When Polity asked me if I’d write a book titled The Case for Universal Basic Income, I hesitated because I’ve always felt myself to be a skeptical supporter rather than an outright advocate. In the end, I decided a case in terms of democratic institutional development and humanist governance could offer an antidote to how conjunctural debates set basic income in response to crises, as compensation for automation or for inequality – in the form of anti-poverty policy. These foci in my view do not do justice to the key institutional innovations and ethical concerns. The democratic humanist case makes basic income part of an unfinished project of democratic development, as distinct from a platform for radical self-governance within deregulatory globalization. It helps us appraise two broader realities: First, providing shared services, financial resources, and skills opportunities in a way which recognizes individuals’ fundamental independence is vital to reverse a slide into social states in which individuals are governed ever more remotely by new administrative technologies. Second, preserving a sense of humanity also, relatedly, depends on generating institutions through which development can be recognized as a common and democratic challenge. Hence, rather than a form of redistribution, I see basic income as a step in the direction of more humanist governing, but I also argue that this involves ethical commitments and institutional capacities which are more complex.
On a broader level, I hope articulating my skepticism aids in showing how support for basic income is possible without complete agreement on the reasons, and that this helps overcome polemics which center on the belief that a case for basic income is necessarily libertarian. A rationale for basic income can be found in broader political and institutional shifts, the nature of which should make us realize that the old ideological wars of Socialism v Capitalism oversimplify and draw attention from the deeper reasons humanist governance is both ethically appealing and more effective.—Louise Haagh
Why and how should we think about basic income in relation to wider social goals and economic reforms? An obvious reason for thinking through wider goals is that basic income embodies a humanist design of welfare and the economy: it is devised to support a person’s independence and subsistence in a continuous and independence-respecting way. Hence, one needs to consider whether the background used as the basis for its defense is one that aligns or conflicts with this essential feature. Bringing the humanist – life-long and individual – form of basic income into view helps avert two forms of confusion.
The first is to do with the development model that grounds the basic income defense. Specifically, one should be careful not to take uncertainties linked with the globalization project as a necessary or positive background. Globalization cannot be the context against which a basic income is justified. A risk with rationalizing globalization is that basic income then becomes an anchor to justify norms and practices that are in direct conflict with the humanist and egalitarian values which the design of basic income embodies.
The way in which the humanist democratic defense engages the form of institutions and governing of the economy directly marks it out from the libertarian case. Left libertarians are distinguished from right libertarians by wanting a higher level of basic income, if not initially, then eventually. On the other hand, right and left libertarian justifications for basic income share a tendency to take the global market model as, respectively, a fact or a good. Left libertarians have made the case for basic income as needed to replace the postwar order of ‘stable positions’, in which case we should accept that basic income is enough to generate stable positions, or stable (income and occupational) positions are a past value. Left libertarians view a baseline of social welfare as necessary, though with clear limits. On the other hand, right libertarians view socializing welfare as against inalienable rights of individuals to resources they can claim through the market. This means left libertarians are equivocal about the use of the competition economy as a development model, whereas right libertarians see it as unequivocally good.
The democratic humanist case for basic income sees in basic income a mode of contesting competition as the primary social relation.
The classic left libertarian endorsement of basic income as a ‘capitalist road to communism’ suggested that basic income enables society to cross a bridge to a state in which paternalist authority is limited, leisure predominates, and the alienation connected with working for ‘external rewards’ ceases. However, does this account situate the value and context of basic income in sufficiently broad terms? In seemingly endorsing self-determination in forging diverse lifestyles to a point that eviscerates collective governance, left libertarianism overdraws individuals’ power in the global economy. The stress on direct transaction and choice makes social care rest too strongly on individual morals.
