Review of “The Ethics of Stakeholding” from 2008

by Karl Widerquist | Feb 7, 2007 | Opinion, The Indepentarian

Review of The Ethics of Stakeholding, edited by Keith Dowding, Jurgen De Wispelaere, and Stuart White, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Review by Karl Widerquist, Citizens Income Newsletter, issue 1 of 2007, revised 2008

            In the interest of full disclosure, I must reveal that I am well acquainted with all three editors. Stuart White was my Ph.D. supervisor; Jurgen De Wispelaere is my coeditor of Basic Income Studies; and Keith Dowding invited me to join the Citizens Income Trust. However, none of them asked me to contribute to this volume. Assume these two factors balance out perfectly, and I am the ideal, unbiased reviewer.

            From the title, this collected volume of essays sounds like a companion volume to Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott’s 1999 book, The Stakeholder Society,[1] and it almost is. All of the chapters touch on their proposal in some way, and the book concludes with a chapter by Ackerman replying to some of his critics in the volume. But the editors’ opening essay defines Stakeholding more broadly than Ackerman and Alstott, as “a particular paradigm within social policy that looks to empower individuals by granting them or helping them to acquire assets or a near equivalent guaranteed future stream of income.” Ackerman and Alstott focus on one such policy, basic capital. That is, a lump sum coming of age grant, which is, in their proposal, $80,000 for all high school graduates who aren’t convicted of a felony by their 21^st birthday. Dowding, De Wispelaere, and White consider two other kinds of Stakeholding proposals, universal basic income (which provides a small, lifetime stream of income) and target asset-building (which subsidizes savings and investment). Ackerman and Alstott’s proposal remains the main focus of the book, and the other proposals are discussed largely in relation to the basic capital proposal.

            Several chapters put forth Stakeholding proposals. Julian Le Grand and David Nissan discuss the baby bond initiative, a very small basic capital grant, which is since be adopted by the British government. Gavin Kelly, Andrew Gamble, and Will Paxton discuss a proposal for subsidized savings accounts. And Robert E. Goodin discusses an Australian proposal for capital grants to the unemployed. His basic idea is that a person who has been unemployed for a year can propose and investment project to the Department of Social Security. If the Department finds it is feasible, they grant or lend the individual as much as two-years-worth of unemployment benefits to get the project underway. It is a very interesting proposal, but Goodin pays too little attention to the question of whether it will encourage people who might have gone back to work in less than 12 months to stay unemployed for the full year so that they can become eligible for the grant.

            Two chapters, one by Stuart White and one by Gijs van Donselaar, discuss the issue of whether unconditional grants allow people who may not be working to take unfair advantage of workers whose taxes support the grant. White concludes that a one-time grant or a temporary basic income can give the disadvantaged greater opportunities and protect them in times of crisis without interfering with a lifetime obligation to contribute to society through work. Van Donselaar is more skeptical, criticizing Ackerman and Alstott’s funding of the stake through an inheritance tax as “a tax on love.” He endorses a modified version that provides a voucher that will ensure that the stake is used only for productive investments.

            Three chapters criticize Ackerman and Alstott’s proposal. Cécile Fabre criticizes Stakeholding for being insufficiently egalitarian, but most of her criticism amount to the claim that Stakeholding is merely a step in the right direction rather than the full solution. Carole Pateman addresses Ackerman’s allegation that the choice of basic income over basic capital is paternalistic. She argues that basic income must be preferred to basic capital not for paternalistic reasons but because the power and economic security basic income gives individuals (and that basic capital does not). Robert van der Veen argues that for all of Ackerman and Alstott’s criticism of basic income as paternalistic, their system has quite a few restrictions on individual behavior. There are conditions attached to the stake; individuals are to receive a citizens pension (rather than being told to save their stake for retirement), and in between they advocate substantial welfare state protections. Van der Veen estimates that if Ackerman and Alstott replaced all of these other provisions by adding equivalent values to the stake they could up its value by nearly three fold to $228,000. Van der Veen observes that while Van Parijs is consistently focused on the desire to maximize “real freedom,” some other value unexplained principle, is competing with Ackerman and Alstott’s desire to increase economic opportunity.

            Probably the most interesting part of the book is Ackerman’s concluding chapter. Surprisingly, he devotes nearly half of the chapter to a rebuttal of van Donselaar’s exploitation allegation. This had special interest to me, because I have spent more time criticizing van Donselaar than possibly anyone else so far,[2] but even I began to feel for him after the way he was handled by Ackerman. Those with an interest in the exploitation objection will be interested in how Ackerman shows that some of the conclusions van Donselaar draws from his models are assumption-specific, and how he defends liberal education against van Donselaar’s case for training individuals to be more productive. Van Donselaar made the tactical mistake of accusing Ackerman of failing to “think through these conceptual complexities.” Ackerman is a venerable, prestigious political theorist, who was able to dismiss van Donselaar’s accusation with an overwhelming amount of self-citations. Van Donselaar left himself wide open to this and so it was a fair tactic by Ackerman. However, although the response was extremely effective rhetorically, it might have allowed Ackerman to escape more substantive parts of van Donselaar’s criticism.

