by Malcolm Torry | Oct 19, 2020 | News, Research
Call for Papers:
Panel on the politics of Universal Basic Income. What role for activism(s)?
This Call for Papers (CFP) is interested in empirical studies that look at the social and political processes related to the growing interest in universal basic income (UBI), including recent pilot tests and experiments, their design and implementation, either at the local, national or supranational level, in Europe and elsewhere. In particular, it focuses on the role of the civil society, experts, public opinion and grassroot organizations, and their interaction with policy officers, government official and political parties. Examples of questions that are of interest for this panel:
- To what extent UBI campaigns and activism have permeated mainstream political and policy discussions? What are the strategies pursued by UBI activists, and how these differ across different locations? When and how are civil society organizations (e.g. trade unions, women and feminist groups, migrants’ associations) willing to incorporate UBI to their demands?
- What are the resistances and oppositions that UBI advocates face in their campaigns? How different UBI frames have shaped its reception among different social groups?
- Do different welfare systems shape different forms of UBI activism, including aspects such as the frames and strategies these groups put forward? What is the precise role played by experts and public intellectuals in these processes? Does the social crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic open a window of opportunity for UBI ideas?
This CFP aims at gathering papers from scholars working on different aspects of the politics of UBI (or guaranteed incomes, negative income tax, cash transfers), to be presented in the context of the 27th International Conference of Europeanists, Council for European Studies (CES), to be held in Reykjavik, Iceland, June 24-26, 2021. Please send your abstract (300 words maximum) before 11 November 2020 to César Guzmán-Concha, e-mail: cesar.guzman-concha@unige.ch Please note that all paper authors must also submit their abstracts proposals through the CES online platform before the official deadline: 16 November 2020
For details of the whole conference see the Council for European Studies website.
by Karl Widerquist | Jun 28, 2020 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This Review was originally published in the Review of Political Economy, December 6, 2009. It’s reproduced here as originally published.
In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, by Charles Murray, Washington, DC, AEI Press, 2006, 230 pp., $20.00 hardcover ISBN 0-8447-4223-6
Charles Murray is not known as a friend of the poor. His 1984 book, Losing Ground argued that the government should ‘zero-out’ all programs designed to help the poor. His 1994 book, The Bell Curve (co-authored with Richard Herrnstein) used questionable methodology purporting to show that people are poor because they are less intelligent than average and that blacks are disproportionately poor because they are genetically less intelligent than whites. If racism is the belief that your race is mentally or physically superior to others, The Bell Curve is a racist book. Yet, his new book, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, Murray puts forth a plan to provide more healthcare, more retirement security and more actual income to the poor with no supervision or conditions attached.
For those familiar with universal basic income, Murray’s proposal sounds very familiar. Murray calls it ‘the Plan,’ saying, ‘I have not been able to contrive a better name,’ but it is essentially a version of the program known as ‘basic income,’ which
has been widely discussed by political philosophers in the last twenty years. Basic income is a regular government-ensured grant provided to every citizen on an individual basis without a means test or work requirement. People with middle or higher incomes pay more in taxes than they receive in the grant, but everyone receives the grant in cash every month. A great deal of literature has appeared on basic income in the last twenty-five years. Basic income is similar to, but not quite the same as, the negative income tax, which was widely discussed in the United States in the 1960s and ‘70s. The major difference between the two is that the negative income tax is given only to net recipients and phased out for people who earn above a certain amount, so that no one both receives a grant and pays income taxes. Both programs are ‘guaranteed incomes’ in the sense that they are designed to ensure that everyone has a small but reliable income, and both programs eliminate ‘the poverty trap’ in which some people find that they can attain a higher income by not working than by working.
Murray cites some of the literature on the negative income tax, but he appears completely unaware of the basic income literature, giving the impression that he reinvented the idea independently. When he discusses people who might drop out of the labor market, his example of what they might do is surf. This example is well-known in the basic income literature from an exchange between John Rawls and Philippe Van Parijs, neither of whom is cited by Murray. Is it a coincidence or is he merely neglecting to connect himself with that movement?
The Plan is most similar to a little-known basic income proposal by Leonard Greene, and elaborated by Irwin Garfinkel, although this connection is probably coincidental. Both Murray and Greene propose canceling everything the US government is currently doing to support individual incomes and use all of that money to finance a basic income for every citizen. The Plan is not quite a universal basic income. Only people age 21 and over are eligible, but it is a basic income in the sense that it has no means test and it is given to everyone who reaches the age of eligibility regardless of income.
