Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky, How Much is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life

by Citizens' Income Trust | Mar 1, 2013 | Opinion

The thesis of this book is that there is a ‘good life’ which can be defined independently of our subjective desires, and that it is possible to determine the elements of that good life and some of the means for attaining it.

The first chapter sets out from Keynes’ prediction that increasing automation would enable us to experience a good life at the same time as working shorter hours: but Keynes ‘did not understand that capitalism would set up a new dynamic of want creation which would overwhelm traditional restraints of custom and good sense’ (p.42) – and, as the Skidelskys correctly note in chapter 2, capitalism ‘has given us wealth beyond measure, but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of having enough’ (p.69).

Chapter 3 surveys pre-modern economic thought, and particularly Aristotle’s, for whom money is the servant of the good life rather than being an end in itself. The Skidelskys then divert us down two cul-de-sacs in order to back us out again. They explore the modern ‘happiness economics’, find it methodologically and ethically suspect, and decide that the pursuit of happiness is no more likely to lead to the good life than is the pursuit of money:

Our proper goal, as individuals and as citizens, is not just to be happy but to have reason to be happy. To have the good things of life – health, respect, friendship, leisure – is to have reason to be happy. (p.123)

Similarly, the authors urge us not to argue from the dangers of climate change to a necessity to reduce economic growth. They prefer a ‘good life environmentalism’: the pursuit of an objectively good life which requires us to treat nature kindly because ‘harmony with nature is part of the good life’ (p.140).

Chapter 6 is the heart of the book because it describes the good life in terms of a set of ‘basic goods’, defined as goods which are ‘universal, meaning that they belong to the good life as such … final, meaning that they are good in themselves, and not just as a means to some other good … sui generis, meaning that they are not part of some other good … indispensable, meaning that anyone who lacks them may be deemed to have suffered a serious loss or harm’ (pp.150-52). On the basis of this definition the authors list seven basic goods: health, security, respect, personality (‘the ability to frame and execute a plan of life reflective of one’s tastes, temperament and conception of the good’ (p.160)), harmony with nature, friendship, and leisure.

The authors study indicators related to the elements of the good life and find that in many ways life in the UK is less good than it was forty years ago. They recommend a ‘non-coercive paternalism’ (p.193), and at the heart of their prescription is an argument for a Citizen’s Income on the basis of their definition of the good life. For instance: leisure and self-directed activity are necessary constituents of the good life, so to enable more people to be employed part-time, which a Citizen’s Income would do, would enable more people to experience the good life.

It is unfortunate that the book advocates the pursuit of the good life purely in terms of our generation of homo sapiens, and explicitly does so in the chapter on ‘limits to growth’. A good life for the planet, and a good life for future generations, are surely just as important as the good life for us. The reader will need to decide whether the Skidelskys have made an adequate case for downplaying that importance. It is also a pity that the book contains no separate bibliography.

But having said that, it is a pleasure to see a book which in general so cogently combines a clearly formulated principle, diagnosis of our current plight, a clear route towards a desired end, and detailed policy prescription designed to take us along that route.

We are of course most encouraged that the Skidelskys have concluded that the attainment of the good life requires a Citizen’s Income.

Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky, How Much is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life, Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2012, xi+243 pp, hbk, 1 846 14448 6, £20

Barry Knight (editor), A Minority View: What Beatrice Webb would say now

by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 19, 2012 | Opinion

Barry Knight (editor), A Minority View: What Beatrice Webb would say now, Beatrice Webb Memorial Series on Poverty, vol.1, Alliance Publishing Trust, 2011, 128pp, pbk, 1 907376 11 5, available from the Webb Memorial Trust, webb@cranehouse.eu

Beatrice Webb’s contribution to a Royal Commission on the Poor Law just over a hundred years ago was a Minority Report which set out five main principles:

• Poverty has structural causes
• Prevention is better than cure
• Dependency should be avoided
• Services should be integrated
• The state, not philanthropy, is responsible. (p.11)

The Government of the time took no notice, but Beveridge had worked as a research assistant on the Minority Report and its findings clearly informed his own 1942 report on National Insurance.

The world is now different, but poverty persists, and the contributors to this collection of essays ask themselves: What would Beatrice Webb have said today? Their suggestions include minimum income standards, supporting poor children in working families (which does not mean enforced low-paying employment), restoring the Child Trust Fund, small-scale lending, raising the tax threshold, retaining universal Child Benefit, reducing labour-market disincentives (rather than regenerating poor neighbourhoods), affirmative action to address discrimination and exclusion, and the active pursuit of gender equality.

