by Karl Widerquist | Feb 21, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in December 2006.
Four basic income advocates died in November 2006. Noble-Laureate Milton Friedman (Nov. 16), Brazilian economist Antonio Maria da Silveira (Nov.21), former director of the Citizens Income Trust (Britain) Richard Clements (Nov. 23), and inventor and philanthropist Leonard Greene (Nov. 30). Below is a short discussion of the role of each in the debate over the basic income guarantee.
MILTON FRIEDMAN
Milton Friedman, the economist who most popularized BIG in the United States, died November 16, 2006. Friedman was on the most influential economists of the Twentieth Century. His work has been influential in diverse areas of economic theory, but most particularly in the area of monetary economics. Although his proposal of a strict rule for increasing the money supply each year by a given percentage has been largely discarded, his critical work on the mistakes made by the central bank that led to the Great Depression and other economic downturns has simply become part of common knowledge.
More than his contribution to the science of economics, Friedman is known for popularization of free market libertarianism in numerous books, articles, and a television show on the Public Broadcasting System. He opposed government regulation of industry and the privatization of state-owned industries right up to and including the Post Office. He was an early advocate of public school choice and of the privatization of Social Security. Thus, he became known as a spokesperson for conservative republicanism, but his libertarianism was never quite in line with traditional American conservatism. As early as the 1960s, he opposed the military draft and supported the legalization of drugs. None of his proposals seemed more out-of-line with the 1980-2006 conservative revolution than his advocacy of the basic income guarantee under the name of the negative income tax (NIT).
Welfare state policy in the United States, and to some extent across the industrialized world, has been dominated by an uneasy marriage of the liberal desire to help the poor with the conservative desire to force the poor to become better people. So, we have a hugely complex system that is stingy with some of the people who need it most, generous with people who fit into arbitrary categories, and makes everyone jump through hoops to meet the conditions of eligibility. One might expect a free-market libertarian to oppose using the tax system either to help or to improve the poor, but to a free market libertarian it is clear which of the two is the greater danger.
To a libertarian, government interference, control, and humiliation of the poor is a waste of time and money and whatever it might do to improve the poor, it does not make them more free. Through this kind of reasoning, Friedman became a supporter of the basic income guarantee.
“He believed that if you wanted to fight poverty you should give the poor more money and let them figure out how to use it,” as Renée Montagne of National Public radio summarized his thinking. He, therefore, advocated BIG in the form of the NIT: a small in-cash grant to everyone who had a low income with a low “marginal tax” rate that would give them plenty of incentive to earn money on the private market if they could.
Friedman did so much to popularize BIG that many BIG supporters today tend to forget that he never lost his free market attraction to the idea that perhaps the government should do nothing for the poor. Friedman’s support for the NIT almost always came with the disclaimer to the effect that as long as we are spending money to help the poor, we might as well use the most efficient method to help them. He even sometimes described the negative income tax as a transitional program toward the complete abolition of all government assistance to the poor—not quite what most BIG advocates hope for.
Nevertheless there is good reason to think of Friedman as a champion of the BIG movement. Friedman’s NIT was broad and generous to those who needed it most. Daine Pagen, of the Caregivers Credit Campaign complained that many recent articles on Friedman treated the NIT as the precursor to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Although the EITC is a form of negative tax that was an outgrowth of the NIT movement, it is actually a very narrow and water-down alternative. Friedman’s NIT was a comprehensive solution to poverty aimed at everyone, not only at low-income workers as the EITC is.
Under the NIT, the government would make no judgment about why a person was poor. It would help everyone in need, and create an incentive system so that everyone who worked more had more a higher take-home pay. It would leave it up to the individual to decide whether that was in their best interest. This kind of thinking is diametrically opposed to “welfare reform” under Temporary Assistance to Needed Families, which is designed to force ever single parent into the labor market whether or not she believes the needs of her children make that impossible.
Friedman wrote extensively on the NIT between 1960 and 1980, but he paid less attention to the topic in the last 25 years of his life. However, in an interview with Brazilian Senator and economist Eduardo Suplicy in 2000, Friedman reiterated his support for BIG. When Suplicy asked what Friedman thought of basic income as an alternative to the NIT, Friedman responded, “A basic or citizen’s income is not an alternative to a negative income tax. It is simply another way to introduce a negative income tax.”
A quick web search will produce thousands of articles on Friedman. For a broad view of his career and contributions, see Samuel Brittan in the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/cms/s/cb74eef8-7599-11db-aea1-0000779e2340.html
ANTONIO MARIA DA SILVEIRA
Antonio Maria da Silveira, professor of economics at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, died on November 21. According to his long-time friend, Eduardo Suplicy, “Antonio Maria was the first Brazilian economist who proposed the institution of a guaranteed minimum income program through a negative income tax. It was in the article Redistribuição de Renda (Redistribution of Income), published in Revista Brasileira de Economia, in April 1975.” Drawing inspiration from Economists as diverse as J. M. Keyns and F. A. Hayek, Antonio Maria argued that it would soon become feasible for the government to secure a decent living for everyone. Suplicy credits him with being a consistent voice in favor of a basic income guarantee right through the passage of a bill to gradually phase in a basic income in Brazil. Suplicy’s tribute to Antonio Maria da Silveira is in the December issue of the BIEN NewsFlash (www.basicincome.org).
RICHARD CLEMENTS
Richard Clements, former director of the Citizens Income Trust (CIT), died November 23, 2006. According to the CIT, “The Citizen’s Income Trust has been sorry to hear of the death of Richard Clements. After being editor of Tribune and running Neil Kinnock’s office, Richard was Director of the Citizen’s Income Trust from 1993 to 1996, when sadly he had to retire because of his own ill health and to look after his wife Bridget. He was a most effective Director, and we were very sorry when he had to leave. Not surprisingly, he was particularly good at raising the profile of the Citizen’s Income debate in the press.” Clements was also a campaigner against nuclear weapons and editor of the British left-wing newspaper, the Tribune. The British newspaper the Guardian article on Clements is on the web at: https://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1955580,00.html.
LEONDARD GREENE
Can you imagine a better way to make a fortune than to invent a product that saves lives? Can you imagine a better thing to do with a fortune than use to fight poverty and disease? Leonard Greene made his fortune inventing safety products for airplanes. His stall warning device (a safety feature that is now standard equipment on commercial aircraft) has saved an uncountable number of lives. After Greene was a well established business owner with dozens of patents and a multimillion-dollar business to his credit, he founded the Institute for SocioEconomic Studies, which funded research on healthcare policy and on the Basic Income Guarantee. Greene wrote two books on the Basic Income Guarantee, Free Enterprise Without Poverty and The National Tax Rebate. Greene’s BIG idea was simple: What if they United States replaced everything it is now doing to maintain someone’s income and replaced it with a basic income in the form of a tax credit or tax rebate? Greene found that the revenue currently devoted to tax deductions, welfare policies, farm subsidies, and many other programs could be redirected to a basic income large enough to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States. His ideas have not caught on with mainstream politicians, but they have continuing appeal. His idea for redirecting all U.S. income support spending into a basic income has been virtually reinvented by Charles Murray in his latest book, In Our Hands, and the idea of BIG in the form of a tax credit is very much the idea behind the BIG bill submitted in the 109th Congress by Representative Robert Filner. He is survived by eight children. He son, Donald Greene died in United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. Leonard Greene died November 30, 2006 at the age of 88.
