Over the past few decades, wealth funds like this have been successfully implemented in Alaska and Norway, quashing any doubt about their practical viability. Alaska’s fund was created in 1976 under the Republican Governor Jay Hammond and has grown in value to $62 billion. In a typical year, every Alaskan citizen, including children, receives a dividend from the fund of about $1,000 to $2,000. Norway’s similar fund recently topped $1 trillion in value and, in the last quarter alone, generated $23 billion of investment return, or about $4,500 per Norwegian. Unlike Alaska, Norway uses its fund not to directly pay out dividends but as a source of revenue for its famously generous welfare state.

The idea has a long history. Thomas Paine advocated the creation of a similar “national fund” in his 1797 pamphlet “Agrarian Justice.” Socialist economists have supported it as well. Oskar Lange wrote in favor of the concept in 1936, and Rudolf Hilferding described the socialization of financial assets as “the ultimate phase of the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat” in 1910.

In more recent times, more and less robust versions of the idea have been endorsed by the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Meade, the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and even Hillary Clinton in her 2016 campaign memoir. It would be hard to claim it’s some sort of utopian fantasy.

The key challenge in building a social wealth fund is not how to run it once it has been created, but how to bring assets into the fund in the first place. Alaska and Norway were able to dedicate the proceeds from natural resource exploitation to that purpose, but most governments seeking to duplicate their efforts would need to look elsewhere for the money.

Wouldn’t the enormous wealth that our increasingly productive society is generating, which now flows into just a few pockets, be a fair source? Some of the concrete ways this could happen are through the transfer of existing federal assets like land, buildings and portions of the wireless spectrum into the new fund. Other measures could include increases in taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy such as estate, dividend and financial transaction taxes and the creation of a new type of corporate tax that requires companies to directly issue new shares to the social wealth fund on an annual basis and during certain corporate moves such as initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions.

Another way to bring assets into the fund would be to modify the way the Federal Reserve pumps money into the economy. Currently, the central bank does that by buying up Treasury bonds. If instead we used newly created money to buy up stocks that are then deposited into the social wealth fund, it would gradually socialize wealth ownership without the need to raise taxes on anyone. As Roger Farmer and Miles Kimball have argued, these kinds of asset purchases could also be ramped up during recessions, allowing the federal government to acquire significant portions of the national wealth relatively cheaply while also stabilizing financial markets and stimulating the economy.

Creating a social wealth fund in which we all own an equal part is certainly not the only way to tackle wealth inequality directly, but it is one of the few ways that we know works well and is able to work within the system we now have. If policymakers want to get serious about trimming wealth concentration, and not just use these shocking statistics to promote the same old half-measures, then this would be a fair, effective and practical way to start.