|
A
Citizen's Income Trust Seminar Series
A
Citizen's Income for All in the UK
January
to March 2009
In
early 2009 the Citizen's Income Trust is planning a series
of academic seminars throughout the UK, in close collaboration
with six major universities. The series aims to draw attention
to Citizen's Income as a genuine, universal alternative
for the current selective, work and means-tested approach
to welfare policy in Britain.
From
January through to March 2009, leading academics in the
fields of politics, philosophy and social policy will discuss
the prospects of introducing a Citizen's Income for each
UK citizen in the post-Blair era. Confirmed participants
include Prof. Bill Jordan (University of Plymouth), Dr Tony
Fitzpatrick (University of Nottingham), Dr Louise Haagh
(University of York), Prof. Ruth Lister (Loughborough University),
Prof. Guy Standing (University of Bath) and Dr Stuart White
(University of Oxford).
The
seminars will be hosted by the Department of Politics, Philosophy
and International Affairs (Queen's University Belfast),
the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (University
of Brighton), the Centre for Social Ethics (University of
Newport, Wales), the International Centre for Public and
Social Policy (University of Nottingham), the Department
of Politics (University of York), and the Department of
Politics (University of Reading). All seminars will be open
to the general public.
Further
information can be found on the CIT website at www.citizensincome.org/seminars2009.shtml
or contact the organisers at seminars2009@citizensincome.org
Editorial
The
progressive Left
The
journal Renewal's aim when it was first published in 1993
was to modernise the Labour Party, and since then it has
developed a broad dialogue on the progressive left. It now
calls itself 'a journal of social democracy', and its explicit
aim is to 'expand the scope of equality, democratic governance
and social freedoms within regulated markets'. 1
For
decades there have been conservatives, liberals, socialists,
Greens, and various others, both individually and through
their think-tanks and policy groups, actively discussing
a Citizen's Income as a means of renewing the tax and benefits
system. What might best be called the 'progressive left'
has been rather silent on the matter. Three years ago the
organisation Compass ('direction for the democratic left')
published a thinkpiece on a Citizen's Income, which was
welcome; but when it published its manifesto, The Good Society,
the chapter on a Citizen's Income was removed just before
publication. The reason given was hesitancy about the idea's
acceptability to the manifesto's readership.
A
recent edition of Renewal looks set to change this reticence.
It discusses the notion of 'the commons': 'A commons arises
whenever a given community decides that it wishes to manage
a resource in a collective manner, with a special regard
for equitable access, use and sustainability. It is a social
form that has long lived in the shadows of our market culture,
but which is now on the rise'. 2 The editorial notes that
the edition's authors frequently mention a Citizen's Income
(often termed here a Basic Income) as a means of distributing
the value of the commons to the population as a whole, and
also correctly notes the beneficial effect which a Citizen's
Income would have on volunteering, community activity, and
collective creativity. 3 An editorial is not the place to
discuss in detail all of the references to a Citizen's Income
in the journal's articles, but one particular reference
might be forgiven. In relation to the funding of a Citizen's
Income, Martin O'Neill approves of James Meade's suggestion
that social justice would be well served by extending inheritance
tax to lifetime gifts and using the proceeds to fund a 'social
inheritance'. 4
It
is a pleasure to see such significant engagement with the
Citizen's Income debate on the progressive left, and we
look forward to seeing a lot more of it.
1
Editorial statement, Renewal, vol.15, no.4, 2007, p.4.
2 David Bollier, 'A new politics of the commons', Renewal,
vol.15, no.4, 2007, p.11.
3 Daniel Leighton, editorial, 'Common struggles, common
interests', Renewal, vol.15, no.4, 2007, p.9.
4 Martin O'Neill, 'Death and taxes', Renewal, vol.15, no.4,
2007, p.70.
News
The
Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at the
London School of Economics has reported on recent research.