Van Parijs’s four-pronged justice frame assumes the world is one we find and parcel out: resources are like a shipwreck, to be divided, jobs are naturally scarce, society is a ‘massive gift distribution machine’, and life is a time-profile. The minimal job of states in this context is to ensure fair distribution of what exists to match the time-profile of people. On this basis, Van Parijs prioritizes basic income, alongside efficiency and individual responsibility. This then gives basic income a central and clear-cut market-justifying role. I defend basic income on different grounds, taking into account how economic development is dynamically rooted in institutions and plans humans create. Hence, prioritizing human development, it is the shape of institutions that ground human activities and social relations that should concern us collectively. In this case, the economics of human life is not about equal time-profiles, but about the equal value of developmental security. Basic income represents one dimension of development security necessarily bound to others.
More specifically, the democratic humanist case for basic income sees in basic income a mode of contesting competition as the primary social relation. Hence, in the democratic paradigm, committing to basic income should entail committing to humanist reform of the economy in other ways. Free exchange cannot be relied upon to generate human development-protective institutions directly. In this case, the competition economy is neither a fact nor an unalloyed good.
More specifically, the democratic case focuses on practical aspects of basic income – the thing basic income protects, i.e. life-long security. This means the mechanism – a simple equal payment (as a foundation within a wider set of protections) – is not a form of justice in itself, but a means to an end. Basic income is defended in terms of a human development ethics rather than a distributive ethics. This difference changes the character of other debates. To illustrate, it is common to set basic income next to proposals many view as in the same family on account of being distributive and targeting individuals. For example, to offer more ostensibly palatable versions or ‘forerunners’ or ‘pathways’ to basic income, a series of proposals for distributing capital grants to youth or working-age adults (a single grant of between £25,000 and £50,000) through citizens’ wealth funds have re-emerged recently, reviving an old debate about the choice between such grants and the life-long support a basic income presents.
From a democratic development perspective, these two interventions are not directly comparable. First, basic income is distinctive because it is a continuing structure within the governing of the whole economy, whereas capital grants (CGs) leave the dynamic of the economy essentially intact. Second, basic income is a developmental structure for individuals, whereas CGs may or may not lead to a stable structure in a person’s life. On their own, CGs reinforce the structure of personalized risk, and doing so they strengthen the values attending to punishing failure, and so potentially the justifiability of means-test and sanctions. On this basis, it is not clear that CGs are a good alternative to collective development policies, although they could be a component. In all, a focus on how the form of institutions and public policy generate complementarities in terms of human development invites an informationally broader view of cost and returns on investment.
Thinking of basic income as constitutive of human and economic development answers a number of more practical confusions, relating to the meaning of income and poverty, autonomy, and social equality and public reform, as I consider below.
Income and Poverty
The word ‘income’ makes people assume the intention with basic income is to put an end to employment or organized work, or that giving people ‘free’ money crowds out reasons to earn and contribute that are important. Basic income does the opposite, because it allows individuals to keep the grant when they earn. As such, basic income will take away the unfair disincentive of present income support systems that require persons to exhaust all their savings. If we think of secure subsistence as an infrastructure, like roads, or the Web, we can see how basic money can be considered enabling.
On the other hand, thinking of basic income as a response to poverty makes basic income a part of a compensatory rather than constitutive welfare paradigm, generating the problems listed earlier. A case in point is the IMF’s cautious case for basic income in states without adequate public administration, and conversely a case against basic income in administratively developed societies. It is hard not to see in this reasoning simply the restatement of deeply embedded bias: the old problem of ‘unidentifiable causality’ applied to public assistance. The idea that as mature welfare states have the apparatus to means-test, therefore targeting and careful administration of behaviour conditions are preferable, is like saying that no one should meet in person because we have Skype, or everything should be done via email, even when we know the phone is conflict-reducing because it is less formal. Like technology, administrative tools and systems have magnifying effects. The threat of having subsistence withdrawn is coercive, whether done by a computer or a public official. Some would say the former is worse. Modern societies generate technology so fast that mindless governing through the market can alter the function of institutions very quickly and imperceptibly. Modern society therefore requires more conscious awareness and debate of policies’ constitutive norms, so that change can be filtered accordingly.