by Kate McFarland | Jan 3, 2017 | News
Sir Anthony (“Tony”) Atkinson, a distinguished economist best known for his work on inequality, passed away on January 1, 2017, aged 72.
In the words of BIEN co-founder Philippe van Parijs (Professor Emeritus at Université de Louvain), Atkinson was a “great scholar and a wonderful man, to whom the basic income movement is greatly indebted.”
Tony Atkinson (May 2015), CC BY-SA 4.0 Niccolò Caranti
At the time of his death, Atkinson was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford (previously Warden of Nuffield College). He was a Fellow of the British Academy, and a former President of the Royal Economic Society, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the International Economic Association.
Atkinson began writing on economics in the 1960s, when he published a first book on poverty in Britain and a second on unequal distribution of wealth. Throughout his career, Atkinson’s research focused on issues of social justice and public policy, especially related to income inequality. His recent projects included the World Top Incomes Database and a report on monitoring global poverty for the Commission on Global Poverty of the World Bank.
BIEN co-chair Louise Haagh (Reader at University of York) reflects:
Atkinson was a remarkable figure in the field of economics and in public debate. He is behind the concern with inequality as a threat to capitalism that is now common knowledge. Most important of all, with the likes of Amartya Sen, he made the field of public and welfare economics respectable, showing how the economy cannot function without a strong, well-funded public sector and a combined concern with pre- and redistribution to make equality of outcome attainable.
Malcolm Torry, BIEN co-secretary and Director of the Citizen’s Income Trust, describes Atkinson’s books, reports, and papers as having always been “packed full of detail, and always with a purpose: to tell anyone willing to listen that poverty and inequality matter, and that changes to tax and benefits systems can reduce them.”
In his last major work, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (2015), Atkinson presented 15 proposals to curb income and wealth inequality in developed nations. These include a national participation income and an unconditional basic income for children. Similar to a basic income, a participation income grants all members of society a right to a secure livable income. However, as its name suggests, a participation income is subject to a participation requirement. On Atkinson’s view, this requirement might be satisfied by not only paid employment but also caregiving, volunteer work in one’s community, full-time education, or other socially valuable activities.
Although he advocated for a participation requirement, Atkinson was an important contributor to the basic income discussion, even participating in BIEN’s congresses. Haagh recounts that, for over two decades, Atkinson was “open about his support for universal grants” at the same time as he also voiced “skepticism about how the proposal would sit with current welfare systems and norms” — a skepticism which, in Haagh’s view, lay behind his suggestion of a participation condition.
“I interpret Atkinson’s concern as not wanting to give up on ideas and practices of cooperation and community in the areas of welfare and economic development. That is why he thought participation was important as a form of legitimacy and for itself,” Haagh says. “Being the mark of honest and curious scholarship, Tony changed his mind on both the form and funding of basic income and participation income over time, explaining his reasons. Tony was critical in making basic income analysis less messianic and part of the wider welfare debate.”
Torry offers a slightly different interpretation of Atkinson’s endorsement of participation income, while agreeing that his work has been instrumental in driving forward critical, evidence-based debate about basic income and welfare policy:
Early in his career he recognised the desirability of Basic Income, but worried that it might be publicly and therefore politically unacceptable to give to everyone an income unconditionally: hence his proposal for a Participation Income. When he first made the proposal in 1992 he privately admitted that it might not be possible to administer a Participation Income: but he never gave up on the idea, and included it in his last book Inequality.
Elaborating upon Atkinson’s scientific approach to these topics, Torry contends that the distinguished economist’s most important legacy might be his development of microsimulation tools for the modeling of tax and benefit reforms:
It is thanks to Tony and his one-time colleague Holly Sutherland that the UK has been a leader in using microsimulation programmes and large survey databases to evaluate a wide range of individual and household effects of tax and benefits reforms. The Basic Income debate in the UK has been as intelligent as it has been because we can use the tools that Tony was the first to develop.
Tony combined a deep desire to reduce poverty and inequality with a social scientist’s pursuit of evidence as to how that might best be achieved. He will continue to be an example to us all.
