by Kate McFarland | Oct 12, 2016 | News
Joel Dodge is an attorney and writer based in New York City. Recently, he has been writing articles on the topic of universal basic income, several of which have been published in the online news publication Quartz.
Dodge’s interest in UBI stems in part from his attraction to the idea of a child allowance–a policy he encountered in the Netherlands while studying Dutch social programs. He cites the journalist Russell Shorto, an American expat living in Amsterdam, as an influence. In Dodge’s words, Shorto wrote about “the refreshing surprise of the Dutch government depositing money in parents’ bank accounts to help out with the cost of school books, diapers, and raising kids generally.” Commenting on the origins of his interest in UBI, Dodge explains, “The charm and user-friendliness of the policy stuck with me–how government wanted to be there to help out for the big moments in life, and it did so through simple automatic cash infusions.”
Read more: “The best way to fix child poverty in the US is to give poor kids free money”
With UBI’s recent increase in publicity and popularity, Dodge began researching earlier discussions of basic income guarantee programs in US politics — especially circa 1970, when the US federal government nearly passed a basic income guarantee in the form of President Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, and Nixon’s challenger, George McGovern, developed his own basic income proposal (the “demogrant”).
Dodge says, “Part of learning about UBI has been excavating our past political debates, which is exciting. So it’s both an old idea and an extremely cutting edge, even revolutionary one.”
Read more: “When Basic Income Was Almost an American Reality“
In his most recent writings on UBI, Dodge has explored some of the main objections from both Right and Left. He dismisses the contention that it will “make people lazy” — pointing that, insofar as people do stop working, they might make other valuable social contributions (as did such “gentlemen of leisure” as Charles Darwin and Rene Descartes).
Read more: “Universal basic income wouldn’t make people lazy–it would change the nature of work”
The major worry from the left — that a basic income would disrupt the welfare state in a way that leaves many worse-off — is one that Dodge finds more pressing. In communication with Basic Income News, he describes motivation for writing “The progressive case against a universal basic income“:
I was motivated to write [it] for two principal reasons. First, I think some of the hype surrounding the cross-ideological embrace of UBI is overstated. The right and left have very different ideas about how UBI would interact with the current welfare state, and I wanted to draw attention to that disagreement.
I also saw certain influential liberal policy figures like Larry Summers, Jason Furman, and Jared Bernstein rapidly coalescing around the same critique of UBI in recent months: namely, that funding a UBI would inevitably come at the expense of other social welfare programs. And I think it’s an important critique. Those who advocate for UBI on the left need to come up with a clear and plausible way to fund a UBI while merging it with our existing social welfare regime.
Scott Santens and some other UBI advocates support retaining government healthcare programs and adding on certain UBI supplements, such as disability benefits. They point to the holes in our social safety net, but that’s really an argument for just plugging in these holes to keep people from falling through the cracks–a much more practical near-term project in our political tradition than a UBI, frankly.
And the reason progressives support certain in-kind benefits like food stamps, housing support, and public healthcare is because we think these are essentially fundamental rights that everyone should be entitled to. Would we really go back on those basic instincts if we replaced the welfare state with a UBI? That is, if someone exhausted their UBI, would we support the hard-line Charles Murray-style position that they are out of luck and must depend on charity? I doubt it, and certainly hope not. So I think UBI needs to be structured in a way that adapts to the moral imperative of guaranteeing that certain targeted, basic needs will be met, understanding that there’s social value to providing more than just cash benefits in some circumstances.
Overall, Dodge describes himself as “deeply curious about UBI” but, at the same time, cautious. He believes that it’s important to wait for the outcomes of upcoming studies of basic income before adopting such a policy. Meanwhile, he maintains that progressive reforms should be approached in an incremental manner. As he relates in other remarks to Basic Income News:
I’m deeply curious about UBI. I admire the ambition, simplicity, and utopian instinct of UBI. But it’s also important to pay attention to how basic income works in practice in the experiments that are just gearing up. The best data we have now are from experiments conducted more than 40 years ago, so we need to see how UBI works today.
I also tend to be an incrementalist when it comes to progressive reform. So I try to harness some of the energy surrounding UBI toward smaller scale reforms. Some of our refundable tax credits could be transformed into direct periodic payments from the government to help out families year-round. There are good fiscal and efficiency arguments to back this up, so the political path is clearer. And if we enact UBI-lite policies today, it could pave the way toward bigger and bolder UBI-style reforms tomorrow.
Bibliographical Summary: Joel Dodge on UBI
“The best way to fix child poverty in the US is to give poor kids free money” (August 19, 2016) Quartz.
