BIEN | Opinion

Daniel Dorling’s Injustice (reviewed in the Citizen’s Income Newsletter, edition 3 for 2010) has been reissued in paperback with a new foreword by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and a new afterword by the author.

This is an exploration of the complex relationship between social policy and the environmental challenges which we all face, with social policy here defined as ‘systematic public interventions relating to social needs, well-being and problems’ (p.2) – and the relationship really is complex because, whereas in the short term there might be a trade-off between money spent on protecting the environment and money spent on health, housing and education, in the longer term money not spent on protecting the environment will impact on health, housing and education. In the other direction, social policies in areas such as fuel poverty will have an impact positively or negatively on the environment; social policies have often been designed to promote economic growth, and this has an impact on the environment; and to redirect the aims of social policy will have an impact, too, and preferably one which will steer us away from the worst of the possible climate change outcomes.

This substantial collection of articles rehearses a plethora of arguments for a Citizen’s income (here termed a Basic Income), arguments both pragmatic and visionary; and an important byproduct for the reader is a distinct sense that the pragmatic and the visionary are related in a way more complex than we might at first have thought.

The title of the series to which these volumes belong contains an important ambiguity. A critique is a careful examination of a subject, so a critical writing is a careful study of the subject under review; but in common parlance ‘critical’ also means ‘significant’. (We might say that the title of the series contains a critical ambiguity.) It is in this double sense that the writings contained in these volumes are ‘critical’. They are careful studies of aspects of taxation, and they are also significant, in relation to the study of taxation, in relation to the social policy field as a whole, and because they have been seminal in their field.

The completion of the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ review of taxation, chaired by Sir James Mirrlees, Nobel Laureate and proposer of a theory on optimal taxation, has given rise to three valuable volumes.

The editors’ introduction to this volume of thoroughly researched conference papers shows just how much has changed in OECD tax systems during the past few decades: flatter income tax rates, ubiquitous VAT, the almost complete disappearance of wealth taxes, a substantial reduction in excise duties, and much more. The separate chapters discuss the reasons for these changes, and also such fields as corporate taxes, environmental taxes, decentralized taxation, tax administration, and the relationships between tax policy, politics, and research.