The hardest thing for any society to do is to avoid oppressing its least advantaged people. Politics everywhere is an insider game: people with political, economic, and social advantages make policy for their own benefit not just neglecting outsiders, but oppressing them. Most theories of justice understandably want to eliminate this insider-outsider problem by building a consensus around a true “social contract” or an undeniable sent of “natural rights.” Unfortunately, you can never get everyone to agree to anything. How can you eliminate the insider-outsider problem, if you can’t bring every outsider into consensus?
More than 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant gave the world an overconfident solution that, I would like to argue, has helped justify oppression ever since: create a basic social-political structure that, in Thomas Scanlon’s words, “no one could reasonably reject.”
Obviously, no matter how fair and just social arrangements are, some unreasonable people—call them recalcitrants—will reject them because of their selfishness, irrationality, or ignorance. But if we create a social structure that truly incorporates everyone’s needs or rights or concerns, we can effectively eliminate the insider-outsider problem even without a literal consensus. Any reasonable objectors—call them dissenters—will have been brought into the coalition.
If you could do such a thing, the social contract would resemble (if only superficially) an insider contract. Some people—call them the ruling coalition—would establish a basic structure. Other people would object. The ruling coalition would say that the objectors were unreasonable, and they would be right. The coalition would speak for the recalcitrants, truly bringing them inside the contract, knowing that if they were rational they would know (and if they were reasonable they would admit) that they are not really outsiders.
If the social contract of the reasonable looks so much like an insider contract, how will we know which it is? Most theories of justice try to bypass this how-do-we-know question by focusing on the what-do-we-do question. If we thought there were reasonable objections, we would change the basic structure to one that had no reasonable objections. Many philosophers have written extensive theories about the kind of structure that they believe could not reasonably be rejected.
Great. But then we’re in the same situation where the ruling coalition says its reasonable. How do we know that the ruling coalition is the one that’s reasonable and the objectors are the ones that are unreasonable rather than the other way around? No one is infallible. Philosophers make mistakes. So do ruling coalitions. One could reasonably characterize all of recorded history as the March of Folly of ruling coalitions. So, if we’re fallible, how will we know when and whether we’ve succeed in this great and worthy quest to create social arrangements “that no one could reasonably reject?”
Unfortunately, I want to argue that virtually all contemporary theories of justice are based on the overconfident assumption that the theorist who wrote it actually knows how to solve the insider-outsider problem.
Immanuel Kant
The danger of a theory based on that piece of overconfidence is revealed by the answer to this question, who must we convince that we’ve created a structure “that no one could reasonably reject”? The only possible answer is that the ruling coalition only has to convince itself. They have to treat potential objectors well enough to keep them from rebelling, but they don’t really have to justify the structure to anybody; they don’t have to get objectors to agree to anything, because they can dismiss them as “unreasonable.” My reading of recorded history indicates that insider coalitions can be incredibly unjust without doubting their own reasonableness or creating a serious risk of rebellion. (For example, the Texas state legislature once passed a resolution claiming, “the servitude of the African race … is mutually beneficial to both bond and free.”)
Modern philosophers can reasonably claim that they are far more reasonable than the 1861 Texas Confederate state legislature, and they can propose a structure that gives voice and concern to many out groups, but they are dangerously overconfident if they ignore this observations that I believe our obvious: A privileged majority can never speak for an underprivileged minority. A male-dominated government can never claim to speak for women. A white majority can never speak for black or any other non-white minorities. A Christian majority can never claim to speak for non-Christian minorities. A secular majority can never claim to speak for religious minorities. A heterosexual majority can never claim to speak for queer minorities, and so on and so on.
The insider majority must give out-groups voice and try to accommodate their concerns, but the majority also has to rule, and they will make mistakes that advantage insiders over outsiders. The job will never be done. Justice is in the pursuit of accord, not in the assumption that we’ve done enough, and objectors are just unreasonable.
My latest academic article, “The Pursuit of Accord: Toward a Theory of Justice with a Second-Best Approach to the Insider-Outsider Problem,” discusses this issue at greater length. It gives ten reasons to believe that all ruling coalitions are insider coalitions rather than true “social contracts.” It discusses four strategies to create consensus, and argues that although they must be tried, they’re likely to fall short of establishing a genuine consensus even if everyone is reasonable.