Murray promoted the book and the Plan with several lectures in 2006. When questioned whether a guaranteed income is an affront to the work ethic, he responded, ‘You’re a conservative. I’m a libertarian.’ But make no mistake, Murray is profoundly conservative. His books have blamed the welfare state for everything that a conservative might find wrong with modern society, from welfare dependency though unwed motherhood to a decline in ‘man’s’ ability to craft a meaningful life. Many of the benefits he expects from the Plan align with conservative goals. He believes it will lead more people to attend church, more people to support private charities, and more of the poor to adopt the superior values of middle- and upper-class people.
Many people were shocked that a man who wrote a book arguing to zero-out the welfare state would put forward a plan for a basic income and universal health care. But it should not be completely surprising. Murray was sympathetic to the negative income tax in his contribution to Lessons from the Income Maintenance Experiments; and in What it Means to Be a Libertarian, he wrote that some form of income guarantee was the next best thing to the complete elimination of redistribution.
There is in fact a long history of free-market conservatives who have seen an income guarantee as a streamlined, conservative alternative to the complex, conditional welfare system. F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman promoted the negative income tax on those grounds, and it seems to have been part of the motivation behind Richard Nixon’s watered-down negative income tax proposal in 1970. Most recently, Governor Sarah Palin pushed through a bill for a one-time increase in Alaska’s regular basic income (the Alaska Permanent Fund) from $2000 to $3200 per person per year. The free market appeal of an income guarantee is twofold. From the point of view of taxpayers, conditional welfare programs waste a large percentage of their budgets in overhead cost that could be saved under an income guarantee. From the point of view of the recipients, the rules and constant oversight of a conditional welfare system can be humiliating and oppressive.
Murray’s earlier books give the impression he believes that the poor are unproductive, genetically unintelligent people with bad values who have babies just to get welfare checks. One might therefore wonder why he cares about freeing the poor from oppressive government supervision. The answer is that while Murray seems to believe capitalism is a near-perfect meritocracy and that the poor are genetically inferior, he honestly believes that the poor should be free and that humiliating supervision by government bureaucrats cannot make the lives of the poor better. This kind of thinking led Murray to reinvent basic income.
This book—typical of Murray’s research—seems designed to give laypersons the impression of broad knowledge while having little concern with giving that impression to people who know the field. It is a thin volume with lots of numbers and footnotes but without a deep understanding of the research he cites. His discussion of the negative income tax is a case in point. He is aware that Milton Friedman supported the idea and that experiments were conducted on it, but he misstates what a negative income tax is and what the experimental results were. He gives the impression that a negative income tax has a 100% take-back rate, meaning that for each dollar earned privately recipients lose one dollar of their grant. If so, recipients who make money in the private labor market are no better off financially unless they get a job that pays more than the entire grant (pp. 8–9; 74). Almost no one who supports the negative income tax supports this draconian variant. Friedman supported the negative income tax largely because it could be designed to eliminate the work-incentive problems of conditional welfare programs, and none of the experiments tested a 100% take-back rate. Murray also implies that the experiments found evidence that large number of recipients dropped out the labor market. In fact, none of the experiments found evidence that anyone dropped out of the labor market. The relative decline in hours for the experimental group was 2–9% among primary wage earners and up to 20% for mothers of young children, but none of this relative decline represented anyone ‘dropping out’ of the labor market. It was instead attributable to people who happened to become unemployed taking longer to find their next job. Perhaps most importantly, the relative decline of work hours was not always an absolute decline. The largest predictor of whether recipients worked was not whether they were in the experimental or control group but the health of the economy. The people who conducted the experiments concluded that the work disincentive effects were small and did not put the viability of the program at risk.
Murray has not been careful with the facts, but is his plan a good one? Is the Plan a good workable idea that people who actually have sympathy for the poor could support? The answer is mixed. It is small; $10,000 per year minus $3,000 for mandatory private health insurance minus $2,000 for possibly mandatory retirement savings with no additional provision for children’s healthcare. That is, $5,000 per year ($416.67 per month) if retirement savings is mandatory and $7,000 per year ($583.33 per month) if it is not mandatory—for each adult whether she lives alone or with children. A single parent will be able to sue for child support out of the grant to the noncustodial parent, and so might have access to something in the neighborhood of $833.33 per month for herself and her children. But even an adult with no dependents is well below the official poverty line of $9,359 if she tries to live on $5,000 a year. (Following Murray, I’m using 2002 figures.)