Researchers at the Centre have found that 'when controls
are made for a range of factors which may independently
affect employment retention, they find no statistically
significant impact associated with the introduction of Working
Families Tax Credit for women. For men, the results suggest
that Working Families Tax Credit increased employment retention
rates by 2 percentage points' (Centre for Analysis of Social
Exclusion, annual report 2007, p.22).
The
February edition of Benefits contains an article
by Kate Stanley entitled 'Citizen-centred welfare: a single
income replacement benefit and personalized conditions and
support' (Benefits, vol. 16, no. 1, 2008, pp.81-8)
which concurs with the Institute for Public Policy Research's
view that a single working age income replacement benefit
would considerably simplify the benefits system. In more
general terms, the article suggests that within a 'reworking
of rights and responsibilities, proposals to reform welfare
could usefully be measured against at least three criteria:
fairness, simplicity and empowerment. The welfare system
should be fair, both in the way in which its processes treat
people and in the distributional outcomes it produces. The
system should also be seen to be fair, in order to achieve
and sustain broad public support. This should be based on
fair reciprocity, which balances the rights and responsibilities
of citizens, state and civil society. The welfare system
should also be designed and delivered as simply as possible,
promoting efficient administration and helping citizens
to understand their entitlements. Complexity can only be
justified where it respects the diversity of citizens, not
where it simply reflects the interests of the system or
historical anomaly. Finally, the welfare system should be
designed and delivered in ways that maximise the control
and agency of citizens. …..' (p.82).
The
Pensions Policy Institute has published its Briefing
Note no.44, Incentives to save in a pension. 'PPI modelling
shows future levels of eligibility for means-tested benefits
are very uncertain. The central projection for the proportion
of pensioner households eligible for any means-tested benefit
shows a fall from 60% today to 50% by 2050 - with a broad
'funnel of doubt' for 2050 being 35% to 65%.... More relevant
is the number of people eligible for the combinations of
means-tested benefits that are most likely to lead to low
returns from saving: such as the Guarantee Credit element
of Pension Credit (in the absence of Savings Credit), or
Housing Benefit. … In the current figures, the proportion
of households facing moderate marginal deduction rates (20-60%)
falls between 2005 and 2050. The proportion facing high
marginal deduction rates (80%+) remains at around 20%.'
The PPI suggests policy options. See
http://www.pensionspolicyinstitute.org.uk/news.asp?p=306&s=6&a=0
for more details.
Research
from three charities suggests that the Government must take
a holistic, joined-up approach to the tax and benefits systems
if they wish to achieve their objectives of full employment
and an end to child poverty. Researchers working for Community
Links, the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group and Child Poverty
Action Group studied the technical implications for
tax, tax credits and benefits of a set of hypothetical case
studies and then tested the results by interviewing local
people in east London to find out how these interactions
affect their lives. They concluded that moving into work,
or increasing working hours, could lead to unpredictable
outcomes because of the ways in which different individual
circumstances, responses and experiences intersect with
complex fiscal measures. At present, work does not always
pay better than remaining on benefits. While many interactions
between different benefits and tax credits have positive
or coherent policy effects, a substantial number are contradictory,
with (say) the granting of one benefit leading to the withdrawal,
or curtailment, of another. Such interactions can make claimants
worse off by entering work, or working longer hours. The
advent of tax credits, in particular, has changed what was
previously a relatively reliable, fixed system of benefits
into one that is constantly changing with alterations in
claimants' circumstances. This has led to an increase in
complexity, so the interviewees to whom the researchers
spoke to often had little understanding of the systems or
their entitlements. Some spoke of unpleasant surprises,
such as the loss of passported benefits and tax credits
overpayment recoveries. Individuals often felt that remaining
on benefits was the better option financially, though this
did not always mean that they chose not to work.
