real return, now estimated at 3 percent a year [31]. Transfers from the fund cover about 27 percent of the 2026 central government budget [32]. The rent is owned before it is saved, saved before it is spent, and spent under a published rule that every government has to defend in parliament. That is what a Gulf gift lacks: a rule that binds the payer. The United States has the institutions to write such a rule and has not written one. Until it does, the American version of universal high income is a rising stock market and cheaper software, distributed by ownership and consumption rather than by birth. The ownership half is narrow: on the Federal Reserve’s measure, the richest tenth of American households holds about 87 percent of the corporate stock and mutual fund shares that households own [33]. That may keep America from becoming Qatar. It may also leave Americans with Qatar’s place in the world and none of Qatar’s grants.

Hans Singer and Raúl Prebisch argued in 1950 that countries exporting raw commodities tend to lose ground over time against countries exporting manufactures [34]. That pattern held in a world where industrial buyers had alternatives. A core racing to build compute may have fewer alternatives to the nickel, power and land it needs than the old industrial core had. Fewer alternatives raise the price of an input. They do not, by themselves, raise the income of the people who live near it.

Who May Apply

Musk may be right that the machines will make enough for everyone. The Gulf’s experience bears on something else: what keeps a payment coming once the money exists. The ruler’s gift lasted as long as his budget, which Saudi state employees found out in 2016 and again in 2020. Need protected the soldiers, because the war could not be fought without them. Norway’s rule holds even for people its economy can do without, because every government has to defend it in parliament.

For what the machines earn, none of that has been written. The companies keep shareholder registers and payrolls. The governments that could tax them have not said what a citizen is owed, and the governments outside the two countries have not been asked. The Abu Dhabi form starts with who may apply. A form for universal high income, if anyone drafts one, will start there too.

Notes

[1] Abu Dhabi Housing Authority, “Emirati Family Growth Services,” Rental Assistance for Newly Married UAE Nationals (up to AED 75,000, based on the beneficiary’s monthly income; enrollment in the Medeem program and a pending housing-benefit application required). https://iskan.abudhabi/en/Our-Services-and-tools/Emirati-Family-Growth-Services. Dollar conversion is the author’s, at the fixed rate of about 3.67 dirhams to the dollar.

[2] Gulf News, “Abu Dhabi launches Dh75,000 rental assistance for newlyweds” (eligibility: a male Emirati citizen from Abu Dhabi marrying an Emirati woman, with humanitarian and social cases of marriage to non-citizens open to consideration; certificate that neither spouse receives a housing allowance). https://gulfnews.com/uae/government/abu-dhabi-launches-dh75000-rental-assistance-for-newlyweds-1.500308294

[3] Business Insider, “Elon Musk says everyone will want their ‘personal robot,’ but warns of ‘Terminator’-style risks,” May 2025 (remarks at the US-Saudi Investment Forum, Riyadh, May 13, 2025). https://www.businessinsider.nl/elon-musk-says-everyone-will-want-their-personal-robot-but-warns-of-terminator-style-risks/

[4] Fortune, “Elon Musk says AI will remove need for jobs and create ‘universal high income.’ But workers don’t want to wait for robots to get financial relief,” November 6, 2023 (remarks at the UK AI Safety Summit). https://www.fortune.com/2023/11/06/elon-musk-ai-artificial-intelligence-universal-income-jobs/

[5] Al Jazeera, “Where do the 35 million foreigners living in the GCC come from?” March 9, 2026 (Qatar: population of about 3.2 million, of whom about 330,000 are citizens). The article gives the citizen share as 12 percent, but its own figures imply about 10 percent, the share used here. https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/where-do-the-35-million-foreigners-living-in-the-gcc-come-from

[6] Al Jazeera, note [5] (more than half of the 62 million people in the six GCC states are foreign workers).

[7] Law No. 38 of 2005 on the Acquisition of Qatari Nationality, art. 1 (Qatari nationals include any person born in Qatar or abroad to a Qatari father). Text and abstract via the Gulf Labour Markets and Migration programme. https://gulfmigration.grc.net/qatar-law-no-38-of-2005-on-the-acquisition-of-qatari-nationality/

[8] Law No. 38 of 2005 on the Acquisition of Qatari Nationality, art. 2 (any non-Qatari may acquire Qatari nationality by decree of the Emir, provided he has been a regular resident of Qatar for not less than twenty-five consecutive years and has a lawful income, good repute and good knowledge of Arabic). English text from the Al-Meezan Qatar Legal Portal, as archived by the American University in Cairo’s Center for Migration and Refugee Studies. https://www4.aucegypt.edu/CMRS/Files/2.2%20Qatari%20Citizenship%2038%202005_EN.pdf