Finally, it discusses an alternative theory called “justice as the pursuit of accord” (JPA), which offers a second-best approach to the insider-outsider problem under the working assumption that consensus is impossible to achieve even if everyone is rational and reasonable. The ruling coalition has to make the laws, but it can never presume to speak for dissenters. It must both try to get as many people into accord as possible and try to minimize negative interference with people who can’t be brought into accord. Basic Income plays a significant role in the minimization of negative interference and other aspects of JPA. My earlier book, Freedom as the Power to Say No, outlined JPA’s theory of freedom. My article (“The Pursuit of Accord”) and the future book I’m hoping to develop from it will discuss JPA as an overall theory of justice and outline its accompanying property theory.
When people ask me where to find empirical research on the effects of Basic Income online, I tend to recommend the following sources, both for the sources themselves and for the many more sources you’ll find in their bibliographies:
Karl Widerquist “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can we Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?” The Journal of Socio-Economics (2005). You can find an early free version here.
Go to Google Scholar: search “basic income” and/or other names for the concept with our without additional key words to narrow it down. Scroll through as many pages of links as you have time for.
Go through the tables of contents for each issue of the journal Basic Income Studies.
Go through the news on Basic Income News, as far back as you have time for, looking for mentions of and links to new research.
I’m leaving out a lot of good stuff because I can’t find it online, but those things together should give you a good idea of the current state of UBI research.
What links would you add (please answer only if you can give the full information about it including an actual links to it)?
Erik Olin Wright, a long-term advocate of Universal Basic Income and one of the most influential sociologists today, recently announced that his doctors have advised him that he has only a few weeks left to live. (Update: he passed away on January 23.) He is best known for his work on social stratification, egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism, deep democracy, and interstitial revolution.
But he has also had an important influence over the Basic Income movement. He was the first to describe basic income as “a permanent strike fund for all.” He wrote about it and provided platforms, such as the Real Utopias project that allowed other people to write about it when few people thought it had any chance.
Wright announced his diagnosis in a very brave and optimistic statement:
strange state of existence
Journal entry by Erik Olin Wright — Jan 5, 2019
I have roughly three weeks left of existence. Three weeks. Let’s call that January, 2019. January 2019: my month, my last month. There can be surprises — both ways of course. My liver is the main source of leukemia’s havoc. It is greatly enlarged now, filled with AML. This is why I need transfusions of platelets and red blood cells every day. The graft did not survive the return of AML so it produces no products, and the AML-clogged liver seems to be filtering out some of the transfusions so I am not getting full benefit from those. The result is that my platelets remain extremely low even after a platelet transfusion and my hemoglobin remains very low even after a hemoglobin transfusion. So, eventually these become too low to sustain life, or an opportunistic infection does me in. The doctors say “a few weeks” — a nice surprise would be to slide into February; my birthday is February 9. We’ll see what happens.
This is all hard to take in fully. I am not in great turmoil over dying. I am sad about many things, desperately sad about those connected to my family. But I’m not afraid. I wrote about this early on; my feelings haven’t changed: I am stardust that randomly ended up in this marvelous corner of the milky way where some stardust ended up in conditions where it became complexly organized in a way we term “alive.” And then even more complexly— conscious stardust that is fully aware that it is conscious: amazing — stardust, inanimate products of exploding supernova, organized in such a complex way that it is conscious of its own aliveness and consciousness — the greatest privilege in the whole, immense universe. It may be for a limited time — this complex organization ends and the stardust that is me will dissipate back to the more ordinary state of matter. Nothing to do about that. As creative fanciful minds, we humans are good at inventing ways for our existence as conscious beings to continue after the stardust dissipates. It would be nice. I don’t believe in that sort of thing, but I’ll find out by some time in February.
I am one of the many people who have been influenced by his work, and his talents affected me personally. He was the editor of my first published academic article, “A Reciprocity Argument for the Guaranteed Income,” in 1999 (before the name Basic Income became standard). His ability to see my intuitive leaps and to explain how to fill them in was amazing. That kind of ability takes not only strong intellect, but strong empathy. A combination that even many great academics lack. It’s the mark of an exceptional person.