In his final chapter, the editor lists four definitions of poverty: ‘absolute low income … relative low income … material deprivation … index of multiple deprivation …’ (p.119): but these are all static concepts. A dynamic definition of poverty would be this: ‘A structural inability to create one’s own path out of poverty’. This definition reveals high marginal deduction rates and complex administrative and income uncertainty and continuity problems on changing one’s employment status to be the serious problems which they are.

Of particular interest is the number of suggestions which would reduce marginal deduction rates. Peter Kenway suggests ‘raising the level of the personal allowance to remove low earners from income tax altogether; raising the level of the income thresholds above which benefits and tax credits start to be tapered and/or council tax begins to become payable; reducing the rate at which tax credits and benefits are tapered away as earnings rise; … reintroducing a (lower) starting rate of income tax’ (p.56); and Jonathan Bradshaw calls for Child Benefit to remain universal and shows how effective it is at reducing poverty. Of equal interest is Steve Osborn’s finding that ‘the uncertainties created by the current benefits system and its implications for moving poor people into employment’ (p.80) is a serious problem.

If increasing inequality is a major problem, if income uncertainty across changes in someone’s labour market status are a problem, and if high marginal deduction rates are a major cause of poverty (and in the context of a dynamic understanding of poverty they are), then surely what Beatrice Webb would be saying today is what she said in 1909: that universal services are what’s required; and she would also be saying today that a universal unconditional income for every age-group would prevent poverty, would tackle some of poverty’s structural causes, would reduce dependency, and would integrate tax and benefits, and that it is the state’s responsibility to see that it happens.

Matthew C. Murray and Carole Pateman (eds), Basic Income Worldwide: Horizons of Reform

by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 18, 2012 | Opinion

Matthew C. Murray and Carole Pateman (eds), Basic Income Worldwide: Horizons of Reform, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, xv + 271 pp, hbk, 0 230 28542 2, £57.50

This book is a most useful survey of international experience of Basic or Citizen’s Income, of benefits sufficiently similar to enable them to be regarded as on the way to a Citizen’s Income, and of significant legislative attempts at Citizen’s Incomes. The book complements Basic Income Guarantee and Politics, edited by Richard Caputo and recently published by the same publisher, with which it overlaps to some extent, but not too much. Both books are essential reading for anyone interested in how experience of Citizen’s Income, and debate about it, are developing worldwide.

Some of the material in the first part of the book will be familiar to readers of this Newsletter, but some will not be. The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend will be well known, but less well known will be some highly positive results from United States and Canadian Negative Income Tax experiments. This Newsletter has already reported stunning results from the Namibian Citizen’s Income pilot project, but less well known are the complexities of Brazil’s and Canada’s political economies and their effects on benefit reform.

The second part of the book describes Basic Income proposals for East Timor, Catalonia, South Africa, Ireland, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia. The overall impression is of a widespread global debate, different in different countries, but with lots of connections between the different national debates.

Murray’s concluding chapter is understandably effusive about the results of the Namibian pilot project, and about the brake on inequality provided by the Alaskan Permanent Fund Dividend. Conditional schemes, on the other hand, are found to lead to new inequalities (p.253), and tax credit and negative income tax schemes to have similar problems (p.255). Murray recognises the different effects of different political contexts, and this reviewer was particularly struck by ways in which more federal political arrangements, such as those in the USA and Brazil, can make the debate more possible locally but quite complex nationally.

One issue over which the editors seem to be somewhat confused is that of terminolog. In this book, ‘Basic Income’ usually means an unconditional and nonwithdrawable income for every citizen, but sometimes it means a class of benefit types of which an unconditional benefit is one member (e.g., p.251), which leaves the unconditional and universal benefit without a name. A similar problem arises in the introductory chapter, which lists some important questions: What form should the payment take? How much should it be? Should it be unconditional? Should it be universal? Can it be afforded? How should it be funded? Some of these questions are ‘controversial questions’ surrounding ‘Basic Income’ (p.2) if ‘Basic Income’ is understood as an unconditional, nonwithdrawable and universal income: but some are not. The question ‘Should the payment be universal?’ is a question about whether we should have a Basic Income. It is not a question about a Basic Income. Similarly, ‘Should the income be paid unconditionally?’ is a question about whether or not we should have a Basic Income. By the end of the introduction we are entirely unsure about what the term ‘Basic Income’ means.

I know that this has been said in these pages before, but it clearly needs saying again: clarity of definition is essential to rational debate.