Kate
Green, Chief Executive, Child Poverty Action Group, said:
'This report shows that people are struggling to make sense
of the financial support they are entitled to. The system
is fragmented and too often one policy contradicts another
in its effect on low-income families. All parts of the system
need to work together to maximise family incomes and help
end child poverty for good.'
Robin Williamson, Technical Director, Low Incomes Tax Reform
Group, said: 'Our work has shown that people are not always
better off seeking work; in particular, loss of benefits
in kind such as free school meals can be crucial in dissuading
them from taking up work. True work incentives cannot be
achieved by single policies; there has to be a clear, coherent
and holistic strategy across the entire tax/benefit system,
and across all government departments.'
Aaron
Barbour, Community Links Research & Policy Manager,
said: 'For the first time we now have a clearer picture
of the interactions that occur within people's lives and
the systems supposedly designed to support them. Government
needs to take immediate action to address the immense interactions
and so complexities inherent within the benefit, tax credit
and tax systems. Doing nothing is not an option if child
poverty is to end and the ambition of full employment achieved.'
To
see the full report and the researchers' press release,
go to: http://www.community-links.org/news/article/two_new_reports_from_linksuk/
The
CREATE Consortium is proposing that Government establishes
a Community Allowance (a payment to people to do work which
strengthens their neighbourhood without affecting any of
their benefits). This would enable people to get out of
the benefits trap and it would contribute to the regeneration
of their communities. As the alliance says: All that is
needed is a change to the benefits regulations. The Consortium
aims to run pilots in each English region, Scotland, Wales
and Northern Ireland, to test this approach. The five-minute
film, Benefits Rule, about how benefits regulations stop
people from getting paid work in their community, can be
viewed online at the new CREATE website (www.communityallowance.org).
Main
article
Why
Participation Income Might Not Be Such a Great Idea After
All
by
Jurgen De Wispelaere, Trinity College Dublin and University
of Oxford
and Lindsay Stirton, University of Manchester
This
note draws on a much larger research paper, 'The Public
Administration Case against Participation Income', published
in Social Service Review, 81 (3), 2007, pp. 523-549. The
arguments made in the current piece are elaborated in much
more detail in the published article, and we refer the interested
reader to that piece.
A
decade ago, the Oxford economist Tony Atkinson voiced a
concern, shared by most basic income proponents, that Citizen's
Income schemes might face insurmountable political obstacles.
Even where good ethical and economic reasons to favour unconditional
grants over means-tested, selective income support exist,
'it will be difficult to secure political support for a
Citizen's Income while it remains unconditional on labour
market or other activity' (1). As a solution Atkinson proposed
to institute a participation income (PI), a social
assistance program that gives up on means-testing but retains
the politically salient notion of social participation.
Elaborating on his proposal, Atkinson explains:
the
qualifying conditions would include people working as
an employee or self-employed, absent from work on grounds
on sickness and injury, unable to work on grounds of disability
and unemployed but available for work, it would also include
people engaging in approved forms of education or training,
caring for young, elderly or disabled dependents or undertaking
approved forms of voluntary work, etc. The condition involves
neither payment nor work; it is a wider
definition of social contribution. (2)
It
should come as no surprise that PI has been well received
across the basic income community. Many think it represents
an acceptable ethical compromise between the values
of universal inclusion and social reciprocity, and is thus
capable of appeasing those critics who believe Citizen's
Income will lead to free-riding on a worrying scale. Others
instead believe it offers a necessary political compromise,
allowing various factions within the welfare debate to converge
on a scheme that appears acceptable to all.
Within
the latter group, some have suggested that a PI would inevitably
transform itself into a full-fledged Citizen's Income once
the benefits of further relaxing eligibility conditions
becomes apparent. (3) But meanwhile they are happy enough
to move ahead with a scheme that is considered a close cousin
to Citizen's Income because of its wide (if not quite universal)
coverage, its lack of intrusive bureaucratic control, and
its recognition of the many ways in which citizens genuinely
participate in social life. In short, PI seems uniquely
placed to bridge the otherwise competing perspectives of
unconditional basic income advocates and proponents of 'soft
workfare' And so PI emerges as the strongest candidate of
a Citizen's Income-style proposal that might actually make
it into policy.