[9] WAM (Emirates News Agency), “Under directives of UAE President, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi approves AED1.54bn housing benefits package for citizens ahead of Eid Al Adha,” May 25, 2026 (second package of 2026; more than 133,000 benefits worth over AED 182 billion since the authority’s establishment). https://www.wam.ae/en/article/c0e2jn3-under-directives-uae-president-crown-prince-abu

[10] Hazem Beblawi and Giacomo Luciani, eds., The Rentier State (London: Croom Helm, 1987). The summary of the bargain in the text is the author’s compression of the literature that grew from this volume.

[11] CNBC (Reuters), “Saudi Arabia slashes ministers’ pay, cuts public sector bonuses,” September 27, 2016 (20 percent cut to ministers’ salaries; overtime capped at 25 to 50 percent of basic salary; leave capped at 30 days; Shura Council housing and car allowances cut 15 percent; exception for troops in combat on the southern border and abroad in the Yemen intervention; 2015 deficit of nearly $100 billion). https://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/27/saudi-arabia-slashes-ministers-pay-cuts-public-sector-bonuses.html

[12] Law360, “Saudis Triple VAT To 15% Amid Virus-Driven Spending Cuts,” May 2020 (the 1,000-riyal monthly cost-of-living allowance for state workers was granted in 2018 following citizen complaints about earlier austerity). https://www.law360.com/tax-authority/articles/1272175

[13] Al Jazeera (Reuters), “Saudi Arabia to impose ‘painful’ austerity measures, triple VAT,” May 11, 2020 (allowance suspended from June 1, 2020; VAT raised from 5 to 15 percent from July 1, 2020). https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/saudi-arabia-impose-painful-austerity-measures-triple-vat-200511040647800.html

[14] Gulf News, “Jobs in the Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman seek workforce of nationals” (special report; Saudization initiated in the mid-1970s as a policy of replacing migrant workers with citizens). https://gulfnews.com/amp/story/special-reports%2Fjobs-in-the-gulf-saudi-arabia-kuwait-oman-seek-workforce-of-nationals-1.76925766

[15] Gulf News, “Saudi Arabia: 1.8m employed by Saudisation Programme” (the Nitaqat programme was first launched in 2011). https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/saudi/saudi-arabia-18m-employed-by-saudisation-programme-1.1630875548126

[16] CNBC, note [11] (Vision 2030 reform plan unveiled in 2016 to diversify the economy and provide jobs for a growing population).

[17] Saudi Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development, news release on the start of the decision raising the Saudization rate in engineering professions, July 8, 2026 (30 percent rate in 46 private-sector engineering professions from June 30, 2026, issued with the Ministry of Municipalities and Housing; Saudi Council of Engineers accreditation required). https://www.hrsd.gov.sa/en/media-center/news/%D8%AA%D8%B7%D8%A8%D9%8A%D9%82-%D8%B1%D9%81%D8%B9-%D9%86%D8%B3%D8%A8%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%B7%D9%8A%D9%86-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%87%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%87%D9%86%D8%AF%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9

[18] Enterprise (EnterpriseAM), “Saudi citizen unemployment nears record low in 1Q,” July 1, 2026, reporting the General Authority for Statistics Labor Force Survey for Q1 2026 (citizen unemployment 6.4 percent; citizen participation 49.0 percent, down 2.3 points year on year). https://enterpriseam.com/ksa/2026/07/01/saudi-citizen-unemployment-nears-record-low-in-1q/

[19] Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, The 2026 AI Index Report, “Research and Development” (59 notable models from the United States and 35 from China in 2025). https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/research-and-development. The chapter PDF released April 13, 2026 reported 50 and 30; the later figures appear to reflect updated Epoch AI data, which is the author’s reading of the discrepancy.

[20] Stanford HAI, note [19] (5,427 data centers in the United States, more than ten times any other country).