“Universal basic income wouldn’t make people lazy–it would change the nature of work” (August 25, 2016) Quartz.
“When Basic Income Was Almost an American Reality” (August 30, 2016) Medium.
“The progressive case against a universal basic income” (September 23, 2016) Quartz.
See also J. DODGE blog.
Photo CC BY-NC 2.0 Zoriah
by Kate McFarland | Aug 29, 2016 | News
Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has written an article in Boston Review in which she analyzes and reviews the political and economic theories of Thomas Paine, Friedrich Hayek, and others.
Anderson identifies the roots of modern systems of social insurance in Paine’s Agrarian Justice. She traces the history of the idea and its implementation through the late 1800s — when German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck instituted the world’s first social insurance scheme — and on to the present. In the latter half of the article, she critiques Hayek’s opposition to social insurance programs such as Bismarck’s pension system. Whilst people are fine with people getting insurance from Covered.com.au or other sites, there can be confusion about this part of the social system. Anderson connects modern right-wing opposition to the welfare state with Hayek’s criticisms of social insurance, criticisms which she argues to be unwarranted.
The article is not presented as an argument for basic income, but as a general defense of social welfare schemes — especially those that protect the middle classes. Indeed, Anderson herself clearly favors Bismarck-type schemes, in which “pension and disability benefits were graded according to each payer’s contributions” over Paine’s (and Hayek’s) idea of distributing equal benefits to all. She only mentions basic income “by name” when describing right-wing proposals, such as that of Charles Murray. She rejects these right-leaning basic income proposals — which would do away with all other benefits and keep individual subsidies below the poverty line — as insufficiently generous and detrimental to the middle class.
Although she seldom discussing basic income directly, Anderson situates some of the idea’s most important predecessors in their historical and political contexts. Paine’s Agrarian Justice and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom are both canonical works in the history of the basic income movement. However, Paine and Hayek endorse very different types of basic income policies, for different reasons and as responses to different political currents — which Anderson’s article does much to illuminate.
Elizabeth Anderson is the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan (or, as we say here in Columbus, “the school up north”). Her areas of research in democratic theory, equality, racial integration, the ethics of markets, rational choice theories, and the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill and John Dewey. Her current work focuses on the history of egalitarianism.
Read the full article here:
Elizabeth Anderson, “Common Property: How Social Insurance Became Confused with Socialism,” Boston Review; July 25, 2016.
Photo: Statue of Otto von Bismarck, via Bernt Rostad
by Kate McFarland | Aug 27, 2016 | News
American poverty expert Robert Greenstein opposes a universal basic income in the United States due to concerns about political feasibility, even though he is sympathetic to the idea in principle. Vox’s Dylan Matthews has interviewed him to find out more.
Robert Greenstein is the President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), which he founded in 1981. Prior to this, he was the administrator of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service under President Carter and a designer of the Food Stamp Act of 1977, regarded as a watershed anti-poverty act. Anti-poverty programs have continued to constitute a major area of research and action for CBPP.
Greenstein’s extensive experience with anti-poverty programs has led him to reject universal basic income (UBI) as a feasible policy for the United States, for reasons that he lays out in a blog post at CBPP (dated May 2016). It is clear that he rejects UBI not on the basis of principle but on the basis of practical issues. He worries that any livable UBI would be too costly to finance by any politically viable means and that, conversely, any politically viable policy package involving a UBI would be worse for poor Americans than the current welfare state. This is because, in his view, enacting a UBI would require a cross-partisan alliance, which would push the policy to the right (e.g. by accompanying UBI with the elimination of all or most current welfare programs, as under Charles Murray’s controversial proposal).
Here are some representative excerpts:
A UBI that’s financed primarily by tax increases would require the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history. It’s hard to imagine that such a UBI would advance very far …
Proponents often speak of an emerging left-right coalition to support it. But consider what UBI’s supporters on the right advocate. They generally propose UBI as a replacement for the current “welfare state.” That is, they would finance UBI by eliminating all or most programs for people with low or modest incomes. Consider what that would mean. If you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale, you’re redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce them.
Will we really tax the top 1 percent or top several percent enough to finance most or all of UBI — on top of the higher taxes we’ll want the same group to pay to shoulder a substantial share of the burden of restoring Social Security solvency, repairing the infrastructure, and meeting other critical needs?
Greenstein, clearly, believes that the answer is no — and that, as a result, any politically feasible basic income would be much less than the aid currently provided to many of the poorest individuals (and distributed without any supplemental aid).