BIEN co-founder Guy Standing (Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London), a long-time acquaintance of Atkinson, was among the many saddened to hear of his passing. Standing reflects:
I knew him for many years, and was delighted when he accepted my invitation to give an opening keynote to the BIEN Geneva Congress in 2002, where he gave a characteristically optimistic speech about basic income coming in through the back door. Above all, he should have received the Nobel Prize in Economics. His lifelong work on income inequality will be his primary intellectual legacy. It was the real foundation for Thomas Piketty’s influential book. In his final magisterial book, Tony returned to basic income, and his participation income variant of the idea. He was a gentleman scholar.
Note (January 3, 7:30 ET): Since the original posting of this article, van Parijs has contributed an additional short post commemorating Atkinson.
Additional Reading: Sir Anthony Atkinson on Basic Income
A. B. Atkinson, “The Case for a Participation Income,” The Political Quarterly, 1996.
A. B. Atkinson, “Basic Income: Ethics, Statistics and Economics,” revised version of a paper presented at the Basic Income and Income Redistribution workshop at the University of Luxembourg, April 2011.
Citizen’s Income Trust, “Inequality: What Can Be Done? by Anthony B. Atkinson, a review,” Basic Income News, August 26, 2015.
Top photo: Sir Tony Atkinson at Fourth Angus Maddison Lecture on Data, Distribution and Development (Oct 2015), CC BY-NC-ND OECD Development Centre
by BIEN | Jan 1, 2017 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Louise Haagh (BIEN Co-Chair)
I first came across basic income in summer of 2001 when instructed about it by Workers’ Party Senator Eduardo Suplicy, at his home in São Paulo. I was doing research on workers’ rights, at the same time undertaking a survey of economic security among residents in poor and middle-income districts (published in World Development, 2011a). Eduardo famously played a key role in the drive to legalise a basic income as a policy goal in Brazil, and in presenting the extension of targeted cash grants as a step towards it (Suplicy, 2002). Eduardo was insistent that I do not go home that evening till I mastered all there was to know about reasons for basic income and how the path towards it was being paved in Brazil. Night fell. I remember enjoying more than a few helpings of food and tea, before Eduardo was satisfied I understood, after which – the gentleman that he is – he accompanied me to somewhere I could hail a cab, making sure to have a long friendly chat with the driver before we were sent off into the night.
The basic income appealed to me then primarily as a necessary foundation for consolidating workers’ rights – and in many ways that is still how I see it, but in a broader context of rights to human development. I had been working on workers’ rights and issues of economic citizenship since the early 1990s, during my PhD on Chile and later work on South Korea, both places I spent a lot of time and in which I did surveys of workers’ condition of precarity and their institutional sources of power. Against this background I was struck by the sanity – the immediately obvious justification for basic income. It seemed to me evident that the most important justification was a basic humanist and democratic one – and I still think that today.
Coming to the BI proposal from the perspective of workers’ movements, and in general the problem of the democratisation of everyday institutions, gives a different perspective on the political character of a BI reform. Above all, it makes it evident that BI intersects with other institutional and political challenges. This is something I am very conscious of when thinking about the question of how a BI might extend the social bases of freedom.
The sense in which I first found BI intuitively important was in relation to occupational freedom. I had been studying the economic liberalisation and institutional restructuring of the Chilean economy during the years of Pinochet and found that the precariousness among workers it generated, both economically and institutionally, had become embedded in a way that the new democratic regime of 1990 could not overturn (Haagh 2002a, 1999). The result, I argued (Haagh, 2002b), was that Chile deepened political rights without this leading to the expected deepening of social rights, given the absence of economic rights. This marked an evident contrast to the formation of welfare states in Europe in the 20th century, as discussed in T.H. Marshall (1949). Before I knew about basic income – during the mid-1990s – I had been working on a concept of ‘occupational citizenship’ – first in my PhD and then during a later British Academy post-doctoral fellowship at Oxford University. Essentially, what sparked my enquiry was the contradiction within liberal economic theory – so manifest in the labour market outcomes I studied in Chile – between the expectation of worker mobility– and the lack of underlying forms of economic security – in the forms both of money and services – that would make this sustainable.
I argued the atomised labour market regime not only predictably led to weak investment in skills, and thus a low-wage, low–skill equilibrium economy (Haagh 1999). In addition, it undermined workers’ freedom in a way that denied them effective citizenship within the polity at large (Haagh 2002a,b).