–Karl Widerquist, Doha, Qatar, January 9, 2019; revised Cambridge, UK, January 12, 2009
The Midterm elections in the United States were extremely interesting. There was a huge Blue Wave of people coming out to vote against Trump’s party, but unlike most midterm elections, there was also a Counter-Wave of enthusiastic Republicans coming out to support Trump’s party (not to mention strategic voter disenfranchisement and Gerrymandering). The Wave and Counter-Wave made for record-high voter turnout, and the Red Counter-Wave did a great job of preventing a disaster and even gaining seats in the Senate, but the Senate was mostly the result of an extremely favorable mix of what states happened to have seats up for election.
The Blue Wave simply won more votes, enough to overcome the Counter-Wave by about 7% in the House, the only nationwide vote. That’s an amazing result for the opposition party in a midterm year with a great economy. It hasn’t happened since 1966 when Vietnam was heating up and the Democrats had just passed Civil Rights legislation losing a vast majority of the people who were actually allowed to vote in the South.
It would be interesting to see estimates of how many races the Democrats would have won without Trump’s Counter-Wave–if Republican turnout had been more consistent with typical in-party midterm election turnout.
With the President, Senate, and Supreme Court functioning as a Republican block, the election won’t make a huge difference in power right now, but it looks bad for Republicans in the future. Although Trump’s taken over the Republican Party, he has done nothing to increase the size of its coalition. If anything, he’s shrunk it, only making up for that by increasing enthusiasm among his coalition.
To win in 2020, he needs the nearly exact same thing to happen as 2016. A big enthusiasm gap in the right places so he can squeak out an electoral college win in pretty much the same states again.
Trump and the Republicans tenuous hold on a great deal of power rests on his ability to command disproportionate enthusiasm among a minority of voters and on the party’s ability to use voter disenfranchisement and Gerrymandering to translate those votes into election victories.
It seems far more likely that Democratic numbers and enthusiasm will continue to grow, and there will be a big change in 2020.
Will this create an opening for more progressive policies like Basic Income? I’ll discuss that in my next post.
Al Jazeera invited me to participate in a panel discussion (on of all things) U.S. foreign policy. It didn’t give me the chance to talk about basic income or about “indepentarianism” specifically, but I think I made some good points. I said the campaign donors aren’t trying to get candidates elected, but to buy influence. I wish I’d said that this fact makes campaign contributions a form of legalized bribery. I said that when Trump says “America First,” he really means “Me First,” and that most of his foreign policy is to find some leader he can bully to make himself look like a tough guy. I wished I’d said that like he strokes White American’s egos, but delivers for himself not for them—much like most nationalist leaders around the world today and throughout history. I said that America is still acting like it’s 1945 when America was the only in-tact industrial economy. It’s overplaying its influence trying to impose unilateral sanctions on Iran and other places, and overplaying its hand like this will ultimately weaken not strengthen American influence in the world.
Next time I hope they put me on a panel where I can bring up basic income.
My latest discussion paper is a draft of Chapter 2 of my forthcoming book, the Prehistory of Private Property (coauthored by Grant McCall, Tulane University and the Center for Human-Environmental Research) The paper addresses the natural-rights-based (“right-libertarian” or more descriptively “propertarian”) justification of private property to show that it is not a purely normative argument. The paper argues that propertarian principles cannot rule out government or collective ownership of territory on a purely normative, a priori basis, and therefore, cannot rule out the government’s right to tax, regulate, or redistribute property titles without relying on empirical historical claims. Therefore, the natural-rights-based justification of extensive ethical limits on those powers has to stand on the empirical claim that such an event, though possible, is historically implausible—a claim or a collection of claims we call “the classically liberal hypothesis.”
This hypothesis could be specified in at least three different ways. First, before governments or any other collective institutions appear, all or most resources are appropriated by individuals acting as individuals to established private property rights. Second, only individuals acting as individuals perform appropriative acts (i.e. neither individuals acting as monarchs nor groups intending to establish collective, public, or government-held property rights perform appropriative acts). Third, even if collectives perform appropriative acts, subsequent transfers of titles (in the absence of rights violations) are likely only to produce privatized property rights.
This chapter sets up the next two. Chapter 3 examines the evidence propertarians have put forward to support the classically liberal hypothesis, showing that this evidence is extremely weak. Chapter 4 investigates the truth-value of the hypothesis. It not only gives a strong argument for the falsity of the hypothesis; it presents strong evidence indicating that quite the opposite is true. Individualistic private property rights—largely or entirely free of collective control—tend only to be established through aggressive rights violations.
NOTE to Basic Income supporters: although this paper and this book are not directly about Basic Income, they address an argument commonly used to oppose Basic Income.