[21] CNBC, “China’s tech giants pour billions into Xi’s goal of ‘common prosperity,’” September 3, 2021 (Alibaba pledge of 100 billion yuan; Tencent doubling its social-initiatives commitment to 100 billion yuan; Alibaba’s $2.8 billion antitrust fine earlier that year). https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/03/chinas-tech-giants-pour-billions-into-xis-goal-of-common-prosperity.html

[22] Reuters, “Beijing owns stakes in ByteDance, Weibo domestic entities, records show,” August 17, 2021 (a 1 percent stake in Beijing ByteDance Technology, registered April 30, 2021, held by an entity owned by three state bodies, with a board seat); Reuters, “Beijing takes ‘golden share’ in Tencent subsidiary, records show,” October 19, 2023, via The Edge Malaysia (a 1 percent stake in a Tencent unit, following similar stakes in units of ByteDance and Alibaba). https://www.aol.com/news/beijing-owns-stakes-bytedance-weibo-022352524.html and https://ceomorningbrief.theedgemalaysia.com/article/2023/0656/World/22/686822

[23] State Council of the People’s Republic of China, Opinion on Implementing the Provision of Basic Public Services at Place of Permanent Residence, May 22, 2026, as summarized by the Jamestown Foundation, “Beijing’s Hukou Reform Is Not Welfare-Oriented” (hukou assigns each citizen to a locality, typically inherited, and has historically tied public services to it; the opinion directs local governments to serve residents regardless of hukou status), and by the Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter, “Beijing’s welfare bill that no one wants to pay” (funding left to local governments). https://jamestown.org/beijings-hukou-reform-is-not-welfare-oriented/ and https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/beijing-s-welfare-bill-that-no-one-wants-to-pay

[24] S&P Global Commodity Insights, “Indonesian nickel smelters ramp up ore imports from Philippines: FINI,” November 24, 2025 (the 2020 ore export ban helped attract downstream investment; Indonesia’s global nickel market share over 60 percent, per Forum Industri Nikel Indonesia chairman Arif Perdanakusumah). Industry estimate. https://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/news-research/latest-news/metals/112425-indonesian-nickel-smelters-face-closure-risk-as-ore-supply-tightens-fini

[25] Reuters, “Chinese firms control around 75% of Indonesian nickel capacity, report finds,” February 5, 2025, via Kitco (ownership tracing by the Washington-based nonprofit C4ADS: Chinese companies controlled about three-quarters of Indonesia’s roughly 8 million metric tons of nickel refining capacity as of 2023). https://www.kitco.com/news/off-the-wire/2025-02-05/chinese-firms-control-around-75-indonesian-nickel-capacity-report

[26] China Daily, “China to expand agricultural trade while ensuring food security,” February 5, 2026 (agricultural imports of $207.4 billion in 2025). https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202602/05/WS69847e7fa310d6866eb37b62.html

[27] World Grain (reporting Reuters), “Report: China ups 2025 grain production goal,” March 2025 (China imports about 80 percent of the soybeans it consumes). https://www.world-grain.com/articles/21120-report-china-ups-2025-grain-production-goal

[28] U.S. Energy Information Administration, “U.S. energy facts explained: imports and exports” (the United States has been an annual net total energy exporter since 2019). https://eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-and-exports.php

[29] Stanford HAI, The 2026 AI Index Report, note [19] (top U.S. model’s lead over the top Chinese model at 2.7 percent as of March 2026; the report describes the gap as effectively closed). Figure as reported in the report’s published takeaways and confirmed against independent summaries.

[30] Stanford HAI, The 2026 AI Index Report, note [19] (the gap between top closed-weight and top open-weight models, near zero in 2024, widened again in 2025; summaries report it at 3.3 to 3.4 percent).

[31] Norwegian Ministry of Finance, Meld. St. 22 (2024-2025), “The Government Pension Fund 2025,” executive summary (net government cash flow from petroleum activities transferred in its entirety to the GPFG; the fiscal policy guideline links spending to the expected real return, estimated at 3 percent). https://www.regjeringen.no/en/documents/meld.-st2.-22-20242025/id3119577/?ch=1

[32] Norwegian Ministry of Finance, Meld. St. 7 (2025-2026), “The Government Pension Fund 2026,” executive summary (about 27 percent of the 2026 central government budget estimated to be financed by transfers from the Fund). https://www.regjeringen.no/en/documents/meld.-st.-7-2025-2026/id3155109/?ch=1

[33] Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Distributional Financial Accounts, via FRED: share of corporate equities and mutual fund shares held by the top 1 percent (50.2 percent) and by the 90th to 99th wealth percentiles (37.2 percent), first quarter of 2026, data updated June 18, 2026 (together 87.4 percent for the top tenth; holdings through pension entitlements are a separate category). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01122 and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/WFRBSN09149

[34] H. W. Singer, “The Distribution of Gains between Investing and Borrowing Countries,” American Economic Review 40, no. 2 (1950): 473-485; Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (New York: United Nations, 1950). The application to compute-era supply chains is the author’s.