EDITORIAL NOTE
When I volunteered to write the USBIG Newsletter in 2000, I did no realize how many obituaries I would have to write. It is a particularly sad duty that I have never quite gotten used to. Friedman’s death, following Herbert Simon in 2001, James Tobin in 2002, John Kenneth Galbraith early this year, marks the end of an era when the great economists who seemed to disagree on everything else, all seemed united behind the guaranteed income as the best way to reform anti-poverty policy. Friedman was first among these because of long-term efforts to popularize the idea. Although Friedman considered himself a liberal (or libertarian) who believed freedom was the overriding value that should guide policy and who believed that freedom conflicted with egalitarianism and economic equality, he had something to teach egalitarians. His logic (if you really want to help the poor, give them money and let them decide how to use it) leads me inevitably to the belief that unconditional assistance, in the form of some kind of basic income guarantee, must be the centerpiece of any truly egalitarian program. It has also made me suspicious of anyone who calls himself egalitarian but advocates conditional assistance to the poor. There can’t be egalitarianism without respect for the poor, and how can we say we respect the poor if we advocate policies designed to promote “equality but…”? For example, I support equality but only for the truly needed. I support equality but only if they are willing to work. I support equality butnot one of them is going to get their hands on one red cent of my tax dollars if they’ve ever refused a job. I can’t help but be suspicious. I can’t help but come back that that idea, if you really care about the poor, if you really want to help them, you will give them money unconditionally, with no supervision, without asking for anything in return. Sometimes it takes a libertarian spot a true egalitarian.
-Karl Widerquist, New Orleans, LA, December 20
by Kate McFarland | Oct 23, 2017 | Opinion
Relaxing Conditions on ‘Basic Income’: A Case Against Definition
From a linguistic standpoint, there is no one “correct” definition of the term ‘basic income’ [1]. Different groups and organizations have adopted different definitions, suitable to their purposes, and these definitions sometimes conflict with one another.
BIEN, at present, coordinates affiliates who use the term differently from one another, organizes conferences to bring together individuals who use the term differently from one another, and issues news reports on varied stories in which the term is used in different ways.
I have come to believe that, in its role as such an umbrella organization, BIEN’s attempt to define ‘basic income’ does not lend clarity. Instead, to avoid equivocation and confusion, it would do better to admit upfront this diversity in definition and shades of meaning.
BIEN’s Definition of ‘Basic Income’: One Among Many
At its 2016 Congress in Seoul, BIEN adopted the following definition: “A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.”
When I write for BIEN’s website, I accept this as a stipulative definition of the term, and call attention to potentially confusing differences in usage. For example, when I report on the recently launched “basic income pilot” in Ontario, I note that the program being tested–in which payments to participants are household-based and income-dependent–does not actually satisfy BIEN’s definition of ‘basic income’ (although, as I emphasize below, it does congeal with an established and widespread use of the term within Canada).
My comments in might sometimes seem to treat BIEN’s definition as privileged or authoritative. This, however, is only an artifact of the particular context in which I am writing–BIEN’s website–and my desire to maintain consistency within this context. I do not believe that BIEN’s definition is privileged in any absolute or objective sense, or that it is more “correct” than other uses that have become established within other groups, organizations, and geographical regions.
As I take it, my prevailing duty as a news writer is to prevent readers from believing false things. In this context, clarity and consistency in meaning are of utmost importance, and BIEN’s definition of ‘basic income’ is a burden I must bear, knowing that there will be many situations in which it will be inconsistent with the definitions employed by the parties on whom I report.
Two particularly important cases, in my experience, are the following two types of definitions:
- Definitions that additionally stipulate that the amount of the periodic cash payment must be sufficient to meet basic living expenses.
- Definitions that lack the qualification that the payment must be (a) non-withdrawable (not means-tested) and/or (b) paid on an individual basis.
A. Definitions stipulating that the amount of the periodic cash payment must be sufficient to meet basic living expenses.
Many high-profile groups and organizations have adopted definitions of ‘basic income’ with this additional necessary condition (philosophers may enjoy the opportunity to say that, on these definitions, “the ‘sufficient’ condition is a necessary condition”); for example (emphases added):
- GiveDirectly, the charity organization known in the basic income community for its impending major experiment in Kenya, defines ‘basic income’ as a type of cash transfer that is “unconditional (recipients don’t have to work or do anything else to be eligible), universal, with all members of society receiving, enough to cover basic needs, and guaranteed for the recipients’ lifetimes”.
- International Basic Income Week, an annual initiative that is pursuing partnership with BIEN in 2018, stresses four conditions that must be met to use ‘basic income’ to refer to a cash transfer policy: payments must be (1) universal, (2) individual, (3) unconditional, and (4) high enough.
- Founding members of the Economic Security Project, a major US-based initiative launched in late 2016, have decided to reserve the use of ‘basic income’ for programs in which payments are high enough to meet basic living expenses, and have endorsed the neologism ‘base income’ to refer to programs that provide universal and unconditional payments of lesser amount.
- Multiple affiliates of BIEN–including groups in Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Switzerland, and perhaps others–have adopted definitions of ‘basic income’ (or its translational equivalent) that include some type of condition specifying that the amount of payment must be “sufficient” or “high enough” to meet some type of minimal needs (see “Affiliate Definitions of ‘Basic Income’”).
The question of whether BIEN itself should include the sufficiency condition as a necessary condition (so to speak) has been the cause of previous terminological controversies within the organization, including the one that eventuated in the vote at the 2016 Congress in Seoul, in which BIEN rejected the proposal to restrict the definition of ‘basic income’ in such a manner. In a paper delivered at the 2017 BIEN Congress (“What’s a Definition? And how should we define ‘Basic Income’?”), Malcolm Torry, General Manager of BIEN and Director of the UK’s Citizen’s Basic Income Trust, defends this decision. According to Torry, the adopted definition does not “conflict with any affiliate’s definition”, “represent[s] the consensus among affiliates”, and “reflect[s] common usage of the term”.
All of these claims seem dubious, however, especially when one considers that BIEN has aspired to provide a definition–that is, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to use the term ‘basic income’–rather than a non-exclusive list of necessary or paradigmatic features.
First, notice that the different definitions of BIEN and some of its affiliates lead to different assignments of truth and falsity to certain sentences. For example, the sentences ‘Alaska has a basic income’ and ‘Iran once implemented a basic income’ seem to be true on BIEN’s definition [2], but they are false on definitions of ‘basic income’ that include a provision that the amount must be high enough to meet basic living expenses. The definitions disagree on whether certain core cases discussed in the basic income literature are actually cases of basic income–and this, I wager, counts as “conflict” between the definitions if anything does.
Secondly, it would be more accurate to say that BIEN’s definition reflects a–but not the–common usage of ‘basic income’, and that it does not represent consensus, even amongst BIEN’s own affiliates. As reflected by the above list of examples (and further examples could be given), it is unquestionably typical for many speakers and organizations to restrict application of the term to policies that provide livable cash payments.
If one still wonders why a less restrictive definition should prove contentious, it is significant to notice that the act of defining carries evaluative and expressive element: to establish a definition of a term is not merely to clarify and elucidate current usage, nor is it necessarily an attempt to honor as much of present usage as possible while introducing greater clarity and precision; to establish (and insist upon) a specific definition is often also to express what one values. Specifically, speakers sometimes choose to adopt definitions that are narrow or exclusive and reject ones that are more encompassing.