Having theorised a ‘gap’ in terms of absence of occupational citizenship (Haagh 1999, 2002a), it seemed obvious to me that basic income (BI) would be a necessary but not sufficient element in improving persons’ control of their lives.
There are important lessons from Latin America about the political conditions for a BI reform that are important to consider as the debate on BI is gaining force in Europe today. These are of both a practical and analytical kind. Like the case of Chile’s in part stunted democratization, the story of BI in Latin America is not a straightforward one of cash grants turning into rights (Lo Vuolo 2013). Similarly, one cannot be sure prospective transitions into partial forms of basic income through experimentation in Europe will turn into secure bastions of freedom, given the overall context of austerity and preceding roll-back of public sector protections (Haagh 2015).
It is ironic to think that Friedman – who advocated a form of constant basic security in the shape of the Negative Income Tax essentially on freedom grounds as rooted in an idea of independence – also indirectly was architect of Chile’s economic experiment.[1] The irony lies in the fact that that experiment was not complemented with a set of basic rights outside the market. On the contrary, deregulation of unions’ functions – detailed in Haagh (2002a,b) – along with other mechanisms of economic security, was paralleled with the implementation a state organised system of individual insurance, too weakly subsidized to afford real protection (Haagh 2002a, 2006). Given the underlying precarity of workers’ income streams, the individual insurance model was unable to offer effective cover.
The case of Chile shows why basic income has moral appeal, yet the basis of that appeal that lie in destabilisation, precarity, inequality, and loss of workers’ democratic rights may not be a likely political basis for a sustainable BI reform. Moreover, time has shown that in conditions of high inequality and weaker public finances, such as in Latin America, political preferences are likely to continue to be for targeted and conditional benefits (Lo Vuolo 2013, Haagh 2007, 2011a, 2013, Haagh and Helgø 2002).
The practical contradiction – as demonstrated in Chile – between the two seemingly symbiotic elements of Friedman’s advocacy, for economic liberalisation, and for basic security, is then not that surprising from a political and institutional perspective.
This is because the destabilisation of institutions that the first project entails destroys the basis for everyday cooperation within society that gives legitimacy to the second project to extend universal rights. Although Friedman did not see the Negative Income Tax as a welfare right, but as a kind of money mechanism to promote agency and ensure against basic risk, even something ostensibly simple like the NIT, depends on quite complex institutional development and political agreements. The fact that Friedman did not like the welfare state does not mean it did and does not exist in the United States. It is its more hierarchical – interclass-distributive- form that makes it more incoherent and punitive (Haagh 2012, 2015).
In short, the conditions of precarity in Latin America – now more common in the developed world – showed me why basic income is morally necessary for the market economy (as Friedman knew), but not itself sufficient for freedom in a democratic polity.
The Chilean case also showed me that the moral appeal of basic income is not the same as a political foundation for basic income reform. The two may even be contradictory if moral appeal is linked with conditions of crisis and compensation, as distinct from equality as equal standing in a more complex sense, which gives to BI a key but partial role in democratising institutions’ form.
For me it is very important to stress the compatibility of basic income and the interests of workers’ movements. The demands made by workers’ organisations historically can be argued to have played a transitional role in a process of democratisation to consolidate more universal rights. At the same time, the interests they channel in terms of institutions’ stability and democratic form represents something constant and deeper. This is important to remember today when – in a context of growing precarity in the developed world – there is a risk that the defence of basic income comes to be thought about as compensation for loss of – or an exchange for – other rights.
Coming back to that evening in 2001, it was not at all a surprise to me then that it was a Senator of a Workers’ Party advocating for basic income who was trying to convince me of the. To me, it was intuitive that workers’ movements should and would embrace the idea – at least in the context of a family of rights-based institutional changes. Having come to BI via work on unions, I was therefore quite surprised when – after going to the BIEN Congress in Geneva in 2002 – I became aware of the polemical nature of the BI debate concerning the relationship of that proposal and the established welfare state – hereunder social democracy and the union movement. Although it is painful to acknowledge, I think an important basis for that real life tension lies in the academic basis of the BI proposal as couched in fairly abstract and idealistic terms (Haagh 2011b).