[1] New Haven: Yale University Press.

[2] A chapter in The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee, an article in Political Studies, and these were the result of four working papers on www.usbig.net.

Review of “Libertarianism Without Inequality” from 2005

by Karl Widerquist | Feb 14, 2005 | Opinion, The Indepentarian

Book review of “Libertarianism without inequality,” by Michael Otsuka14th February 2005, Oxford University Press, 2003, 158 pages

Review by Karl Widerquist, originally published in the Citizens Income Newsletter, 14th February 2005

According to the dust jacket, “Michael Otsuka sets out to vindicate left-libertarianism, a political philosophy which combines stringent rights of control over one’s own mind, body, and life with egalitarian rights of ownership of the world.” In so doing, he creates a political philosophy more true to the ideal of self-ownership than libertarian philosophers such as Robert Nozick, and more true to the idea of society as a voluntary association than liberal egalitarian philosophers such as John Rawls. Otsuka reconsiders self-ownership and the “Lockean proviso” on which much of Nozick’s argument against the redistribution of property rests. He presents his work as a revision of Locke, but one that is true to the voluntary spirit of Locke’s treatise.

Otsuka defines “robust self-ownership” as “in addition to having the libertarian right itself, one also has rights over enough worldly resources to ensure that one will not be forced by necessity to come to the assistance of others in a manner involving the sacrifice of one’s life, limb, or labour”. Nozick does not consider robust self-ownership and seems willing to sacrifice it to preserve nominal self-ownership and unrestricted rights of property ownership. He, therefore, ends up with a world in which people are much less free than Otsuka’s society.

Locke, like many other philosophers, begins with the recognition that all people have equal claim to the land and resources of the world, and argues that individuals can appropriate portions of it as long as they leave “enough and as good” for everyone else. If one interprets this to mean that others are no worse off than they would be in a primitive state of nature, the proviso allows great inequalities to result from the appropriation of land. But Otsuka defines an “egalitarian proviso” to mean that one can only appropriate resources if they leave others with the ability to acquire an equally advantageous share. Such a rule might allow inequalities, but none that follow from control of resources outside of one’s own mind and body.

By basing his theory of government on the principles of robust libertarian self-ownership and the egalitarian Lockean proviso, Otsuka seeks to create a society in which all people give their actual consent to the political society in which they live, not the weak tacit consent offered by Locke nor the hypothetical consent offered by Rawls. Otsuka goes on to apply his theory to issues such as the right to punish and intergenerational equity. However, the distributive implications of these two principles will be of most interest to readers of the Citizen’s Income Newsletter.

Otsuka does not discuss what practical policy would be needed to ensure that these two principles are upheld in a modern society, and he does not discuss basic income at all. He sticks instead to the hypothetical model of an agrarian society in which these principles can be attained by granting plots of land. However, a very good case for basic income could be made using these two principles. The egalitarian proviso justifies a large amount of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor, and the principle of robust libertarian self-ownership implies that redistribution should come in the form of an unconditional grant large enough to cover one’s basic needs. What policy could do this other than basic income?

REVIEW OF “THE WORLD OWES YOU A LIVING” (from 2003)

by Karl Widerquist | Oct 31, 2003 | Opinion, The Indepentarian

This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in October 2003. 

A few years ago on April 1, a New York public radio station did an interview with a woman who wrote books entirely by downloading bits and pieces of other people’s writing from the internet. That interview was an April Fool’s Day joke, but as any post-modern artist or Hip Hop DJ can tell you, it is quite possible to do something that’s new and creative by piecing together bits of already existing material. And that is exactly what Vancouver audio-author Matt Fair has done with his new audio production, “The World Owes You a Living.” The audacious title is a reference to a Brian Mulroney speech complaining some “Canadians, and there are a lot of them, who believe the world owes them a living.” Matt Fair spent years collecting audio clips, mostly from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and splicing them together in a way to make Mulroney’s lecturing of the poor look ridiculous.

This work does not pretend to be an academic inquiry and does not contain a single line of argumentation from premise to conclusion; ideas come and go, and most of the quotes are unattributed. It is instead a strong artistic statement in favor of the basic income guarantee. It slides from topic to topic, juxtaposing for example, society’s desire to punish criminals with the market’s ability to punish nonconformists. Statistics of the growing prison population, come up next to an employment consultant saying, “You’d better be prepared to take any job that’s available or the market will punish you.” Although the author claims no direct influence from Rap music, he uses sampling techniques common to Hip Hop as the consultant returns saying, “punish you, punish you, punish you,” between statistics on poverty or homelessness.

The audio production is about seven hours long and is sold in a six CD set. It would make an excellent radio program, but if you’re interested in the CD’s they are available on the web at:

https://www.theworldowesyoualiving.org/

https://www.theworldowesyoualiving.org/PAGES/brochurepage.htm