Participation Dividend Modeler
A modeler that sizes a participation dividend pool, sets the civic-contribution rate and metrics, distributes income to verified contributors, and stress-tests the design across fraud, access, and scaling assumptions drawn from Chapter 4.
What it does
A 67-year-old manages a parent's dementia care 30 hours a week. Skilled, essential, unpaid. The neighbor running a mutual-aid network. The tutor teaching adult literacy every Wednesday. The market sees zero value in any of it; communities cannot function without it. Chapter 4 of The Bridge names the gap precisely — "no mechanism connects that recognition to income" — and proposes the participation dividend to close it.
This tool models that mechanism end to end. You set the size of the dividend pool (the chapter's example: a 12-person team generating $100M redirecting 2–3% is a rounding error that funds real civic infrastructure), define which contributions count and how they're measured, choose a per-hour civic rate, and the modeler distributes income to verified contributors and shows the per-person result. Then it stress-tests the design against the four safeguards the chapter insists on in order — fraud, quality, access, and a protected funding base — plus a phased scaling pathway from pilot cities to national integration.
The distinction the tool keeps front and center is the one Chapter 4 draws between the productivity dividend (the total surplus AI creates — the pie) and the participation dividend (one mechanism for distributing that surplus by compensating civic contribution). They share a name because they share a purpose; the modeler treats the first as the funding source and the second as the distribution engine.
Who it's for: municipal and state policy designers running pilots (the right scale now, per the chapter), foundation officers, cooperative and community-infrastructure leaders, and economists pressure-testing the "paying people not to work" objection against the Alaska and AmeriCorps evidence.
Figure: The participation dividend is the middle mechanism here — addressing purpose and identity by compensating contribution markets systematically underprice.
A $2.5M pool funds 163 contributors of 30,000 targeted — about $1K/mo each. The cap binds for every contributor at this rate — effectively an equal-share design.
Proportional (hours × rate): the dividend slopes with recognized hours, preserving reciprocity (Atkinson participation income). The annual cap clips the highest-hours tenths — flattening the top of the curve.
Sweeping civic rate ($/hr) holds every other input fixed. Demanded payout (bars) and realized per-person dividend (line) both move monotonically with the rate — the relationship the chapter says you must price honestly before scaling.
At or below Spice Timebank’s sub-2% benchmark.
Multi-source validation cross-checks claims against independent sources.
Reaches most of the intended population, including harder-to-serve groups.
Inside the 2–3% “rounding error” band legislators cannot easily raid.
His 20 hours/week of quality-assurance expertise applied to the food co-op becomes visible and compensated. The stipend removes desperation rather than replacing a career — a foundation, not a substitute for one.
10-city pilot (yr 1–5): the right scale now. Test the safeguards before widening the circle.
Keep the labels distinct: the productivity dividend is the surplus AI creates (the pie); the participation dividend is one mechanism for distributing it by compensating civic contribution. They are not interchangeable.
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- Book 2 (*The Bridge*), Chapter 4 — "Widening the Circle," especially "Model Two: Participation Dividends — Compensating Contribution Beyond Employment" and "The Barriers That Remain."