Nevertheless, Greenstein’s concluding sentence suggests that he is not opposed to UBI in principle:
Were we starting from scratch — and were our political culture more like Western Europe’s — UBI might be a real possibility. But that’s not the world we live in.
Robert Greenstein, CC BY 2.0
US Department of Agriculture
Last month, Vox’s Dylan Matthews — who has written extensively, and sympathetically, about UBI for several years — interviewed Greenstein, calling on him to expand upon his opposition to UBI.
In the interview, Greenstein reveals that he learned about UBI in the 1990s from the Brazilian Senator Eduardo Suplicy, a former co-chair and honorary co-president of BIEN:
We’ve had this long dialogue, where I would say that I very much shared the ideas of UBI but in the United States, I didn’t think it was feasible or practical. There were, however, ways to move in that direction, such as big expansions of the earned income tax credit and the like. It was an ongoing conversation with Eduardo for a number of years.
As in Greenstein’s CBPP post, a tension between idealism and practicality emerges in the interview. At one point, for instance, Greenstein states:
There’s nothing in US political culture to suggest that there’s openness to doing big tax increases, that’d extend well beyond people just at the top, in order to finance cash payments for people who have no earnings and little or no work record. I personally am in favor of doing that! But I don’t see support for that. I think they’d likely be excluded.
Relatedly, Matthews poses an important question regarding the role of individuals — such as himself — who advocate for radical change as a way to begin to change popular opinion:
One reason I write a lot about basic income is not that I think it’s going to pass soon, but because I think giving cash aid to poor people, including the nonworking people, is a very good thing, and I view it as part of my job as a writer with a platform to try in some small way to change public opinion on that. … Do you think there’s any value in basic income as a persuasive tool that can translate to more sympathy for comparatively modest expansions of the safety net?
Greenstein’s reply is worth reading in full, but we might quote some excerpts:
I very much agree with the guaranteed income goal. The question is how do you get there, and, given the math and US political culture and budget politics, make sure that one is making progress toward that rather than going in the wrong direction? I would view UBI proposals like Charles Murray’s, or even other proposals that don’t eliminate Social Security or Medicare but do eliminate all or most means-tested programs, as clearly steps backward when you do the math.
I worry a little about the UBI interest being a little bit of a distraction from the immediate steps and fights that actually move toward that. I’ve had this discussion with a couple of UBI people, about starting with the child credit and moving to phase in at $0 and so on, and it’s sort of like we’re talking past each other. It’s smaller, it’s incremental. But to me, that’s how you get toward the goal.
I like many people, think we need a robust carbon tax. If we could ever get one, I do think there may be a potential to do a modest-size universal payment with a portion of the revenue that’d grow over time. To me, that’s a different route. The biggest obstacle there isn’t UBI; it’s getting the support to actually impose the tax. But if global warming continues to become more and more of a problem, one certainly hopes that at some point our political system accepts that you’ve got to do something about that. I do think that’s a potential platform. …
Such incremental proposals and cautionary notes are worthy of attention, even — indeed especially — from those who are already committed to UBI.
Read the entire interview, as well as Greenstein’s original article, below:
Dylan Matthews, “An expert on fighting poverty makes the case against a universal basic income,” Vox; July 16, 2016.
Robert Greenstein, “Universal Basic Income May Sound Attractive But, If It Occurred, Would Likelier Increase Poverty Than Reduce It,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; May 31, 2016.
Featured image CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Third Way Think Tank
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
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by Tyler Prochazka | Aug 24, 2016 | Opinion
One of the most visible libertarian advocates of the basic income is Dr. Matt Zwolinski. Zwolinski is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego and has written extensively on the libertarian case for the basic income.
In my interview with Zwolinski, he said a basic income “can help protect the freedom of certain vulnerable people,” although he recognizes there is a trade-off due to the coercive nature of taxes.
Zwolinski also dismissed some of the common libertarian objections to the basic income, saying it is a hard moral sell to claim taxation to help the poor is indistinguishable from a mugger stealing for himself.
“I think there’s a moral case, based on freedom and a correct theory of property rights, that justifies some form of economic redistribution,” he said.
For those libertarians that think basic income disqualifies them from the libertarian label, Zwolisnki said this does not make much sense since many libertarian thinkers throughout history have advocated for the basic income approach.
“Libertarianism is and should remain a pretty big tent,” Zwolinski said.
As a libertarian, what is the best reason to support UBI?
I don’t think that there’s a single best reason. I’m a pluralist in my moral philosophy, and so I think that a lot of different kinds of reasons are usually appropriate in assessing the case for or against a particular piece of public policy.