Many conservative Christians, for example, continue to resist the redefinition of ‘marriage’ to allow the term’s application to same-sex partnerships. And many pro-choice Americans were recently outraged that the US Department of Health and Human Services decided to define ‘life’ broadly to the point of conception. Or, in a somewhat lighter vein, consider cocktail purists who scoff at the practice of using ‘martini’ to refer to any mixed drink served in a v-shaped glass. In the eyes of the conservative Christian and the cocktail purist, the more inclusive definitions are simply unacceptable, for they disrespect the sanctity of marriage and martinis (as God and the International Bartenders Association intended them to be). And when the definition in question has legal or political ramifications, the choice bears substantial weight.
Likewise, in my experience in the basic income movement (especially in the US context), I have observed that many left-leaning proponents of basic income insist upon the strict definition–with the “sufficiency” condition–as a way to distance their own proposals from right-wing and libertarian schemes, such as Charles Murray’s proposal to replace all existing programs with a universal flat-rate cash payment of 10,000 USD per year. Often, champions of a narrow definition of ‘basic income’ don’t want Murray-like proposals to be assimilated into the basic income movement, and their preferred definition reflects this.
Such activists might decry definitions like BIEN’s as unacceptable precisely because it aspires to retain neutrality on the level of the payment. If BIEN were simply to reply that the definition should be kept broad in order to accommodate all proposals for regular unconditional cash transfers, including views like Murray’s, then it would quite directly miss their point. It is their prerogative as speakers to fine-tune the meaning of terms in light of their values and interests, and they might have good strategic and political reasons to insist upon these particular definitions.
I believe that BIEN should acknowledge this difference as what it is: disagreement about word meaning–and not at all uncontentious. This disagreement threatens to present readers and newcomers with potentially confusing discrepancies, such as disagreement about the truth of such commonly heard claims like ‘Alaska has a basic income’ and ‘Finland is experimenting with a basic income for its unemployed population’. For the reader of BIEN materials, forewarned is forearmed.
B. Definitions lacking the qualification that the payment must be (a) non-withdrawable (not means-tested) and/or (b) paid on an individual basis.
As mentioned above, this type of definition seems particularly common in Canada, where the idea has enjoyed a long history, where an experiment in Manitoba in the late 1970s became one of the most famous trials of a negative income tax–or what many Canadians politicians, academics, and journalists would call a ‘basic income’.
For example, on a page titled “About Basic Income”, BIEN’s Canadian affiliate, Basic Income Canada Network, defines ‘basic income guarantee’ (which seems to be used synonymously with ‘basic income’) as a program that “ensures everyone an income sufficient to meet basic needs and live with dignity, regardless of work status” [3] [4]. Similarly, the Government of Ontario, which has recently launched a new experiment of what it calls a ‘basic income’, defines the term as “a payment to eligible families or individuals that ensures a minimum income level, regardless of employment status” [5].
Exemplifying this usage, Canadian politician Guy Caron has introduced a proposal for what he calls ‘basic income’, which is a “top-up aimed at helping low-income Canadians to reach the ‘low-income cut-off’”, clearly not a universal and non-withdrawable payment. I submit that this proposal, like Ontario’s pilot, is not inaccurately named: it merely reflects what might be described as dialectical ambiguity with respect to the term ‘basic income’.
Also in his 2017 paper, Torry states, speaking of the Ontario experiment, that the payments “do not constitute a Basic Income, and perhaps BIEN should say that”. I would contend the appropriateness of Torry’s advice depends, in part, on one’s audience. If addressing an audience of basic income activists in UK, for example, then it might indeed be important to clarify that Ontario’s pilot is “not a basic income” (assuming they endorse, and are most familiar with, the definition of ‘basic income’ adopted by BIEN, the Citizen’s Basic Income Trust, and Basic Income UK). But it would be quite presumptuous to make the same assertion to the Government of Ontario itself.
By analogy, suppose a British child were to overhear an American speak of “eating biscuits with dinner before the football game”. It might be important to clarify that the food in question is “not really biscuits” and the game in question is “not really football” in order to prevent the child from forming misconceptions about the American’s selections of baked goods and sports. But it would not be appropriate, presumably, to tell the American himself that he is “not really eating biscuits or watching football” and should stop using his words like that. But Ontarians are not en masse misusing the term ‘basic income’ any more that Americans are en masse misusing the words ‘biscuit’ and ‘football’. The term has merely taken on a different meaning, one with antecedents dating at least to the time of the Mincome experiment in the 1970s.
Given this divergence in meaning, there is again a pronounced threat of equivocation and confusion. Widely used sentences like ‘Ontario is testing basic income’, ‘Manitoba’s Mincome was an experiment of basic income’, and ‘Milton Friedman supported basic income’ might be either true or false depending on the speaker. Indeed, the truth or falsity of such sentences can be determined only after knowing the specific definition of ‘basic income’ adopted by the speaker (or, as a clue, the speaker’s nationality).
Once again, I believe the lesson here is that a wide-scope organization like BIEN must acknowledge this diversity in word use if it wishes to ward against such confusion.
C. “Similarities Overlapping and Criss-Crossing”
In working as a reporter for Basic Income News, I commonly observe speakers–many of them with considerable experience and expertise in the movement–use the term ‘basic income’ in accordance with the two types of definitions described above.
In itself, such ambiguity is benign; it is a common feature of natural language that the meanings of words are shaped and honed in somewhat different fashions within different communities or groups of speakers. When a speaker realizes that a term carries multiple definitions, she knows that she must attend to context in order to resolve the ambiguity, and she knows to be cautious of drawing certain inferences if that ambiguity cannot be resolved.
Complications arise, however, when casual readers falsely assume that ‘basic income’ is well-defined and unambiguous. And, unfortunately, this is all too easy: most articles and websites that purport to introduce “the” concept of basic income do not mention that the term is used differently, and sometimes inconsistently, between different speakers. On the contrary, many authors blithely write as if the term does have a single conventional meaning, offering a gloss on a definition with no mention of the fact that others define the term somewhat differently. Thus, many casual readers might be unaware of the ambiguities that surround the use of the term–raising the specter of unintentional equivocation, confusion, and false belief (e.g. one might unwittingly come to accept falsehoods like “Alaska provides its residents with livable annual income” or “A town in Manitoba was the site of an experiment in which every resident, regardless of income, received a fixed monthly cash payment”).
If an organization like BIEN wishes to be a broad church, facilitating discussion between diverse parties that research or support something they call ‘basic income’, then, I submit, it should cease to posture as if the term has a single definition.
BIEN could state outright that there is no set of conditions that constitutes a unique standard meaning for ‘basic income’. Then, as an alternative to definition, it could provide a list of stereotypical or paradigmatic features of proposals that bear the name. Some of these features–such as being paid in cash and at regular intervals–are more central than others, and might even be said to be necessary features of anything called ‘basic income’. Other features, however, are matters of dispute or discrepancy (such as consisting of a livable amount and being paid in equal amount to all regardless of income).
New problems would likely arise when attempting to decide what to say about frequently cited conditions or features of a basic income. Even the condition of unconditionality, for instance, might not be sacrosanct. Some have spoken about questions such as whether a “participation requirement should be added to the basic income”: is this loose talk, semantic nonsense (akin to asking, perhaps, whether a “marriage requirement should be imposed on bachelorhood”), or evidence that unconditionality is not really a necessary or immutable part of the conceptual core of what speakers call ‘basic income’? If informed and competent speakers’ judgements fail to detect paradox in phrases like ‘a participation requirement on a basic income’, then it is likely the latter.
