Basic Income: Potentials and Pitfalls in the Future of Social Policy

The notion of a universal, citizenship-based payment, either as a supplement to or in lieu of the in-kind services of developed welfare states, is not a new one, though it may seem that way given the recent upsurge in both political and academic interest in the topic (Healy, Murphy & Reynolds, 2013). Indeed, historians of social welfare mechanisms have found records of debates on the topic which date back to the Ancient Greek city states, and a proposal similar to a modern notion of basic income, termed a “citizen’s dividend”, was proposed in the late 1700s by American political theorist Thomas Paine (Wiederspan, Rhodes & Shaefer, 2015). In these cases, the notion of payment tied only to citizenship (which, given the context, it should be made clear would have applied only to free males) was justified on the basis of common stake in land and other natural resources of the nation. Paine in particular reasoned that, if some were allowed to own land gain income from it, it followed that they owed at least a percentage of those profits back to their fellow citizens, given that the land was notionally a commonly-held resource. Similar arguments continue to be made around some proposals for financing basic income type program, in particular in relation to mining-based revenues in South Africa (Ferguson, 2010).

The Ebb and Flow of Basic Income Ideas

In the mid-20th century, two more distinct forms of argumentation about basic income would come to dominate the discourse around the topic; these can be broadly spoken of as being the “leftist” and “libertarian” discourses of basic income. Crucially, though both spoke in favour of a program they each labelled “basic income”, the concerns that such a program was meant to address, and thereby its overall design, were quite different. The libertarian perspective, most heavily identified with economist Milton Friedman, advocated replacing most existing social welfare spending with a program he called a “negative income tax”, whereby the government would “top-up” incomes below a particular level deemed adequate for subsistence to it (Zwolinski, 2015). The purpose of this was two-fold: firstly, it would eliminate administrative costs and market inefficiencies viewed as stemming from the status quo regulatory/welfare state. Secondly, it would encourage the poor and those who had been reliant on welfare programs to act in a more personally responsible manner and address the specter of what advocate of this approach often termed “dependency” on the government. The leftist perspective, advanced by figures ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to Frances Fox Piven, did share with the libertarian a critique of the often-paternalistic and intentionally demeaning character of the welfare status quo. However, in addition to advocating higher benefit levels within a basic income program, this perspective thought of it as more of a compliment to the existing non-cash elements of the welfare state (most notably health care and education), rather than as a replacement for them (Lewis, Pressman & Widerquist, 2005). Though it is often said that basic income has historically and continues to gain support “across the political spectrum”, it is important to note these critical divides in the purpose and governing logic of “basic income” depending on from what perspective the idea is being advanced.

Despite the cross-purposes that advocate often worked at, a political interest in reforming what were widely seen as expensive and inefficient welfare programs during the “stagflation” years of the late 1970s did lead basic income trials to be implemented in a variety of contexts at that time. In addition to several city-based “negative income tax” trials in the United States, the most prominent and longest-lasting of these programs was the “Mincome” program in the Canadian province of Manitoba (Forget, 2011). Launched both in the city of Winnipeg and the town of Dauphin, the program ran for five years before being shut down without a proper analysis being done of the collected data. Fortunately, in recent years, an upsurge of interest in basic income programs has led researchers to dig into the archives of Mincome to discover a real world example of such a program in action. The results they found, including better health indicators, higher wages at entry-level jobs, targeted effects on workforce participation and lower crime rates, have been encouraging for basic income advocates (Forget, 2011). Though the initial results from these 70s pilots were generally encouraging, changing political contexts and a concern about ongoing program expenses resulted in their being shuttered and the idea in general falling off the mainstream political debate for several decades. This is not to say that the cause was abandoned, in particular it retained interest amongst feminist scholars and activists who saw in basic income a way of recognizing and compensating unpaid social reproduction work done primarily by women (McKay, 2001). As well, the growth of cash transfers, both conditional and unconditional, as a preferred method of social development and poverty relief amongst nations in the Global South has given evidence as to the effectiveness of cash-based methods in addressing many of the concerns of basic income advocates (Standing, 2008). It should also be noted that both developed welfare states in the Global North and a variety of social welfare programs in the Global South (in particular the “social pensions” in many African states) rely on the logic of basic income for a limited population deemed to be particularly vulnerable, usually the elderly or those with disabilities (Standing, 2008). For instance, the Canadian Old Age Security/Guaranteed Income Supplement program provides a minimum income above the poverty line on the basis of citizenship and having reached the age of 65. In some sense, the question of basic income given this existing context is one of expanding the current, limited, universalism of these programs to cover the entire population of a country (or at least all those having citizenship).