But, basically, I think there are two strong libertarian arguments in support of a basic income, one broadly deontological in nature and the other broadly consequentialist. The deontological argument has to do with the limits to the libertarian case for private property. For reasons that I think were very well laid out by Herbert Spencer in 1851, I don’t think the standard Lockean story about self-ownership and labor mixing gets us very far in justifying private property in land and other natural resources. For starters, that account simply doesn’t match the historical reality in which most private property originated in force and theft rather than peaceful homesteading. But, more fundamentally, I just don’t see how mixing your labor in a natural object gets you a property right in the whole economic value of that object, as opposed to a right to that portion of the value created by your labor. Basically, I think Henry George was right. And so I think that there’s a strong case to be made for a basic income funded by a “Single Tax” on “land rent” – the economic value of unimproved natural resources such as land.
The more consequentialist case has to do with protecting individual freedom. I call it a consequentialist case rather than a utilitarian one deliberately. The idea is that a basic income can help protect the freedom of certain vulnerable people. But I recognize that a basic income that’s large and broad enough to do that might have to be funded by taxes that violate the freedom of others. So we’re trading off freedom for freedom. That might sound scary to some libertarians, but I think that unless you’re an anarchist you’re already willing to accept something like this. Tax-funded police services, after all, protect individual freedom but are funded by coercive taxation.
I think the seeds for a freedom-based defense of a basic income are present in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, especially in his Constitution of Liberty. Hayek himself defended a kind of basic income, but was never entirely clear about what he saw the justification for it to be. I’ve tried to work out what a plausible Hayekian justification might be, at least in terms of broad outlines. Basically, I see Hayek as embracing a kind of republican account of liberty, where freedom means not just not being subject to the initiation of force but, more generally, not being subject to the arbitrary will of any other person. Once you take that account of freedom on board, I think you can justify a basic income as a way of protecting the economically vulnerable. The idea is that people who might otherwise have to accept any offer an employer makes or else starve aren’t really free. A basic income gives them the ability to say “no,” and thus protects them from being bossed around by the economically powerful.
One interesting thing to note about these two arguments is that they’re not just different in terms of where they start – the moral premises on which they’re based. I think they’re also different in terms of where they end up – in the kind of basic income they justify. If the Georgist argument works, I think that justifies a truly universal basic income. The earth belongs to all of us, and so all of us have an equal claim to the economic value of unimproved natural resources. Now, depending on how much of present wealth you think is due to labor, rather than raw natural resources, the value of this kind of basic income might not be very large. So, on this argument, what you might end up with is a very broad but relatively small basic income. Everybody gets something, but nobody gets much.
The freedom-based argument, on the other hand, doesn’t give us any reason to write a check to Bill Gates. His freedom is already protected by his economic power, so there’s no real point in giving him any more money. And the same will be true of a lot of other people, not just the rich but probably most of the middle class as well. So if the case for a basic income is based on the protection of individual freedom, I think what that gets you is something less than a universal basic income. Not everybody gets something, but what those who need it get will be large enough to effectively protect them against economic domination by others.
What would your ideal UBI look like?
Designing a policy like a universal basic income is obviously a complicated task. And I think it’s a task that should be highly sensitive not only to the kinds of moral considerations with which I spend most of my time as a philosopher, but to empirical considerations of the kinds studied by economists, sociologists, and the like. So I don’t want to claim that I’ve got anything close to the final word on this. I have some ideas, but this is definitely not a one-person project.
That said, I think that given the two distinct moral considerations that justify a basic income, there’s a case to be made for having two distinct basic income type policies that respond to those considerations. One would be a small, truly universal cash grant based on the economic value of unimproved natural resources. Think of this as something like the Alaskan Permanent Fund writ large. The other would be a less universal but more generous grant directed toward those individuals who fall below a certain specified threshold of economic sufficiency. I think the best way of implementing this second program is probably something like Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax, though I also like the proposal set forth by Charles Murray in his book, In Our Hands. In both cases, people earning less than a certain amount of money get a cash grant from the government, with which they can do whatever they wish; while people earning more than that amount get nothing. That conditionality makes the program less than truly universal. But I think you’ve got to do something like that in order to make a basic income economically feasible. Many basic income enthusiasts want a grant that is (1) universal, (2) large enough to provide people with an adequate level of income, and (3) economically affordable. But you can’t satisfy all three of those conditions at once. A Negative Income Tax satisfies conditions (2) and (3), which to my mind are the most important conditions, morally speaking. Condition (1) might be politically important in terms of generating and sustaining support for the program. I’m not sure. But it seems to me that something has to give, and I think there’s a strong case to be made for keeping (2) and (3) and relegating (1) to the land-tax component of the joint program.