Interestingly,
despite the attraction of and support for PI, precious little
detailed analysis of the proposal has been carried out.
This is unfortunate because there are important questions
to be answered when thinking about the design and implementation
of PI:
A
What sort of activities qualify as participation?
B How will the system identify those engaging in these
activities?
C How do we ensure compliance with such a broad set of
requirements? etc.
How
we answer these and many related practical questions will
have important implications for how we design and implement
PI. And perhaps more importantly, by implication, they are
likely to have a major impact on the well-being and autonomy
of its recipients. Thinking seriously about the implementation
of PI, however, reveals a set of problems that are masked
by the overly superficial discussion of PI or 'social participation'
more generally. Our research suggests that these problems
effectively make PI administratively unstable, which
in turn leads to political instability. And if we
are right, then Citizen's Income advocates may have to seriously
rethink whether PI is such a great idea after all.
Administering
Participation Income
Looked
at from a public administration point of view, any welfare
program must be able to perform at least three essential
tasks, if it is to make it off the drawing board:
1
it must establish operational criteria of eligibility
which define the intended beneficiaries;
2 it must provide a mechanism to identify those within
the population who meet these criteria of eligibility,
and distinguish them from those not eligible;
3 a mechanism must exist to transfer payments to eligible
beneficiaries at the appropriate level, frequency, etc.
PI
is no different from any other scheme in this regard. Before
deciding whether to endorse its implementation, a PI proposal
must tell us 1) how one becomes eligible to receive the
grant; 2) who amongst the general population ought to receive
the grant; and 3) how we ensure that those who are eligible
(and only those) effectively receive their entitlement.
(4)
Upon
reflection it turns out that, at each of these points, PI
does not perform as well as its advocates assume. More importantly,
with respect to each of these tasks, we believe that PI
is likely to be outperformed by basic income and,
perhaps more surprisingly, by workfare type of policies.
Needless to say, this has important consequences for the
political feasibility (and desirability) of PI schemes,
a point we return to at the end of this article.
A.
Setting Standards
To
elaborate on the claims made in the previous paragraph,
consider first the problem of coming up with a set of operational
standards that confer entitlements upon eligible recipients.
This in fact means that we need to think how we translate
the idea of PI, grounded in a broad notion of social
participation, into a set of suitably precise standards
or rules. One important goal is to ensure that all relevant
individuals - administrators and claimants alike - can reliably
determine whether a particular person is eligible or not.
This proves to be much more of a challenge than one might
think.
The
literature on administrative rule-making suggests that reliable
and suitably precise standards must have the following properties:
1
standards are clearly defined in terms that have universally
acceptable meaning (transparency);
2 standards are easy to apply in practice by those who
are charged with determining eligibility (accessibility);
3 standards must fit with the underlying policy objective
(congruence). (5)
Applying
these criteria to PI immediately demonstrates the problem
facing administrators. PI is based on a very broad (and
relatively vague) notion of social participation. This fails
as a precise operational standard simply because it leaves
too much room for interpretation, with different parties
likely to come up with different views on what 'counts'
as relevant social participation. One alternative is to
come up with a set of rules that describe a fixed set of
very clearly specified, 'approved' activities, such as volunteering
at least 10 hours per week, having enrolled in a vocational
course, having at least one dependent to care for, and so
on. But any workable list that we come up with is likely
to be much more restricted than what PI proponents have
in mind when they refer to social participation in a wider
sense. Quite a different solution would be to go for a list
that is so expansive, perhaps even open-ended, as to encompass
any socially worthwhile activity one could think of; but
such expansive lists are very hard to work with in practice,
leading again to interpretation problems and various types
of error. In short, translating the requirement of 'social
participation' into a workable set of standards is not as
straightforward as its advocates assume; it involves having
to make hard practical choices with serious implications
in terms of the expected outcomes of the scheme.