Yet more new problems would arise when considering the fact that the paradigmatic form of the policy contains further attributes that are often not mentioned explicitly in definitions of the term: the amount is typically assumed to be relatively stable; the program is typically assumed to be created and administered by a government (although, with some activists proposing privately-funded programs, some definitions deliberately reject it); the condition of “universality” is often (although not always) implicitly assumed not necessarily to extend to children. (See Torry’s paper for further discussion of examples of implicitly accepted paradigmatic features.)
Still more points of controversy could be mentioned. Should ‘basic income’ be defined to require payment in conventional currency (to exclude cryptocurrency-based proposals), or should it be sure not to impose this constraint? Should ‘basic income’ be defined as a universal payment to citizens, permanent residents, or some other specification of the relevant population base?
At the beginning of his 2017 Congress paper, Torry mentions Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of the idea of “family resemblance” in his Philosophical Investigations. He does not, however, carry this Wittgenstein reference to its natural conclusion: a case against definition. I suggest that we do.
According to Wittgenstein, terms of natural language typically do not lend themselves to definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Different uses of a term need not exemplify a common core meaning–and, often, they don’t. Instead, Wittgenstein tells us, different uses of a word are often related by a “complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”.
To illustrate, he delivers the example of the word ‘game’:
Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “—but look and see whether there is anything common to all. … Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ballgames, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how (§66).
The natural progression of Torry’s Wittgenstein reference would have been to argue that ‘basic income’ is like ‘game’: as we examine the diverse and multifarious uses of ‘basic income’, similarities crop up and disappear, with no single common meaning able to be identified. Although Torry does not take this tack, I believe that it would have been precisely on-point.
Of course, an association of “gamers” is free to stipulate a specific definition of the particular type of game in which it is interested. Likewise, an organization like BIEN could stipulate a specific definition of ‘basic income’ to describe the particular type of policy with which it is concerned. One concern, however, is that BIEN’s other actions don’t seem to accord with this desire for specificity. BIEN, at present, seems unified more by word-shape than word-meaning: it coordinates affiliates who support what they call ‘basic income’ (allowing affiliates to adopt their own definitions thereof), organizes conferences to bring together individuals who are interested in something they call ‘basic income’, and publishes news stories about people who talk about something they call ‘basic income’. If BIEN wishes to unify its activities in this way, then it cannot prescribe a definition of ‘basic income’ but must instead defer to the groups and individuals who use the term and who constitute its membership–and, as seen, their definitions of the term are varied and disparate, with only a thin and insubstantial core of features possessed by all.
But we may leave aside questions of BIEN’s mission and goals, for there is another concern facing the organization’s decision to adopt a particular stipulative definition: as a mere matter of fact, the term is used in varied manners that are not always consistent, media coverage of basic income is not always clear to dissociate these (and is usually not), and BIEN does not hold purchase over media reporting on basic income. Adding yet another organization-specific definition to the mix does not lend clarity to confusion. What is needed is straightforward acknowledgement of the diversity and disparity in uses of the term ‘basic income’.
Notes
[1] In this essay, I use single quotes to notate that I am speaking about a linguistic item (the term ‘basic income’) rather than the thing it refers to (a basic income).
[2] Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend and Iran’s oil subsidy reform program possess other non-stereotypical features. Most notably, perhaps, the level of the payments is not only non-livable but also unstable and uncertain. No fixed amount is guaranteed from year to year. (Indeed, as it happens, the future of the PFD is presently uncertain due to ongoing fiscal crisis in Alaska–in an unprecedented decision of the state’s Governor, its amount was halved between 2015 and 2016–and Iran has begun withdrawing higher earners from the subsidy program.)
[3] Note that other groups, such as BIEN’s Australian affiliate, also use ‘basic income guarantee’ and ‘basic income’ interchangeably, but with a definition that includes the qualifications that the payments must be individual and non-withdrawable; thus, the use of the word ‘guarantee’ does not imply that the “Canadian-type” definition of ‘basic income’ is at play.
[4] BIEN’s US affiliate, the US Basic Income Guarantee Network, defines ‘basic income guarantee’ in a manner similar to BIEN’s Canadian affiliate, as “a government ensured guarantee that no one’s income will fall below the level necessary to meet their most basic needs for any reason” (with no condition that the support must be non-withdrawable or paid on an individual basis). However, USBIG does not treat ‘basic income guarantee’ and ‘basic income’ as synonyms, but defines ‘basic income’ in a manner similar to BIEN, as type of basic income guarantee in which “every citizen [is given] a check for the full basic income every month” (leading to peculiarities like the truth of the sentence ‘Ontario is testing a basic income guarantee, but it is not testing a basic income’).
[5] Although common, this is not the only definition in use in Canada. For example, François Blais, a political scientist researching income guarantee programs for Quebec, has defined ‘basic income’ as “an unconditional income that the government awards to every citizen” (see his book Ending Poverty: A Basic Income for All Canadians)–which, as written, could be interpreted as implying an individual and non-withdrawable payment (although not explicitly specified).
Earlier draft reviewed by Tyler Prochazka and Heidi Karow
Cover Photo (Games): CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 B
by Guest Contributor | May 11, 2017 | Opinion
Written by: Conrad Shaw, Bootstraps Documentarian
The Debate
About a month and a half ago, on March 22, the podcast debate forum Intelligence Squared (IQ2) held a debate regarding universal basic income (UBI) in New York City. Being a denizen of New York and a relatively recent and enthusiastic recruit to the cause of UBI advocacy (my partner Deia and I are undertaking an ambitious film project about it), I was eager to go and see this debate play out. I was even more excited when I found out that a recent interviewee and new friend of ours, labor legend Andy Stern, former head of the SEIU union, was to be one of the debaters. This was a chance for a large audience to be presented with the idea of UBI in a thoughtful and cogent way. Andy would be teaming up with libertarian Charles Murray to defend the motion that “Universal Basic Income is the Safety Net of the Future.” Their opponents were to be Jason Furman and Jared Bernstein, Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s top economic advisors, respectively.
The outcome of the debate was far less satisfying than I’d hoped it would be. In short, UBI got spanked. IQ2 judges the winner of a debate to be the side that sways more of the audience in their favor. Before the debate, 35% of the audience were for the motion, 20% against, and 45% undecided. Afterward, the numbers were 31% for, 61% against, and 8% undecided. This means that not only did UBI fail to convince any of the undecideds, but some of those who were for it switched sides. As someone who’s putting a lot of effort into making the case for UBI to the American people, this felt like a foreboding omen of what could come as the UBI discussion begins to take the national stage. For something I considered to be so obvious and beneficial, so necessary, to be, instead, so handily quashed was confusing and painful. In order to understand the reaction of the audience, we did some of our own polling of the audience before and after, and I’ll go into why I think the results turned out the way they did below.
I’d had some uneasiness going in, of course. For one, Charles Murray is a persona non grata among many UBI advocates (and others) for attitudes he’s expressed in the past toward disadvantaged populations, suggesting in his book The Bell Curve that intelligence is the primary factor in predicting societal outcomes like pregnancy out of wedlock and crime. That line of thinking, seemingly discounting outright the imbalances many perceive in our society, makes me very uncomfortable. Sure, intelligence factors in, but I also think it foolish to ignore the factors of class, race, and gender, as well as the neighborhood one grows up in. I’ll admit that my information about Mr. Murray was mostly hearsay with a bit of Wikipedia research on my part, so I didn’t truly know what to expect. To some UBI advocates, Murray is the devil, not to be given a platform from which to spout his evil message, and so, quite understandably, I was worried that the debate could be taken down unproductive and perhaps even bigoted paths.