Many libertarians say removing all welfare would be superior to replacing welfare with the UBI. Do you agree with this sentiment?
No, I don’t think so. But before I explain why, let’s be clear about two different conversations we could have about this question. One is a conversation about ideals – what is the best kind of society we could imagine as libertarians, regardless of how different that society might look from our own? The other conversation is about pragmatics – what should libertarians advocate here and now, given all the injustices, imperfections and disagreements with which any practical political proposal has to deal?
Now, as it happens, I don’t think either of those conversations gets you to the conclusion that all state-based welfare ought to be eliminated. That’s certainly not something that has any practical chance of being implemented in a world where, after all, most people aren’t libertarians. But I don’t think it’s very attractive as an ideal, either. I think there’s a moral case, based on freedom and a correct theory of property rights, that justifies some form of economic redistribution. Obviously, we’ve had a lot of bad redistribution in our society. We’ve have redistribution to the poor that’s made their lives worse, rather than better. And we’ve had a lot of straightforwardly regressive redistribution that actually takes money and opportunities away from the poor and channels it toward the better off. And libertarians have rightly criticized those programs. But the idea that anytime the state takes money from the well-off and gives it to the poor, that’s morally indistinguishable from a mugger on the street taking your wallet at gunpoint, well, that’s a hard sell. And not, I think, simply because non-libertarians are being thick-headed.
In my experience, many libertarians have called me a statist and denied me the label of libertarian for supporting the UBI. Have you had similar experiences and what is your reaction?
Sure, I get that all the time. Some people seem to think a desire to eliminate the welfare state is just part of what it means to be a libertarian. But what’s their basis for that? That Murray Rothbard thought so? Or Ayn Rand? But why should we take them as the final say on what libertarianism is or isn’t?
As I’ve written about before, there are a number of people who fall pretty squarely in the libertarian intellectual tradition – Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek, and Herbert Spencer, to name a few – who don’t hold that view. Why should their views count any less toward defining what libertarianism is than Murray Rothbard’s?
I’m finishing up a book on the history of libertarian thought with John Tomasi. And one of the themes of that book is that the libertarian intellectual tradition is incredibly pluralistic. Some libertarians are consequentialists, some are deontologists, and some are ethical egoists. Some are anarchists, some are minimal-statists, and some are classical liberals. Of course, not all of those views can be right, and libertarians should (and do!) argue amongst themselves about which view is the best libertarian view. But I think it’s silly – and more than a little ironic! – for libertarians to try to write people with whom they disagree out of libertarianism altogether on the basis of some putative ideological authority. Libertarianism is and should remain a pretty big tent.
by Kate McFarland | Aug 22, 2016 | News
A recent episode of the Asia & The Pacific Policy Society’s Policy Forum podcast examined the benefits and costs of basic income.
In the episode, editor Martyn Pearce interviews a series of four experts on the topic: Guy Standing, economist at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and co-founder of Basic Income Earth Network; Charles Murray, W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; Peter Whiteford, Director of the Social Policy Institute at the Australian National University; and Olli Kangas, researcher at KELA, the group planning Finland’s basic income experiment.
Guy Standing speaks about a multitude of issues, including the immediate need of a basic income to prevent the rise of “neo-fascist populists” and the justification of basic income as a type of public inheritance, which is owed to everyone due to the collective contributions of our forebears. Standing also describes possible models to introduce a basic income, such as beginning with a small social dividend alongside current welfare programs. Near the end of the interview, he provides an extended argument against the charge that a basic income “will make people lazy”.
Next, Charles Murray delivers quite different views on why a basic income is necessary and what a model of basic income should look like. Murray stresses that, on his proposal, a basic income “would replace the entire welfare state; it would not be an add-on” — and that the amount would be low enough that no individual could live alone in “splendid isolation”, encouraging employment and cooperation (combining resources).
Peter Whiteford, the third interviewee, briefly overviews the popularity of the idea of basic income in Australia, before turning to address two major arguments against basic income: that it is too expensive and that it would discourage (paid) work.
Finally, Olli Kangas discusses many details related to Finland’s upcoming basic income experiment — including Finland’s decision to test only a partial basic income, the structure of the experiment, and what is being tested (spoiler: primarily the effects on employment).
Listen to the full episode here:
Martyn Pearce and Peter Whiteford, “A basic income, or the end of welfare?” Asia & The Pacific Policy Society, Policy Forum; July 15, 2016.
Photo CC Slilin