The current interest in basic income, and its being put back on the political agenda in countries ranging from Canada to South Africa to France to Finland, is driven by a number of economic and political factors. There remain the old concerns about the administrative costs and paternalism of welfare bureaucracies, but these have been joined by observations about the increasing precariousness of the labour market, caused in part by increased automation, the growth of the informal labour sector in both the Global North and Global South and the sense that, at least at a global level, the old problem of economic scarcity may have been overcome (Healy, Murphy & Reynolds, 2013). Basic income, from this perspective, represent a potential way of dealing with the fallout of massive changes within the economic structure of countries whilst also allowing individuals to retain autonomy and acting in contrast to the often-homogenizing biopolitical structures of the post-World War II Western welfare states. It is also argued that its very simplicity imbues the program with a flexibility which would allow it to work in a wider variety of economic and political contexts. Currently, both the province of Ontario and Finland as a whole are in the process of experimenting with welfare delivery reforms in the direction of basic income, whilst South Africa has implemented a limited form of basic income (known as the basic income grant, or BIG). Other national and sub-national governments have expressed interest in basic income as well, though it is again critical to take into account that they may not all mean the same thing by it.

With all of this interest in basic income, however, a number of questions crucial to being able to assess the potential effects of such programs, along with their basic ability to be implemented in a sustainable fashion, have not yet been answered by advocates or skeptics. A number of such concerns could be classed as practical matters which are particular to the political and bureaucratic systems of each particular government concerned with implementation (De Wispelaere & Stirton, 2012). Advocates and policymakers acting in favour of basic income will need to learn to effectively navigate such systems in order to implement preferred programs in ways which will fit into the broader context of both the welfare systems and general political cultures of these states. However, there are another set of questions which concern the basic income project at a more general level, which could be classed as pertaining to the philosophical and ontological underpinnings of such a program. As basic income, in some form, appears as more and more of a real possibility, as opposed to simply a broad theoretical concept, these questions will require answers ever more urgently.

Questions and Complications Remain

To begin with, there is the problem of exactly whom the basic income will apply to; in other words, what the subject for claims to social justice is in the world of basic income. In most formulations, from Thomas Paine forward, a basic income is conceived of as having a condition of citizenship attached to it[1]. Though this would be a relatively straightforward in a world of limited interstate migration, the reality is that individuals and families currently exist in a wide variety of positionalities vis-à-vis the state which they physically inhabit. In addition to citizens, there are permanent residents, refugees, students on visas, temporary foreign workers and more. The danger with a citizenship-conditional basic income, as it is unlikely that every country would implement such a policy at the same time, and certainly not at the same monetary level, is that it would further deepen the divide between citizen and non-citizen inhabitants of particular countries by denying a core welfare benefit to the latter, thereby making them into a subject to whom considerations of social justice do not apply. This would be especially true if a more libertarian formulation of the basic income, involving cut backs or eliminations of other aspects of welfare state services, was to be implemented. Hardt (2000) attempts to square this with a more universalistic subject position by justifying guaranteed income separate from labour on the basis of “global citizenship” and the increasingly “collective and social” nature of labour in a world of exchanges that is essentially borderless. Though this logic is reasonably successful in terms of providing an underlying philosophical justification for substituting basic income for both market and non-market “schema of the distribution of wealth”, it does not answer a core practical question. Namely, though there may be an existing subject of “global citizen” (even if they do not recognize themselves as such, as will be returned to later), there is not a practical entity to whom she can appeal in order to be provided such an income. Hardt does not answer which mechanism or body should have the responsibility for distributing basic income, and most other formulations assign this task to a national or sub-national government. The problem is that it is extremely unlikely, without either an entire rethinking of the notion of citizenship or the embrace of totally reciprocal or portable welfare regimes between countries that these governments would be willing to take on the task of providing basic income to not just their own citizens, but persons in general. Particularly given differences in costs of living between nation which would mean that a “basic” income would need to be higher in some areas versus others, such a system would either lead to extremely tight restrictions (even more than under status quo) on international migration or a breakdown in the financial sustainability of some countries’ basic income system.

This points to another potential issue with basic income, namely, that of scarcity. The compulsion to labour in order to receive income, either within the market in a capitalist society or in some other arrangement, such as a communal obligation or kinship system in a non-capitalist one, has traditionally been justified on grounds of resource scarcity. In essence, the idea that one must contribute one’s labour or resources, adding to the overall “pie” of the society, in order to make a claim on taking resources out later on. In a situation of scarcity, where the potential exists for a so-called “free rider problem” to emerge where some take out resources without contributing, thus leading to a net depletion of the overall social economy, such a system is justifiable. However, in practice, societies tend to exempt certain classes of people from the labour compulsion, such as the elderly and children, if sufficient resources exist to allow these populations to exist as “free riders” of a sort. The argument for basic income, in relation to the scarcity question, is that, at least at the global level that Hardt (2000) identifies as most economically relevant, scarcity has been overcome by technological advances, productivity gains and automation, such that a labour compulsion is no longer strictly necessary. Again, though, a problem of practical implementation is raised when one moves from the global to the local. Namely, though it may be true that sufficient resources exist for a global basic income to be attainable, there is not a body currently capable of organizing and deploying such resource globally. At the national level, even setting aside questions of effective governance and level of citizen trust in government which affect many states, governments may be capable of deploying resources, but not all governments have the same level of resources to deploy. Put another way, the scarcity question may be resolved at a global scale, and this does indeed “trickle down” to some countries, but it is far from true of all of them. Given the citizenship-focused nature of most basic income projects, the scarcity question will continue to trouble such proposals absent a mass nation-to-nation wealth redistribution or the establishment of a level of transnational government capable of effectively taking on the task of administering such a program.