In short, coming from the comparative institutional tradition of historical enquiry it seems evident to me that basic income is an element in a wider process of democratisation of institutions in society. The success, substance, form, and stability of that proposal is likely to stand or fall with the level of democratisation of society as a whole.
That is why we should not be surprised that BI experiments and debates are happening today in some of the most institutionally developed welfare states in Europe. It is far from given however how they will turn out.
[1] Explaining the purpose of the Negative Income Tax that closely resembles a basic income, Friedman (1979, 120) argued that the ‘basic amount’ (or ’personal allowance’) would “..provide an assured minimum to all persons in need regardless of the reasons for their need, while doing as little harm as possible to their character, their independence, or their incentive to better their own condition” (italics added) 120 He further (ibid. 121) noted, “[t]he negative income tax would allow for fluctuating income… but that is not its main purpose. Its main purpose is rather to provide a straightforward means of assuring every family a minimum amount…”
Friedman, M., 1990[1979/1980], Free to Choose, San Diego: Harvest.
Haagh, L. (2015) Alternative Social States and the Basic Income Debate: Institutions, Inequality and Human Development,’ in Basic Income Studies, Special Issue on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, August, ISSN (Online) 1932-0183, ISSN (Print) 2194-6094, DOI: 10.1515/bis-2015-0002, August 2015, https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/bis.ahead-of-print/bis-2015-0002/bis-2015-0002.xml
Haagh, L. (2013) ‘The Citizens’ Income and Democratization in Latin America – A Multi-Institutional Perspective‘ in Rubén Lo Vuolo (Ed.) Citizen’s Income and Welfare Regimes in Latin America. From Cash Transfers to Rights, Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee Series, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Haagh, L. (2012) ‘Democracy, Public Finance, and Property Rights in Economic Stability: How More Horizontal Capitalism Upscales Freedom for All’ in Polity, October, Volume 44, No. 4. pp.542-587.
Haagh, L. (2011a) ‘Working Life, Well-Being and Welfare Reform: Motivation and Institutions Revisited’, World Development, March, Vol. 39, No.3. pp.450-573. Also available Basic Income, Social Democracy and Control over Time at: https://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeewdevel/v_3a39_3ay_3a2011_3ai_3a3_3ap_3a450-473.htm
Haagh, L. (2011b) , Policy and Politics, January, Vol. 39, No.1, pp. 41-64.
Haagh, L. (2007) ‘Basic Income, Occupational Freedom and Anti-Poverty Policy’ in Basic Income Studies, Vol. 2, Issue, 1, June.
Haagh, L. (2006) ‘Equality and Income Security in Market Economies: What’s Wrong with Insurance?’’ in Social Policy and Administration, Vol. 40:4, 385-424.
Haagh, L. (2002a) Citizenship, Labour Markets and Democratization – Chile and the Modern Sequence, Basingstoke: Palgrave, St. Antony’s Series.
Haagh, L. and Camilla Helgø (2002) (Eds), Social Policy Reform and Market Governance in Latin America, Basingstoke: Palgrave. St. Antony’s Series.
Haagh, L. (2002b) ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes: Labor Reform and Social Democratization in Chile’, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 37, No.1, Spring, pp. 86-115.
Haagh L (1999) ‘Training Policy and the Property Rights of Labour in Chile (1990-1997): Social Citizenship in the Atomised Market Regime, Journal of Latin American Studies, Cambridge University Press, 31, 429-472.
Lo Vuolo, R. (Ed.)Citizen’s Income and Welfare Regimes in Latin America. From Cash Transfers to Rights, Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee Series, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marshall, Thomas, H., 1949, Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Suplicy, E. (2002), Renda de Cidadania – A Saída é Pela Porta, Cortez Editora
Photo credit: Enno Schmidt
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 31, 2016 | Opinion, Testimonies
This year, BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth. In commemoration of the occasion, founding members reunited at its birthplace–the Université Catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Beglium–for a series of talks on the past and future of BIEN and the basic income movement.