The
real problem for PI, however, is not that setting precise
standards is difficult (although it is), but that it seems
much easier to do so for Citizen's Income as well as workfare
policies. Because a Citizen's Income entails no conditions
apart from residency, the problem of having to set a standard
of eligibility literally does not arise, an argument that
is much rehearsed by basic income advocates. What about
workfare? Well, here the reasoning works the other way around:
because workfare is a much more restrictive policy, it too
faces fewer difficulties setting standards that are at the
same time transparent, accessible and congruent to its underlying
policy objectives. A workfare advocate who believes only
labour market participation or human capital improving activities
such as job training or education are socially valuable
will restrict the standards to people who are either in
formal employment or enrolled in approved training courses.
From the point of view of setting standards this is a straightforward
enough way to proceed, no matter what we might think about
the justice of such restrictions.
The
difficulty with PI is that it both insists on having a criterion
for eligibility in order to allow for some restrictions
on who receives the grant, while at the same time wanting
to expand these restrictions well beyond what is being used
by current welfare programmes. This position is a difficult
one to maintain as we have demonstrated above, particularly
when we compare PI's performance to the alternatives of
Citizen's Income and workfare.
B.
Identifying Beneficiaries
Let
us now consider a second difficulty, again very familiar
in the fields of policy analysis and public administration.
Any scheme that puts conditions in place for restricting
receipt of grants or services to part of the population
must inevitably engage in a process of identifying eligible
recipients, distinguishing them from those who (for whatever
reasons) are not deemed eligible. From a public administration
perspective, this implies producing and maintaining lists
of individuals who satisfy the relevant criteria as well
as setting up a system to monitor whether they continue
to fulfill these criteria.
The
main issue is one of informational demands associated with
different policy schemes. Some proposals require much more
information to operate in accordance with the stated or
implied goals, and information is both difficult and expensive
to obtain. In addition, high informational demands tend
to produce opportunistic and strategic behaviour because
individuals can employ a variety of 'loopholes' in the rules
(creative compliance) as well as a variety of errors arising
from both claimants and administrators failing to produce
or appropriately assess key information. (6) In short, the
more information that is required to get a scheme working,
the more difficult is it to implement that scheme in practice.
Given
these difficulties, what sort of scheme would be easiest
to administer given the information-gathering demands it
imposes? First, following on from our discussion of standard-setting,
an operational scheme must be straightforward in terms of
determining what the rules of eligibility require in individual
cases (what claimants must do, or not do, to become eligible),
as well as concretely establishing whether they have in
fact complied with these rules. (7) Second, it is preferable
that the sources of information against which such checking
is done already exist, to avoid having to set up complicated
and costly databases from scratch. Moreover, it would be
crucial that the information base itself only infrequently
changes and is not susceptible to manipulation, to ensure
reliability and stability of the assessment process. Where
these conditions are not met, it may be very difficult in
practice to determine reliably whether eligibility criteria
are met. And it may be easy to cheat, either by straightforwardly
misreporting the relevant information or by more subtle
techniques of 'creative compliance', for example where claimants
register for a university course to claim their PI but have
no intention of actually studying for a degree. (8) Much
of this is already familiar from the welfare administration
literature.
Let
us now again evaluate PI against these standards and compare
its performance against that of Citizen's Income and workfare,
respectively. It is easy to see how, in this particular
context, the broad notion of social participation again
leads to the public administrator's nightmare scenario.
To begin with, unlike traditional welfare programs PI administrators
cannot rely on comparatively reliable sources of information
such as payroll information or university enrolment, because
that only captures part of the activities that we deem appropriate.
