Alaska pays every resident to not go broke on oil
In 1976, the state locked a share of its oil money where no legislature could touch it — and turned resource wealth into the opposite of a curse.
Governor Jay Hammond had watched what oil money did to other places: a sudden windfall, a spending spree, then a bust when the wells ran low or prices dropped, leaving nothing behind but the hole in the ground. Alaska's own oil boom on the North Slope was just beginning, and Hammond wanted a different ending.
In 1976, Alaskans amended their state constitution to create the Permanent Fund: at least 25 percent of the state's oil and mineral royalties would be invested, by law, and could not be spent by whichever legislature happened to be in office that year. Politicians could argue about everything else. They could not touch the principal.
The fund grew for six years before anyone drew a dividend from it. Since 1982, every Alaskan resident — adult or infant, no application beyond a residency check — has received an annual check drawn from the fund's investment earnings, not the oil itself. Some years it has topped $2,000 a person. By 2019 the fund held roughly $64 billion, built almost entirely from money that would otherwise have been spent the year it arrived.
The usual story about resource wealth is that it corrodes whatever government sits on top of it. Alaska's answer was structural, not moral: don't trust anyone, including yourself, to resist a windfall. Lock it before you're tempted.