At the end of the year, all Life Members of BIEN were invited to reflect on their own personal histories with the organization and movement. Read their stories here:
• Hyosang Ahn (Director of Basic Income Korea Network; South Korea): “The first time I encountered the idea of basic income was the summer of 2007. I was at the time the vice president of a small party on the left, rather imaginatively named the ‘Socialist Party’, and was preparing for the coming presidential election…”
• Jan Otto Andersson (Life Member; Finland): “… In 1986 I took part in the international congress on Basic Income in Louvain-la-Neuve. My contribution was called “Basic Income in Three Social Visions”: a Red-Blue mixed society, a Blue-Green dual society and a Red-Green combined society. …”
• Christopher Balfour (Life Member; UK): “… Having been adopted as a Conservative Parliamentary Candidate in the mid-1960s…, I began to talk with already-elected Members of Parliament who shared my concerns. In this way I met Brandon Rhys Williams and then his mother, Dame Juliet. They introduced me to this concept of a small payment as of right, no strings attached, to all citizens. …”
• Richard Caputo (Life Member; US): “… I was not taken in by the idea of an unconditional basic income (UBI) guarantee whole cloth. It did not square well with my sense of social justice, nor with my concerns about poverty reduction, though it did address what I saw as the diminished value of wage-based labor in an increasingly global economy and seemed compatible with the social work value of self-determination. …”
• André Coehlo (News Editor-in-Chief; Portugal): “For me to contribute to BIEN…was kind of a natural progression in my personal activism, after the Zeitgeist Movement. I naturally accepted the basic income concept, after defending a resource based economy, as the former can be seen as an intermediate step towards the latter. …”
• Louise Haagh (Co-Chair of BIEN): “I first came across basic income in summer of 2001 when instructed about it by Workers’ Party Senator Eduardo Suplicy, at his home in São Paulo. I was doing research on workers’ rights, at the same time undertaking a survey of economic security among residents in poor and middle-income district …”
• Michael Howard (Coordinator of USBIG Network; US): “I can remember the moment when I first took a keen interest in basic income. I was familiar with the idea, having spent a research leave at the European University Institute in Fiesole, when Philippe Van Parijs was there writing Real Freedom for All. …”
• Julio Linares (“Life Member 252”; Guatemala): “I first heard about BIEN at a conference in Switzerland about the future of work and basic income. I went to that conference because of a hunch. …”
• José A. Noguera (International Advisory Board of BIEN; Spain): “I still remember quite clearly the first time I read something about the idea of a Basic Income: it was back in 1991, when I was finishing my degree in Sociology in Barcelona, and spent most of my time reading abstruse texts of social theory. …”
• Steven Shafarman (Coordinating Committee of USBIG; US): “My drive to enact a basic income – and most of my ideas about how to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize allies – arose from exploring the way young children learn to walk and talk. …”
• Malcolm Torry (Director of Citizen’s Income Trust, Co-Secretary of BIEN; UK): “Almost exactly forty years ago, I left university, got married, and started work in Brixton, in South London, administering means-tested benefits. … [I]t didn’t take long to understand how inefficient, degrading, and disincentivising means-tested benefits were. …”
• Jenna van Draanen (Outreach Coordinator and News Editor; Canada): “Working with BIEN has been a wonderful experience for me. Not only are there extremely dedicated people here, but they are also talented and kind. …”
• Philippe van Parijs (Co-Founder of BIEN; Belgium): “It is hard for young people today to imagine what it meant to run an international network when all communication between its members had to happen through the post. The newsletter needed to be typed, then printed, then photocopied, then stapled. …”
• Martine Mary Waltho (Life Member; UK): “I first came across the idea of a basic income when I was at university in 1984. There was an article in a magazine; it might have been the New Society. …”
• Karl Widerquist (Co-Chair of BIEN; US): “When I first attended a BIEN Congress in 1998, I’d already been a Basic Income supporter for 18 years, but it was exhilarating for me just to find out that there were enough dedicated Basic Income supporters to fill an auditorium. …”
• Toru Yamamori (News Editor; Japan): “My encounter to the idea of a basic income was around 1991-2. I was involved in solidarity activism with a casual worker’s trade union, in which many of the members were homeless construction workers. …”
Photo: Participants at BIEN’s 2016 Congress in Seoul (bien2016.org/en).