Despite this caricature of Charles, however, he proved to be a shrewd advocate of basic income in the debate. Although he is libertarian, he stuck to lines of argument that did not put off the debate’s mostly liberal Manhattan audience. In the end, he made some lovely appeals to human decency and equality and got a warm reception from the audience. At one point, he even defiantly rejected Mr. Bernstein’s scoffs that he was naive to think people in neighborhoods and communities would be more helpful to each other under a system of security provided by a basic income. It was not lost on me that this “villain” was the one in the room most loudly protesting for the existence and prevalence of basic human decency and of our ability to trust in other human beings, when people are given the chance to be secure.
So Charles wasn’t the issue on that day.
Andy’s arguments were sound and compelling as always, taken in and of themselves. He has an empathetic and adaptive approach, and I’ve become a deep admirer of his ability to think outside the box in a changing world, even when it threatens to overwrite his legacy. In his book, Raising the Floor, co-written with Lee Kravitz, he makes a compelling case as to why labor unions are no longer a tool that will suffice to fight the labor market inequality and disruption many expect moving into the future, even though his most lauded achievements to date are tied to his labor union efforts. It takes a very strong and humble individual to take a pronounced lateral step from his life’s work like that when being confronted with uncomfortable evidence that it has become insufficient.
However, while Andy’s and Charles’s arguments were valid and compelling, they simply were not enough in the context of this debate. They weren’t sufficient to persuade the audience in the face of the arguments and the pedigrees of their opponents. Over and over again, Jason or Jared would dismiss the concept as utopian or idyllic. “$12,000 is great! Why not $25,000, or $50,000, or a million?” is a paraphrase of something Mr. Furman said once or twice that struck me as especially disingenuous.
For the most part, though, the opponents provided honest, albeit predictable, complaints regarding the costs and logistics of distributing UBI, and asserted that it was simply too expensive, that it would amount to taking from the middle class to pay the poor, and that some lower-class people (especially those with children) would lose out under the UBI scheme Andy proposed. Disagreeing with much of this assessment, I awaited the response that would put those claims to rest in the minds of the audience, but they didn’t come. Andy and Charles chose to pursue more ideological arguments than economical and logistical ones, and the audience roundly took that to mean that the math really wasn’t there.
Our conversations with audience members after the event made clear to us that this was the issue that swayed them. They came in hopeful, and many were leaning toward this strange concept of UBI, and then the chief economic advisors of their political heroes and most powerful men in the world walked out and dismissed it as numerically, arithmetically infeasible, and that claim was not rebutted. If you watched the debate, you may have noticed a rather dashing yet awkward young man in a checkered shirt, trying not to appear unhinged while asking the second audience question (at 1:01:23), in an effort to steer the discussion toward specific and practical ways that could be implemented to pay for a real, workable, UBI. That slightly agitated fellow was me, and my question wasn’t really answered at the time, except with the outright assurance by the opponents that my suggestions simply would not be enough.
I felt a little nauseated during the final tallying phase, because I sensed the spanking coming. These people needed to hear that this is not just an idealistic plan, but an intelligent plan, and the details weren’t provided for them to believe in that.
In the end, I thought all of the debaters did a fine job presenting their arguments. Andy and Charles hit the old beautiful points on human rights, human nature, and the promise of a world of security that I had hoped they would, and they also sounded the alarm bells about the impending threat of automation to our workforce. Jason and Jared displayed a wealth of experience as well as real compassion for those in need in our society. I sensed a lot of room for common ground. I felt that the real issues that might remain, if the money issue could be resolved, would be 1) a disagreement around how to administer aid in general, in essence whether people could be trusted with cash and freedom over bureaucratic in-kind giving, and 2) the dilemma of political feasibility, whether in working up the will of the people or that of the Congress.
I also thought the debate format was one of the best I’ve seen, with incredibly delicate and intelligent moderation executed by John Donvan, who struck me as funny, nimble, and fair. Deia and I were truly honored to be there and thrilled that UBI was getting real time in the national dialogue.
The format, however, still left one major thing to be desired for me. It was still a debate. Debates are made for winning, and throughout this one you can hear both sides often plea “and that’s why I want you to vote for my side.” I much prefer a discussion to a debate, with no declared winners or losers. If the only thing to be gained is a bit of mutual growth and understanding, I think we can all get to the work of progressing a little faster.
Actively keeping my cool after the final applause, I hovered maybe 12 feet from Jason Furman and his friends and admirers until I could politely poke my head in and beg him for an interview. I already had about 453 questions in mind. He graciously accepted without a second thought, which went a long way in elevating my estimation of a man who had just stepped on my heart and ground it into the dirt a little.
The Interview
A few weeks later, Deia and I were on a bus from New York City to Washington D.C. to interview not only our first opponent of UBI, but a man who had batted it down so very effectively and seemingly effortlessly. I was nervous, thinking about how new at interviewing I am. Was this going to be a gotcha interview? Should I try to catch him with his words somehow? As I doubted whether I could pull that off, even if I wanted to, in the end I decided that I really just wanted to tap into his very real working expertise of the American economy. This man is an extremely valuable resource, a wealth of knowledge, it occurred to me. Come to think of it, as a chief advisor of one of my greatest heroes (yes, I love me some Obama), and someone who was instrumental (along with Andy Stern, I might add) in passing some very consequential legislation, I reminded myself that Jason Furman, then, is also a hero of mine. He even shared a freshman dorm room with Matt Damon, another major role model in my acting and filmmaking pursuits. Oh crap. Was I going to geek out and ask awful fanboy questions about all his friends or about his D.C. battle stories? Would I be that kind of interviewer?
But enough of my inner monologue. We’re here to talk about UBI, about the economy, about a nation’s growing pains and long-established shortcomings, and about truly progressive solutions to bring greater empowerment, dignity, and democracy into the lives of over 300 million people.
Still, a large part of me expected to walk out of our interview frustrated once again.
In his very first comment, Mr. Furman expressed regret that he hadn’t emphasized during the debate that he is very much open to discussing the merits of direct cash benefits as opposed to in-kind ones, and that his main criticism of UBI was, in fact, the universality of it. This was immediately a change in tone indeed, and it set me at much greater ease about the plan I had made for my line of questions:
1) I would start from a premise, a proposed national implementation scheme for UBI taken as sort of a “best of” from the many versions Deia and I have come across in our interviews, plus a few tweaks of my own, and would establish that all questions in this interview should be considered in the context of this proposed system rather than any other conceptions of UBI floating about.
2) I would walk Mr. Furman, one item at a time, through a list of potential sources of revenue that I was aware of and ask him, in his experienced opinion, what each of those sources could bring in.
Simple.
The “wonkiest of wonks,” as Mr. Furman has been called, was happy to oblige this approach. He would make no promises, and these were all to be understood as ballpark estimations, but he would give his best effort.
The Premise
Although my ideas have evolved slightly since publishing an article that included a nascent version of them, a little while back, my proposal for implementation still generally holds the same. This is a simplified version of it. None of these ideas are groundbreaking within the basic income movement, and many others would likely venture forth a very similar scheme:
- $12,000 per year per adult, delivered at least monthly (preferably weekly) via direct deposit to individual accounts (not as cumulative sums to joint or family accounts)
- $4,000 per child, paid to each child’s guardian, until 18 or age of emancipation, whichever comes first, with a percentage (I suggested 25%) being kept in a trust for the child to access at emancipation, when they would also begin to receive the full $12,000. (Note: It has since been argued to me that all of a child’s money in a UBI program should be accessible to the guardian as needed, and any baby bond type program would be better kept as a separate program, and I’m open to that as well.)
