Delilah Rothenberg on The Predistribution Initiative: You Can't Diversify Away From Inequality

Delilah Rothenberg went into finance to fight inequality and came out the other side with a sharper claim: the way capital is structured produces it. She spent nearly two decades across sell-side equities (Bear Stearns, through the crisis) and private equity infrastructure in Africa and the US, and this showed her the pattern nobody named at conferences: returns leaving the communities that host the projects, SDG 10 on the wall and in the deck but never actually in the world, and pay ratios between mega-fund executives and portfolio-company workers that can pass a thousand to one, even in deals with employee ownership attached.

So she co-founded the Predistribution Initiative, which works with pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds and asset managers on economic inequality as a macrofinancial risk. We unpack predistribution versus redistribution, why a pension fund that effectively owns the whole economy cannot diversify away from inequality, ESG 2.0 (turning the ESG lens on investors themselves), the limits of employee ownership and what context-specific solutions look like, communities taking equity in the infrastructure built next to them, the AI buildout, data centers, consumer demand, and the fiduciary-duty counterargument. She closes with what makes her optimistic: worker voice arriving in corporate governance, backed by some of the largest pension capital in the world.

Delilah speaks at the 4th Ownership Economy Summit, October 1 in New York, get 30% with the code PODCAST30 right here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/4th-annual-ownership-economy-summit-registration-1991957749250

Full agenda: https://summit2026.ownershipeconomy.com/2026agenda

Everything mentioned in this episode:

- The Predistribution Initiative — https://www.predistributioninitiative.org

- PDI's research library, including the ESG 2.0 paper and the AI discussion paper series (the Predistribution AI Lab) — https://www.predistributioninitiative.org/research

- Perspectives on Workforce Directors (PDI) — the worker-voice-on-boards work she cites, now carried by the Workforce Engagement Coalition backed by Railpen with Federated Hermes as a member — https://www.predistributioninitiative.org/research/perspectives-on-workforce-directors-opportunities-challenges/

- Apis & Heritage Capital Partners — the employee-ownership fund manager pairing EO with living wages — https://apisandheritage.com

- IFC Performance Standards — https://www.ifc.org/en/insights-reports/2012/ifc-performance-standards — and the Equator Principles — https://equator-principles.com

- Columbus, Ohio's "Our Voice, Our Choice" participatory budget https://common.oneproject.org/en/columbus

- Bill Easterly's trade-versus-aid argument, where her road began — The White Man's Burden

- UN Sustainable Development Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities — https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal10

Find Delilah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/delilah-rothenberg · https://www.predistributioninitiative.org

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