Nearly 50 years ago, prominent Alaskans planned the state’s future. We should think that way again.

In October, November and December 49 years ago, more than 100 Alaskans sat down for a series of four conferences in Anchorage to think about Alaska's future. Organized by the Brookings Institution at the invitation of the Alaska Legislative Council (a permanent standing committee of the Legislature) and with the cooperation of the University's Institute for Social, Economic and Government Research (then in Fairbanks, the first iteration of the current Institute for Social and Economic Research), the meetings were a response to the 1968 discovery of North America's largest oil deposit at Prudhoe Bay and the $900 million sale of state oil leases on the North Slope in early 1969. With the prospect of unimagined state wealth from lease sales and taxation, leaders felt the state needed all the help it could get in managing its changed circumstances. The title of the collective exercise was "Conference on the Future of Alaska."  The four meetings addressed in turn economics, human resources, environmental policy, and a comprehensive policy system.

Invitees included Alaskans from all walks of life. Many of the attendees would subsequently leave their mark on Alaska, often by supporting or implementing conference recommendations; these included Jay Hammond, John Rader, Joe Josephson, Lowell Thomas, Ed Merdes, Frank Peratrovich, Bill Ray, Millie Banfield, Gene Guess, Chancy Croft, Tom Fink, Willie Hensley, Mike Bradner, Harold Pomeroy and a host of others.

A good many of the conference recommendations became reality. One question the participants took up was whether to spend the $900 million the state had gleaned from its North Slope lease sale. At the human resources meetings participants had urged that education opportunities from preschool through K-12 and higher, including vocational and baccalaureate education, be provided all Alaskans free of tuition and fees. They also advocated a state longevity bonus plan to help the elderly. The Legislature subsequently established the longevity bonus and a student loan fund.

The first meetings were on economics, and the remarks of one of the presenters, Arlon Tussing, a brilliant and iconoclastic economist, resonate well today. Looking at an Alaska future with unprecedented money, Tussing said he wanted to raise doubts in delegates' minds about economic development for the sake of economic development. The commitment to growth, he said, is simply an attitude. It's not a law of nature, and it doesn't benefit everyone. Oil in particular, he said, would not benefit the unemployed, or the employed who are not entrepreneurs.

As Dermot Cole wrote in these pages on Tussing's death in 2016, Tussing argued that for all Alaskans to benefit from the oil money, the state should establish a trust, or investment company, and make all residents shareholders in the trust, the number of shares based on the number of years of residence. If this sounds something like the Alaska Permanent Fund, and its dividend program, it should. Jay Hammond was a Tussing admirer and the Governor's advocacy of the Permanent Fund owed much to Tussing's counsel. So did Hammond's growth policy council.

Tussing and other presenters expressed concern about village Alaska and Native Alaskans. The state should guarantee any resident the opportunity to choose to live in a rural or urban community, they said, and should establish a human affairs agency to oversee and facilitate the transition from rural to urban for any wishing to make that transition. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act has the same aim, in part, and in that regard reflects discussions at the conference. Fairbanks attorney Barry Jackson, who died earlier this year, was a conference participant. He is often credited with the structure of the regional corporations as joint stock economic development entities, with all Natives (born by December 1971) as shareholders.

The conference also recommended that the state provide universal health insurance, and that it drop financial incentives for industrial development, which, they said, don't work.

There's been nothing quite like the 1969 Brookings conference in Alaska since. We live in dramatically changed circumstances again, the result of the fall in oil prices and pipeline throughput. Economists say we're likely at the bottom of the fall, and in a long-term holding pattern.

Next year will mark 50 years on from the mega-conference. We're looking at a new Alaska. We need another Brookings.

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