- Current welfare programs should not be directly axed so much as allowed to naturally phase into obsolescence. For example, if every American’s basic income were high enough to disqualify them for food stamps, then food stamps would naturally disappear, and the food stamp bureaucracy along with it. This would follow the basic rule of “do no harm,” in that the benefits an individual received under a UBI must be at least as valuable as welfare benefits previously received, and so at the very least nobody would be worse off financially, and now the aid would be guaranteed and permanent instead of something for which one must perpetually qualify, and instead of something that would be lost upon earning more income elsewhere.
- The total cost of this plan, given the current population and demographics of the U.S., would be approximately $3.3 trillion.
This plan immediately differed in a couple major ways from the plan Mr. Furman argued against at the IQ2 Debate, the plan Andy and Charles were using as their premise. Most notably, Andy’s plan did not provide any basic income for children. This was Furman’s primary complaint against that plan, in fact, because it would in essence act more beneficially toward singles or those without children than toward families. A family of five would fare worse than a family of four, all other things being equal. Furman stated to me outright that this one change made him much more amenable to the plan I proposed.
The major remaining issue now was the same issue I imagine Andy was hoping to mitigate by leaving children out of his plan: the price. Andy’s plan was $1.8 trillion to my $3.3 trillion, and if Furman painted Andy’s cost as naive and fundamentally unfeasible, mine must be delusional. But he was willing to go through the numbers, and I felt good that he was now at least in support, morally, of the structure of the benefits and the effect they would have on the American people.
So how, then, do we pay for it?
Let’s start simple. Funded with the most blunt instrument possible, this $3.3 trillion price tag would require levying approximately a 20-25% flat tax (depending on how you choose to approximate it) on top of our current progressive system. In other words, every American would pay an additional 20-25% on whatever income they earn outside of the basic income. In a worse-case scenario of a 25% flat tax, this would create a break-even point of $48,000 for an individual. Citizens earning less than this break-even point would be net beneficiaries of the system (in essence, the individual earning $48,000 would pay an extra $12,000 in taxes and receive $12,000 in basic income). The break-even point for a family of four would be $128,000. The less you make, the more of your basic income you end up keeping.
Of course, this means that people above the break-even point would be net contributors, paying more into the program than receiving from it, and most would agree that levying even a small amount of extra taxes on someone making $50K-$60K is neither ideal nor easy to sell politically. Even though it would already represent a net benefit for more than 60% of the country, and even if it would essentially eradicate extreme poverty and homelessness, and even if it would give every American enough security to know they won’t ever end up in the streets, we should be able to do better than $48,000, right?
And so if we want to do this intelligently, we shouldn’t simply slap a flat tax on top of the system we already have and call it a day. We should pay for as much of the UBI as possible through other means in order to drag the necessary flat tax percentage down. If we can lower it to 15%, for example, then the break-even point for individuals would become $80,000. At 10%, it would be $120,000. For families of four, it would be $213,000 and $320,000, respectively. At that point you’d have to be in the top 10%-20% of the country to not be receiving extra money off of UBI. So, let’s try to work in that direction.
Does all of this still sound numerically far-fetched? How could 90% of the country directly profit off of a system like this? The money has to come from somewhere, right? Does this amount to pure socialism? I had the very same instincts at first, and so some back-of-the-napkin calculations were necessary for me to even decide whether UBI was idle fantasy or worth looking into further.
The reality truly is numerically far-fetched in the opposite direction, and it’s just not yet widely understood the extent to which that is the case. The extremely wealthy make so much more money than the rest of Americans that funding a UBI is more than feasible. Just as an example, if we went full socialist and we took all of the net worth and income that households in this country own and make, that we know of, and divided it evenly between all Americans, we could give every man, woman, and child each around $280,000 in savings and an income of $55,000 per year.
Think about that for a minute, or twelve. That includes children, the homeless, and retirees. That would be over a million in the bank and a yearly income of $220,000 for every family of four. That’s how rich the rich are. That’s what has been hidden from us. If we’re asking for zero redistribution of already-owned wealth and only $12,000 of that $55,000 in income per person per year so that nobody starves in the street, it’s not only possible, but it’s simple. It’s a matter of public awareness and political will. It’s a matter of priorities and values. Homelessness and poverty are choices made not by their victims, but by the very structure of our society. Every time we feel a pang of guilt at walking by a homeless person on the street, it should be accompanied by a stab of outrage, because we have the power, today, to fix it. If we don’t each stand up and fight for it, we are each complicit in the pain of so many.
Also, bear in mind that UBI won’t solve the problem of massive income inequality. The very wealthy will remain the very wealthy. Poverty will still be a force to be reckoned with as automation disrupts labor markets. Further changes to our system will undoubtedly be needed. But a UBI can ensure that nobody need be on the street, and that everyone can live in dignity while we wade through the transformational societal changes on our horizon. Many will still struggle, but no one will have zero. It won’t guarantee anyone luxury, but everyone will have options.
The Devil in the Details
With the bigger picture numbers laid out, we then must delve into the finer points of financing a basic income. Here is where Mr. Furman and all of his up close and personal experience re-enter the picture.
You can listen to the interview and/or read the transcript to see for yourself what we came up with and how it unfolded. These numbers, I’ll note, are very rough estimates, and they seem to me to trend in a more conservative direction. In many cases Furman was not comfortable venturing a guess at all, and so I left those out. Here’s a summary of his estimates in trillions:
In essence, even with many potential forms of revenue discounted (including the ones I forgot to bring up, like a VAT tax, a wealth tax, etc.); with arguably conservative estimates given all around; with zero accounting for potential positive benefits in areas of stimulus, crime reduction, health improvement, etc.; and with only a 10% flat tax added, we came up with ⅔ of the $3.3 trillion needed for my proposed plan. That would be enough for on the order of $7,000 per adult and $2,700 per child each year. This, to me, represents an amount I would be ecstatic to see in any legislation coming up, an amount that would deal a tremendous blow to poverty in America and act as a significant empowering agent for Americans.
Again, many will point out that these numbers are all very fuzzy. Of course they are. The intent here is to show that the scale of the funding is feasible. If you disagree with the values, then let’s sit down and hash out what they truly should be and see what total we arrive at.
No doubt Furman saw where I was going with this line of inquiry, and in the end I imagine that’s why he affirmed that he’d rather see that same money going toward a childless EITC or other, more targeted forms of getting cash to people. This implies to me that, in the end, the financial feasibility of a UBI is not the real issue for him. At the heart of his hesitance is valid concern over the method of delivery of aid, and at the heart of that delivery system lies an issue of faith. Who do we trust more with money, our government or our people, and to what extent? I daresay that nobody wants the government having a hand in all of our day to day decisions, and yet most of us will recognize the need for a certain amount of regulation and oversight to protect us from the large and insensitive forces of capitalism to which we are vulnerable as small individuals. Furman apparently leans more in the direction of relying on government to determine how money should be spent. Those in favor of UBI put more of their trust in individuals. Both parties seem to me to lie not too far from each other on the spectrum, just on opposite sides of center. Then there are those who are far more extreme in either direction.