Murray’s typically conservative response is that they can double-up with friends and relatives and they can all go out and get jobs at minimum wage. He calculates that when you add $583.33 to the income from a minimum wage job it would get most people—even single mothers with one dependent—out of poverty. He neglects to mention that this strategy involves mortgaging their retirement savings so that they will be more than $4,000 below the poverty line in retirement if they do this every year. He also neglects to mention that he is an opponent of the minimum wage. Since the whole idea of getting rid of the minimum wage is to enable employers to pay their workers less, we can assume that all of his calculations about how well off the recipients will be after they get these jobs are overestimates. He also neglects the very possibility that unemployment might exist, that the market may not be able to absorb the millions of new entrants to the labor market he hopes to see, and that most single mothers cannot work full time or in many cases even part time.
Consider a single mother with three dependent children at ages that make it difficult if not impossible for the parent to work outside the home. Her poverty threshold is $18,307. If she’s on her own and retirement contributions are mandatory, her income ($5000) is less than a third of the poverty threshold. If she can effectively sue the father for his entire grant (an optimistic assumption), she can increase her income to $10,000. If she and the father both mortgage their retirement savings, she can get up to $14,000. That is probably enough to keep her family off the street, but it is still more than $4000 below the meager US poverty line. Murray suggests combining incomes is as a solution. If she cohabitates with another mother in exactly the same situation, their combined income is $28,000—still $1,600 below the poverty threshold for a two parent family with six children of $29,601.
The grant is too small to give a dignified life to the poor without at least the addition of a child grant, but is it better than the current system? I have to admit that on this point, I am inclined to agree with Murray. As horrible as it sounds, in most states, TANF recipients work for less than they would get unconditionally under the Plan. Many people who aren’t eligible for TANF, SSI, or Unemployment Insurance get far less or nothing at all. Even the small grant of $416.67 a month can help many people get by if it is unconditional and tax free. The Plan would save many people from the utter destitution and homelessness that they experience in the United States today. On top of that, a retirement fund of $2000 a year put into a protected savings system would make for a better retirement than many Social Security recipients experience today, and $3,000 per capita could buy basic universal health coverage, solving one of the most important problems in American society today. If the Plan were put in place now, maybe we could eventually get the benefit increased to a decent level. Therefore, despite all of its faults, the Plan would be an improvement for many people living at or near the margins in the United States.
by Basic Income Earth Network | Apr 21, 2020
What is a Basic Income?
A Basic Income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.
Sometimes called Universal Basic Income, a Citizen’s Income, or a Citizen’s Basic Income, it is not the same as a Minimum Income Guarantee; A Basic Income does not reduce as one earns more. For more information: About Basic Income
Why do we need it?
Because someone’s Basic Income would never be taken away, it would
- provide a secure financial platform to build on
- enable the employment market to become more flexible at the same time as enhancing income security
- give to everyone more choices over the number of hours for which they were employed
- enable carers to balance their caring and other responsibilities
- make it easier to start new businesses or to go self-employed, and
- encourage personal freedom, creativity, and voluntary activity
Because everyone would get a Basic Income, it would
- create social cohesion, and
- carry no stigma
Because the Basic Income would never be withdrawn, it would
- reduce the poverty trap for low income families, enabling them to lift themselves out of poverty by seeking new skills, better jobs, or additional hours of employment
- reduce the unemployment trap, so getting a job would always mean additional disposable income
Because Basic Income would be simple and efficient, it would
- be easy to understand
- be cheap to administer and easy to automate
- not be prone to errors or fraud
Many current benefits system are no longer fit for purpose. They assume that everyone has a stable single employment, that household structures don’t change, and that individuals’ circumstances change very rarely. Our lives are no longer like that: and as technology and the employment market continue to change, our benefits systems will become even less appropriate.
In a context of rapid change, the only useful system is a simple one. A Basic Income is as simple as it gets.
For a list of 101 reasons for a Basic Income, see Malcolm Torry’s book, 101 Reasons for a Citizen’s Income.
Why pay money to the rich when they don’t need it?
It is efficient to pay the same level of income to everybody of the same age and then tax it back from those who don’t need it. The alternative is to means-test incomes so that only those who are poor receive them: but that results in complexity, stigma, errors, fraud, and intrusive bureaucratic interference in people’s lives.
Would Basic Income be financially feasible?
Tests for a Citizen’s Basic Income scheme’s financial feasibility might be listed as follows:
- Revenue neutrality ( – that is, it would be funded by making changes to the current tax and benefits system), or sustainable additional funding should be shown to be feasible
- Poverty and inequality need to fall
- Low income households should suffer no significant losses at the point of implementation, and no household should suffer unmanageable losses
- Income Tax rates should rise by a clearly manageable amount
- A significant number of households should be released from means-tested benefits
Would people still work?