Our position is this: A ‘Citizen’s Income’ or a ‘Basic Income’ is an unconditional, nonwithdrawable income for every individual as a right of citizenship. The terms should not be used for anything else. Other terms, such as ‘social dividend’ and ‘universal grant’ are equivalent, but only if they mean the same thing. (We do not use ‘Basic Income Guarantee’ because a guaranteed income can mean an income achieved by means-tested benefits.) Widespread agreement on the meaning of terminology would considerably help the clarity of debate, both individual national debates and the global debate, and it would have helped the editors and authors of the book under review to express themselves more clearly.

But having said all that: Murray and Pateman have provided us with a most useful collection of essays on some highly significant Citizen’s Income experiences and debates, and anyone interested in that debate should read this book.

Review: Tony Fitzpatrick, Welfare Theory: An introduction to the theoretical debates in social policy

by Citizens' Income Trust | May 29, 2012 | Opinion

Tony Fitzpatrick, Welfare Theory: An introduction to the theoretical debates in social policy, 2^nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, xvi +  241 pp, pbk 0 230 27202 6, £19.99

The map with which political philosophers and social theorists are concerned overlaps, to a considerable extent, with the particular territory occupied by social policy. This book starts from the premise that you cannot properly understand the one unless you understand the other. (p.xiv)

This accessible and thoroughly researched book is also a vindication of Fitzpatrick’s conviction that ‘welfare theory’ – the philosophy of social policy – is a discipline in its own right. Welfare theory draws on both ‘social theory (the philosophy of sociology and social science) and political theory (the philosophy of politics and government)’ (p.xv), but it orders things in its own way and develops its own emphases. It is not insignificant that the first chapter is entitled ‘wellbeing’, now a focal concept for welfare theorists and social policy makers.

The book is structured around a number of concepts: equality, liberty, citizenship, community, state, power, poverty, society, and class. Fitzpatrick explores the histories of these ideas, the different ways in which they have been understood, and ‘recent developments’. Throughout, there is reference to social policy. For instance: the National Health Service’s achievements are judged against a variety of definitions of equality (p.39), the distribution and redistribution of income is the field on which a discussion of the relationship between equality and liberty is constructed (ch.3), new forms of ‘deliberative democracy’ are related to the idea of  ‘democracy’ (p.79), and the chapter on ‘state, power and poverty’ is largely driven by the history and current state of the UK’s welfare state, the detail of current social policy, and measured outcomes (ch.5). The first three of these relationships fit the three types of relationship which Fitzpatrick lists in his introduction: ‘assessment’ (of practice by theory), ‘explanation’ (of practice by theory), and ‘reform’ (of practice by theory). But we can see that there is also a fourth relationship: practical policy’s influence on welfare and its concepts. To take a particular example: Beveridge’s ‘contributory’ and ‘social assistance’ welfare state was largely driven by previous government-supported co-operative insurance provision and by the Elizabethan Poor Law. The real-world relationship between welfare theory and social policy is a circular one, with each affecting the other. Fitzpatrick’s book is a text-book for students ( – the first edition was written for that purpose, and this second edition has benefited from the first edition’s use for that purpose), so we would expect it to concentrate on the ‘welfare theory forms social policy’ side of the relationship; but in his ‘concluding remarks’ Fitzpatrick suggests that

it is often necessary to take social policy themes and issues into account when discussing social and political theory. Social policy students do not simply debate how to translate principles into practical reality. Instead, they ask distinctive questions that enhance the method and assumptions of social philosophy. To explore social and political thought without substantial reference to the battles fought over social policies is to miss a key feature in the development of modern societies. (p.211).

Following the chapters on particular concepts, chapter 7 is entitled ‘ideologies’. Here Fitzpatrick describes the Radical Right, Conservatism, Social Democracy, Marxism, and Feminism. (Descriptions of the first two and of Marxism are followed by ‘criticisms’; descriptions of social democracy and of feminism are not.)

Chapter 8 is on ‘identities’: a recognition that social policy is often driven by the ‘recognition’ of an ‘identity’ (for instance, disability). Chapter 9 is on ‘globalization’, and shows how a global economy constrains national social policy; and this chapter in particular shows how economic policy has influenced both the idea of globalization and changes in social policy. The final chapter, on ‘global justice and environmentalism’, is new to this edition, and contains a useful taxonomy of types of global justice.

Finally, Fitzpatrick suggests that the utopian and the pragmatist need each other. The truth of this in relation to our tax and benefits system is obvious. Maybe it’s time for a second edition of his Freedom and Security, his book about a Citizen’s Income: a book which exemplifies the complex relationship between welfare theory and social policy which the book under review is all about.