I certainly can’t blame Furman for his inclinations. We’re talking about his legacy, after all, and the liberal government has arguably managed to affect measurable, positive change, raising many out of poverty who would be there without any bureaucratic aid. It will take great strength of character for our country and our civil servants to see where we need something drastically new and better than our tried methods, and, as Andy Stern did when he stepped away from the SEIU labor union, to bravely and humbly take that lateral step away from our legacies. We must abandon the hope that a benevolent bureaucracy will save us from our ills and instead invest in deputizing our people to enhance their own well-being and create more opportunities for themselves. Our social safety net has served to arrest our fall in many ways, and so it has been beneficial, but people are falling through the holes of that net, and some people have missed it entirely. It’s time to retire the net and replace it with a floor. As a people, we can stand on a floor. We can walk on a floor. We can build upon a floor. Have you ever tried building on a net?
UBI is about putting the money in the hands of the citizens to choose for themselves how to spend it best. It’s about removing the middle-man, the father figure, and the teacher, instead trusting individuals and communities to step up to the plate and invest in themselves in the wisest ways they can. Basic income is, quite simply, power to the people boiled down to its most simple essence: cash. And cash is nothing more than our expression of security.
If we can drive the conversation beyond semantics and distractions to these very fundamental principles, and if we can carry out this discussion civilly and with respect for all political leanings and backgrounds, I believe that implementing a universal basic income will emerge as an irrefutably sensible solution moving forward, passed by wide, nonpartisan popular support. What I encountered most in our interview with Mr. Furman was agreement, and we have had much the same experience with every American we engage in this discussion, be they liberal, conservative, libertarian, progressive, or other. Almost everyone, pro or anti, Furman included, expresses great interest in seeing the results of the ongoing basic income trials going on all over the world. This gives me great hope.
(Note: Speaking of basic income trials, we’re doing one of our own for our documentary BOOTSTRAPS. Our aim is to share with the public the human stories of real Americans from all walks of life receiving a basic income for two years. If you count yourself among the many who are either supporters of UBI or who are unsure about it but would be very interested to see the results, please consider contributing to our crowdfunding campaign. Every dollar will go toward our pilot, meaning into the bank accounts of the subjects of our film. Our production budget will be raised and administered separately. If you’re interested in being involved with or helping the production, you can contribute to the production fund or write to us at bootstrapsfilm@gmail.com.)
Image from iq2 UBI debate website.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Apr 19, 2017 | Opinion
An article by John Clarke, ‘Progressive Dreams Meet Neoliberal Realities’, poses an important question: Is it true that ‘we can draw a line between the models that are concerned with improving lives and raising living standards and those that are focused on intensifying the capacity for capitalist exploitation’?
First of all for some of the mistakes in the article. The ‘progressive’ camp is well described as offering a range of schemes that would be ‘responsibly redistributive, reduce poverty and inequality and ease up on bureaucratic intrusion’, and that would provide enough money to live on: but it is not true that those who propose schemes that would be ‘responsibly redistributive, reduce poverty and inequality and ease up on bureaucratic intrusion’ ‘pay great attention to explaining how nice their systems would be but give little if any thought to the concrete prospects of implementation’. Research published by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and by the Citizen’s Income Trust shows that schemes that would be ‘responsibly redistributive, reduce poverty and inequality and ease up on bureaucratic intrusion’ can be perfectly implementable.
A second mistake is to suggest that ‘there is a fight to be taken forward for living income, full entitlement and programs that meet the real needs of unemployed, poor and disabled people, as opposed to the present ‘rituals of degradation’ they embody.’ Unfortunately, it is precisely the fitting of benefits to needs that results in the ‘rituals of degradation’.
In the section of the article that matters, ‘Neoliberal version’, Clarke suggests that the motive underlying the schemes proposed by at least some of those governments proposing pilot projects is in fact the same as Charles Murray’s: the dismantling of all other welfare provision. He suggests that Citizen’s Income plans might be described with ‘progressive’ phrases, but their purpose is pernicious. He also suggests that Citizen’s Income proposals can provide cover for additional austerity within the current system; and that Citizen’s Income is being proposed in order to promote a more exploitative employment market.
In the section ‘Progressive Dreams’, Clarke suggests that ‘progressive’ versions of Citizen’s Income would be politically infeasible because they would tip the balance of power away from employers. He claims that it is neoliberal governments that seem to be interested in Citizen’s Income, suggesting that ‘progressive’ versions don’t stand a chance; that pursuing an infeasible Citizen’s Income might divert attention from tackling neoliberal depredations; and that Citizen’s Income would be an inadequate response to the problems facing our society. Clarke suggests that what we need is such public services as ‘free, massively expanded and fully accessible systems of healthcare and public transportation’, social housing, universal childcare, ‘living wages, workplace rights and real compensation for injured workers’.
Clarke’s final paragraph is worth quoting in full:
I am suggesting that our movements need to challenge, rather than come to terms with, the neoliberal order and the capitalist system that has produced it. For all its claims to be a sweeping measure, the notion of progressive BI is a futile attempt to make peace with that system. In reality, even that compromise is not available. The model of BI that governments are working on in their social policy laboratories will not ‘end the tyranny of the labour market’ but render it more dreadful. The agenda of austerity and privatization requires a system of income support that renders people as powerless and desperate as possible in the face of exploitation and that won’t change if it is relabelled as ‘Basic Income’.
The arguments need to be tackled one by one, starting with Charles Murray’s. Those who would like to replace public services such as healthcare with a Citizen’s Income confuse two different kinds of universality. The universality of healthcare must be one of availability, whereas the universality that characterises Citizen’s Income is one of provision. Whether healthcare is provided via the highly efficient NHS, or via an insurance system riddled with market failures, what individuals require is availability when it is needed, however much that costs. One person’s absorption of healthcare resources will be very different from another’s. Some people might spend months in hospital, and others might hardly ever see the inside of one: but they all need healthcare to be there when they need it. No standard amount of money can replace such a universality of availability. No doubt this argument will need to be made constantly. The important thing is that it is the only right argument and that it has to be made.
Some of Clarke’s other statements are genuine wake-up calls, and suggest that only Citizen’s Income schemes that do not impose losses at the point of implementation should be proposed. Similarly, nobody should be suggesting that a Citizen’s Income scheme could substitute for a National Minimum Wage or for a Living Wage. Citizen’s Income and a Living Wage would function very happily alongside each other, and would function far better than a Living Wage with a means-tested benefits system. Every time a Living Wage level is raised, means-tested in-work benefits fall, whereas this would not happen to a Citizen’s Income.
Some of Clarke’s arguments need to be tackled. No financially feasible Citizen’s Income would tip the balance of power very far away from employers and towards employees, if at all. Means-tested benefits function as dynamic subsidies – that is, they rise if wages fall – whereas Citizen’s Income functions as a static subsidy because it doesn’t rise if wages fall. Thus employers might experience more resistance if they attempt to cut wages. Also, because a Citizen’s Income might give to some employees more choice over employment patterns, and thus more ability to negotiate in the employment market, it might look as if the balance were shifting towards employees. However, because the overall effect would be to reduce the inefficiencies in the employment market, employers would find their firms becoming generally more efficient. This really could be a situation in which everyone wins.
No doubt some experiments are being conducted by neoliberal governments. This will not be a problem if researchers test the piloted schemes for household losses, and for changes in inequality and poverty. The best response, though, would be for governments across the political spectrum to research and pilot Citizen’s Income, and not to leave it to governments at only one end of it.
