Children's Opportunity Trust

Peter Barnes: Capitalism 3.0 — Chapter 9: Building the Commons Sector (pages 135-154)

The Children’s Opportunity Trust is the second big piece of national commons infrastructure. It’s a way to fix capitalism’s other bad habit of perpetuating class privileges from one generation to the next. Unlike feudalism, which was based on hereditary aristocracy, capitalism is, in theory, a meritocracy, or at least a “luckocracy.” Players are supposed to have a fair, if not equal, chance to succeed. Winners are supposed to be determined by hard work, talent, and luck, rather than by accident of birth. Yet, as we’ve seen, Capitalism 2.0 falls far short of this ideal.

The Children’s Opportunity Trust would give every child, as a birthright, an infusion of start-up capital — a kind of Social Security for the front end of life. The trust’s revenue would come from end-of-life repayments, as explained in chapter 7. This funding mechanism, I believe, is better than taking money from the general treasury. It directly links start-up help from society with an end-of-life obligation to repay, creating a kind of temporal commons that connects arriving and departing generations. ... read the whole chapter