Among all the scenarios blockchain technology can be applied to, taking on global inequality is precisely one that hasn’t been spoken enough yet. In fact, inside this distributed ledger technology might reside the key for a fairer shared economic future.

If there is something globalisation can be proud of is in the help it has provided in making almost all globe part of the production chain, and therefore, part itself of the capitalism wheel. For good, it has aimed many ‘potentially’ attractive countries to grow their very own industry -although mostly manufacture-based-, and with it millions of people have been able to find a job and make a living with it.

On the other hand, these workers in emerging countries have been not treated as well as in western counterparts, which in the end means inferior wages and poorer quality standards for them. This is it because main corporations are still set in Europe and USA and they have made sure the business rules (better and cheaper than competition) have been scrupulously followed from the very beginning of the production chain.

Little can do their homeland countries about these conditions set by corps, as international markets are the closest thing to a proper wild wild west. If China or India chooses to high up national minimum wages and protect worker rights more reliably, they will relocate their factories somewhere else, compromising in the way millions of families who rely on them.

Roughly, this is the definition of inequality in our worldwide spread capitalism system and the future we are heading to is quite uncertain in terms of job stability and growth rates. The main issue here is indeed the unfair distribution of the wealth. Capital keeps in the same hands over and over again while the poorest get just a glance of it.

The problem lies in the distribution of wealth

 However, technology can be the answer inequality was waiting for to be finally overtaken, once and for all.

At least, that is how they think at the World Economic Forum, and with the blockchain as main character in order to tackle the high inequality rates we live in. For them:

“Through the blockchain, we can go from redistributing wealth to distributing value and opportunity fairly in the first place, from cradle to grave. Including billions of people in the global economy: protecting rights through immutable records like land titles; creating true sharing economy by replacing service aggregators like Uber with distributed applications on a blockchain; ending the remittance rip-off and helping diasporas return funds to their ancestral lands; enabling citizens to own and monetize their data (and protect privacy) through owning their personal identities rather than identities being owned by big social media companies or governments; unleashing a new halcyon age of entrepreneurship by enabling small companies to have all the capabilities of large companies; helping build accountable government through transparency, smart contracts and revitalized models of democracy.”

The idea is to distribute the wealth before it has been even created so the possible outcome would be automatically shared with all stakeholders, which for instance would be the citizens.

The pre-distribution paradigm

That example of using blockchain capabilities to create a decentralized and a fairer economic system is also agreed by The Washington Post journalist Nicolas Berggruen.

She points out in a recent article her idea of wealth distribution, in which she agrees on instead of re-distribution (which is really post-distribution), we should be talking about pre-distribution: instead of ameliorating inequalities through the tax and benefits system once they have occurred, lower inequalities by making everyone a stakeholder, putting everyone in the same boat and endowing everyone with access and dignity. This model would continue to foster innovation and investment while giving everyone a stake in the future.

“Fundamentally, pre-distribution proposes a moral economy in which every citizen is due and is given a “share” of a country’s income and productive capacity from the start. This moral understanding of a rightful share has so far been mainly utilized with mineral wealth. But applied to the fruits of our high-tech economy, it suggests a radically new sort of sharing economy. Digital wealth can be thought of as the oil of the 21^st century — except now it is possible to generate this wealth everywhere, not just where the minerals happen to be underground,” she added.

This capacity has profound implications for enabling an authentic sharing economy and with high implications in the incoming new robotic breakthrough.

For example, each new robot in an autonomous vehicle fleet could be fractionally owned by every member of the community in which it operates. Every time someone purchased a ride with one of the vehicles, rather than the income only going to a private company, it could be distributed to everyone in the community.

And that is the point for her where blockchain comes to light. This capability makes blockchain a potentially powerful accelerant for ensuring that everyone can own a share of economic goods. Instead of trying to make up for technologically driven job displacement via UBI, blockchain makes it possible to address inequality at its root, on the production side. Instead of waiting for the inequality to happen and then addressing it via a universal basic income, we can instead pursue the idea of a universal right to intellectual and capital goods — a universal basic capital.

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