Finally, if universality and unconditionality are good for benefits systems, then they are good for everything else. The UK’s Sure Start childcare provision was designed to be universal, which removed the possibility of stigma. The NHS attracts no stigma, and it is highly efficient. Some services will need to be paid for, at least to some extent: experiments with free public transport can mean overloaded transport systems – but many public services are more efficient if free at the point of use. So far from Citizen’s Income being seen as a replacement for public services, it should be regarded as a default model for them unless proved otherwise.
As for Clarke’s final paragraph: let’s be realistic – the neoliberal age might be with us for some time to come, so what the situation requires is survival mechanisms and a modelling of how it might evolve to the benefit of people and planet. Citizen’s Income is precisely what is required. If Mr. Clarke would like to suggest a better alternative then we would be pleased to hear from him.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Apr 14, 2017 | Opinion
Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy, Harvard University Press, 2017, 384 pp, 0 6740 5228 4, hbk, $29.95
This book revolves around two focal points: freedom, and Basic Income; and it might best be understood as a meditation on the relationship between them.
The introductory first chapter outlines what a Basic Income is and how it would tackle poverty, unemployment, and the quality of employment, and how it would enhance an individual’s freedom: freedom within the household, freedom in the employment market, freedom from bureaucratic intrusion… The relationship between ‘universal’ and ‘unconditional’ needs more work, and a Basic Income that varied across a country would not achieve the kind of redistribution that the authors would like to see achieved across Europe in chapter 8, as it would be conditional and therefore not a Basic Income, and would pose considerable practical difficulties: but otherwise this chapter offers a reliable discussion. Persistence with the significant amount of detail will reward the reader.
Chapter 2 discusses such alternatives as Negative Income Tax, Earned Income Tax Credits, and wage subsidies, all of which fare badly in a variety of respects when compared to Basic Income. Basic Income is preferred to a Basic Endowment because it protects our lifelong freedom against freedom badly exercised in our youth; and a reduced working week is criticised on the grounds that it would control the number of hours of paid employment that we were permitted to work, whereas a Basic Income would enhance our freedom at the same time as offering the possibility of a shorter working week. A Participation Income ought to have been tackled here as an undesirable alternative to Basic Income rather than later in the book as a feasible step on the way to Basic Income.
The following two chapters contain some of the relevant history: chapter 3 the history of social insurance and means-tested benefits, and chapter 4 the history of the Basic Income debate. Then chapter 5 argues that a Basic Income would be both ethical and just, with both of those criteria focused on the notion of individual freedom, and in particular on the freedom not to seek paid employment. Among the dialogue partners are John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Brian Barry, and Karl Marx. This is a chapter that the ‘philosophically inclined’ (p.113) reader will greatly enjoy, although whether the unphilosphically inclined will find that it satisfactorily answers the objections to Basic Income listed at the beginning of the chapter is an interesting question. Rather more likely to do that would be the fact that the lower marginal deduction rates that a Basic Income would deliver would make it more likely that someone would seek paid employment, not less. More practical considerations are permitted to intrude when a land value tax is found to be impractical; and the reader is plausibly counselled to seek a more just society rather than a happier one.
In chapter 6, on funding, experiments, and transitions, there is a usefully detailed discussion of the different marginal deduction rates that would be experienced by individuals at different points on the earnings spectrum if income tax rates were raised to pay for a Basic Income. The discussion suggests that such increases need to be kept to a minimum. A variety of natural and constructed experiments are discussed, and the difficulty of employing their results in debate on Basic Income is well argued. There is an equally useful discussion on the difficulty of transferring labour market models and empirical results from contexts within current tax and benefits systems to the context of the Basic Income debate. A number of taxation options are discussed: taxes on capital, on land, on other natural resources, on financial transactions, and on consumption. When the authors turn to implementation options, they correctly recognise that a ‘partial Basic Income’ (which ought in relation to their original definition of Basic Income to have been called a ‘small Basic Income’) would need to be the first step. They then consider options for how such a Basic Income might be implemented, and suggest that implementing it first for a single age cohort would create unfairness between cohorts (p.160). However, if the Basic Income replaced income tax personal allowances and other benefits then members of the relevant cohort would not necessarily receive any immediate financial advantage, and any perceived unfairness relating to a Basic Income’s various advantages over existing benefits systems would result in pressure to extend the Basic Income to neighbouring cohorts. This implementation method has more to be said for it than the authors realise.
Chapter 7 tackles political achievability. A survey of opinion poll results finds the public broadly in favour, except for Swiss, most of whom voted against the referendum resolution on Basic Income because they were not convinced that it would be possible to pay for the high Basic Income recommended by the campaigners. The chapter goes on to find growing understanding of the advantages of Basic Income among trades unionists ( – the UK’s Unite receives an honourable mention). The complexity of feminist, socialist and Green Basic Income debates is well understood. Somewhat incongruously the UK’s Liberal Democrats and Charles Murray are located together in a section titled ‘Liberals’. Separate sections on ‘Liberals’ and ‘Neoliberals’ would have made more sense. Similarly, the section entitled ‘Christians’ should have been two sections: ‘Christian Democrats’ and ‘Christians’. Social movements such as Occupy and the movement that promoted the European Citizens’ Initiative on Basic Income are correctly seen as significant locations for future debate on Basic Income.
The latter half of chapter 7 evaluates social policies that the authors believe would be useful steps on the way to a Basic Income. They recognise that a Participation Income (an income conditional on the recipient’s ‘participation’ in society) would face administrative challenges, and believe that these would result in the participation condition being phased out. They would not. The participation-testing of the entire population would be so unpopular that the Participation Income would soon be abolished along with any thought of it becoming a Basic Income. A Negative Income Tax, which the authors also believe could be a step towards a Basic Income, could suffer the same fate. As the authors recognise at the end of the chapter, the only viable first step on the way to a Basic Income would be a Basic Income paid at an easily fundable level to a single or multiple cohorts. Unfortunately, the last line returns to the possibility of ‘participation’ conditions. The temptation to suggest this should be resisted.
Both chapters 6 and 7 contain material on implementation routes. To have brought this material together into a single chapter titled ‘roads to Basic Income’ would have been helpful. As it is, issues relating to implementation look as if they are of secondary significance. They are not. They are where the debate is now going.
Chapter 8 ponders the difficulties that globalisation, immigration and emigration could pose for a Basic Income in a single country, and the authors speculate about the possibility of a global Basic Income. They suggest that a Europe-wide Basic Income funded by a financial transactions tax or a carbon tax would reduce the economic pressures that give rise to migration within Europe, and would therefore reduce levels of migration, and make it more likely that freedom of movement would survive. Such a Basic Income would also help to preserve the Euro’s viability.
This book is a triumph, and will remain the definitive liberal argument for a Basic Income for many years. At its heart is a utopia in which every individual experiences the maximum possible freedom, and Basic Income as a means to that end. ‘Equality’, ‘inequality’ and ‘social cohesion’ are missing from the index, and Basic Income’s promise of a more equal and more cohesive society might have been given a little more attention alongside the ubiquitous emphasis on individual freedom: but readers from a wide variety of ideological commitments will still find this book useful. It is well written, well referenced, and generally well organised, and it tackles many of the issues central to the current debate.
There will be a lot more books on Basic Income, as there should be given the increasingly diverse and widespread debate. Some of those books will be from the same standpoint as this one, others will be from a different ideological standpoint, and some will be from a more pragmatic point of view. Whatever standpoint they come from, they will find it difficult to exceed the intellectual quality of Basic Income: A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy.