Finally, there is the question of whether or not a basic income program would be sustainable in the political sense in the manner in which the growth of what Esping-Andersen (1985) identifies as the “social democratic welfare state” was in the 20th century. The key to the growth of the welfare state, and the notion of “decommodified consumption” (via free-at-point-of-use services such as health care), according to his analysis, was “the mobilization of working-class political power resources” (meaning primarily trade unions and left-wing parliamentary political parties usually associated with them). By contrast, until very recently (for example, the adoption of basic income as a key policy plank by the presidential candidate of the French Socialist Party), basic income tended to be a subject of interest to academics and policymakers rather than a concrete demand made by a mobilized political power grouping, either in the traditional sense of trade unions and political parties, or in more modern social movements (Cremer & Roeder, 2015). Indeed, many trade unions and traditional social democrats have looked at basic income in a skeptical, if not outright hostile, manner. To some degree, this is a legacy of libertarian strands of support for basic income which were explicitly aimed at taking down aspects of the welfare state that such movements viewed as their major achievements. As well, what Standing (2014) identifies as an emphasis on “labour rights”, that is rights specific to and contingent upon the performance of labour, has sometimes led trade unions and social democratic parties to view basic income as a way of enabling a further degradation of working conditions by shifting responsibility for worker well-being from the employer to the state. Standing, however, critiques this reasoning as not recognizing what he identifies as the “class-in-the-making” of the “precariat”, who exist outside of the formal protections of the labour market and did not benefit, or benefitted less, from the social democratic welfare state model. This is because such a model, though notionally decommodifying some social goods, in reality continued to tie access to those good to participation in the labour market. In this view, basic income would better recognize and thereby address the real conditions of the precariat than would attempting a revival of the welfare state and full employment. However, it does remain the case, with the exception of South Africa, where there was a broad social push for the BIG, as documented by Ferguson (2010), that even those social justice movements which exist outside of the traditional social democratic framework have not yet made basic income into a clearly articulated demand. Organizations explicitly concerned with labour precarity, such as Fight for 15, have placed emphasis more on rights-at-work and raising wages, rather than a right-to-not-work implicit in at least the leftist interpretation of basic income. To some degree, this indicates that such organizations may still be stuck, to greater or lesser degrees, in the old social democratic model, with its emphasis on labour rights, albeit with some new elements. Whilst there is certainly room for collaboration on common interests between basic income advocates a these movements on the basis of the interests of the precariat as identified by Standing (2014), the fact remains that this has not yet fully emerged. Following Esping-Anderson’s insights on welfare state development in relation to the mobilization of political power, it therefore remains unlikely that basic income in the form advocated by Standing, Hardt or Ferguson is likely to emerge absent its taking up as a demand by an organized and politically effective movement of the precariat (likely joined by some representatives of the more traditional working class power centres).

Conclusion

With that said, the notion of basic income continues to express a certain truth about the collective stake in the commons and the ability to demand a just share of social wealth, free of restrictions or paternalistic impediments, and without the, increasingly unnecessary, compulsion to engage in the formal labour market. With both the increasing interconnectedness of global economic production, and the increasing precarity of many forms of work, the case for basic income on both moral and practical grounds has rarely been more compelling than it is now. Though practical questions do remain as to the issues of distributional mechanisms and scarcity, there is nothing necessarily stopping basic income from coming in at least in some polities at this time. However, in order for this to occur, a recognition and a concrete convergence of action (as opposed to a notional convergence of interest) must be had between basic income advocates and political movements both of the precariat and the traditional working class. Just as the welfare state of the 20th century was largely built on the political muscle of the workers of its time, if basic income is to be the welfare cornerstone of the 21st, it will need a similarly strong mobilization behind it.

References

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[1] There have been some NGO-based pilot projects to provide guaranteed annual incomes to target populations, most notably through GiveDirectly in Kenya. These projects have a different conditionality and subject of social justice attached to them than the usual “basic income” proposals. As such, though the programs are notable, they should be considered separately from the basic income proposals discussed here. In addition, data on their effects is very limited as they have only been attempted in earnest within the last five years.