If by ‘work’ we mean ‘paid employment’, then the answer is yes. In the short to medium term, we are unlikely to see a Basic Income that would be sufficient to live on, so everyone would need additional sources of income. And because Basic Incomes would not be withdrawn as earnings rose, any family taken off means-tested benefits by their Basic Incomes would experience a reduction in withdrawal rates, and would experience more incentive to seek employment, or to start their own business, than they do now.
If by ‘work’ we mean purposeful activity of any kind, then the answer is again yes. By providing a secure layer of income, a Basic Income would enable people to readjust their employment hours in order to undertake additional caring and community work.
Why pay money to people who do nothing?
In many countries we are already paying means-tested benefits to people who do nothing, and the complexity and sanctions associated with those payments demotivate people and can tip their families into poverty. A Basic Income would take a lot of people off means-tested benefits, and so would encourage economic activity. Pilot projects in India and Namibia showed that in countries with less developed economies, and without comprehensive benefit systems, even quite small Basic Incomes increase economic activity among households with the lowest disposable incomes.
Would immigration go up?
As with other benefits, a government would be likely to require a period of legal residence before someone could receive a Basic Income. Because Basic Income would provide everyone with a secure layer of income, and therefore a greater employment incentive than means-tested benefits, anyone coming into the country would be even more likely to contribute to the economy than they are now.
Would wages fall?
Means-tested benefits function as dynamic subsidies – that is, they rise if wages fall, which can encourage wage-cutting. A Basic Income would not rise if wages fell, so employers would experience more resistance if they attempted to cut wages.
Some wages might rise. Because everyone would have a secure financial platform on which to build an income strategy, some workers would be more able to leave undesirable jobs in order to start their own businesses, or to learn new skills and seek new jobs; and workers would be able to spend longer looking for a job that they might want, rather than just any job. Either currently undesirable jobs would have to improve, or wages would have to rise in order to attract workers.
Some wages might fall. Because everyone would have a secure income layer, some people might decide to take a desirable job even if it didn’t pay very much. Wage levels for desirable jobs might therefore fall.
Would a Basic Income threaten the welfare state?
If a revenue neutral Citizen’s Basic Income scheme were to be implemented, then no cuts to public services would be required. The amounts of means-tested benefits received by households would fall, but only because those households were already receiving Basic Incomes. Benefits specifically designed to cover the additional costs of disability, and benefits to cover the differing housing costs in different areas, would continue.
Would a Basic Income cause inflation?
Inflation occurs when the amount of money available to spend is greater than the value of the economy’s productive capacity. In that situation, if the amount of money keeps growing, then each unit of money can buy progressively less, so money loses its value, sometimes rapidly. A Basic Income scheme paid for purely by making changes to the current tax and benefits system would not add to the money supply, so inflation would not occur. If the amount of money available to spend was below the productive capacity of the economy, then a government could create money until the gap was filled, and that new money could be used to pay a Basic Income: but if inflation started to occur, then money creation would have to stop, and new taxes would have to be used to pay for the Basic Income.
Has a Basic Income ever been tried?
Short pilot projects have taken place in Namibia and India, and something like a Basic Income has been implemented by accident in Iran. Experiments with the similar but different Minimum Income Guarantee and Negative Income Tax in the United States and Canada during the 1970s showed useful social outcomes and very little withdrawal from employment. The similarities between the economic effects of a Minimum Income Guarantee and Basic Income would suggest that the results of the Minimum Income Guarantee experiments would be replicated if a Basic Income were to be implemented; and the differences between them mean that the effects are likely to larger for Basic Income than for the 1970s experiments. Basic Income pilot projects and similar experiments continue in the United States, Uganda, Kenya, Spain, and the Netherlands, and experiments are planned for Scotland.
Further reading
More detailed responses to questions can be found in chapter 10 of Malcolm Torry, Why we need a Citizen’s Basic Income: The desirability, feasibility and implementation of an unconditional income, Policy Press, 2018.
Recently published introductions to the subject are as follows:
Louise Haagh, The Case for Universal Basic Income, Polity, 2019
Annie Miller, A Basic Income Handbook, Luath Press, 2017
Guy Standing, Basic Income: And how we can make it happen, Penguin, 2017
Malcolm Torry, Why we need a Citizen’s Basic Income: The desirability, feasibility and implementation of an unconditional income, Policy Press, 2018
For a detailed treatment of feasibility, see Malcolm Torry, The Feasibility of Citizen’s Income, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016
For chapters on many aspects of the Basic Income debate by world experts, see The Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income, Palgrave, 2019
by Basic Income Earth Network | Apr 21, 2020
BIEN | Research Index Research Posts Research index Congress papers Research depository [ a ] anarchismin our siteacademic papers anthropologyin our siteacademic papers automationin our site academic papersthe BIS papers[ b...