And since there are no comparative reliable sources of information
for care work or volunteering, it seems PI must employ the
sort of intrusive and costly bureaucratic measures (such
as regular visits from case workers) that most advocates
abhor and hope to avoid. A further problem arises when we
reflect on how arbitrariness and local/regional inequalities
may arise because of different interpretations of what constitutes
approved socially valuable activities or the inconsistent
application of imprecise standards, as outlined in the previous
section. (9) If PI is serious about restricting receipt
of the grant to some extent - as it must, if it is to be
a genuine ethical or political compromise - it must also
be serious about combating creative compliance or else face
diminished political and public support. Such is the logic
of welfare policy.
PI's
weakness in terms of the monitoring of conditions of eligibility
is again best illustrated by a simple comparison with both
Citizen's Income and workfare. Unsurprisingly, an unconditional
Citizen's Income fares much better because of the absence
of eligibility criteria and, by implication, the absence
of the need to identify and monitor (and, where required,
sanction) recipients. It is worth noting that there may
still be good reasons why some type of monitoring would
be a good idea - to ensure that each individual effectively
receives their grant, for instance (10) - but clearly there
is no need to extensively monitor individuals for reasons
of determining who is eligible to receive the grant. Workfare
programs again perform better than PI, but for very different
reasons. Because workfare determines eligibility on very
restrictive grounds - being employed, actively seeking work,
being registered for approved training, etc - it can piggy-back
on a number of 'cadasters' (11) that are present in most
mature welfare states. It is true that monitoring remains
a costly and problematic affair for workfare programmes,
but both the range of activities (and therefore the number
of institutions within which such activities take place)
and the sheer volume of potential recipients (which is much
lower than with either PI or Citizen's Income) makes monitoring
nevertheless more manageable than in the case of PI. So
we conclude that, in this particular field, PI again performs
relatively poorly when compared to Citizen's Income and
workfare.
C.
Disbursing Payments
The
final administrative task that a PI must perform is to disburse
the payments to eligible recipients. This is a task that
is never discussed in the literature on Citizen's Income
or PI, but nevertheless raises a number of concerns of note.
What is required is a distribution mechanism, or 'conduit',
which ensures that PI is disbursed effectively to
all eligible recipients (and only those). Effective
conduits require low or no barriers or hurdles facing recipients
but in addition also promote straightforward oversight allowing
administrators to check whether grants have effectively
been received. The latter requirement means that a disbursement
system which can be integrated into a wider administrative
network that cross-checks receipt of funds is superior.
Payment systems with multiple in-built redundancies - overlapping
at various junctures in the claiming process - are one way
to design grant delivery, though it comes at the (budgetary
and organisational) cost of significantly complicating oversight.
An alternative is to simplify payments radically by offering
a single disbursement channel for all recipients: in addition
to the lack of sufficient 'layers' of redundancy, problems
may arise where such channels do not have a truly universal
reach. For instance, homeless people often have no reliable
access to a bank account which poses a problem with centralized
systems that typically make use of bank payments in one
way or another. One important lesson here is to be careful
about so-called technological fixes where we think a mere
'upgrade' of the technology will resolve all administrative
problems.
When it comes to delivery mechanisms, Citizen's Income proposals
typically opt for single payment channels: grants are disbursed
either through the tax/credit system or, as in some proposals,
through a designated debit card. This method scores highly
in terms of absence of barriers, but poorly in terms of
oversight and back-up systems (redundancy). Workfare schemes
typically offer systems that are integrated into the administrative
processes that determine eligibility; extensive interventions
by case workers, no matter how much of a nuisance and intrusion
we think they are, have the distinctive advantage of offering
high oversight on payments and creating a valuable frontline
opportunity for claimants to address any issues regarding
non-payment. But this advantage of face-to-face oversight
obviously comes at the cost of significant complexity.
While
Citizen's Income and workfare take opposite, but arguably
equally plausible, routes for addressing problems associated
with delivery systems, PI seems to share none of the strengths
and all of the weaknesses with either scheme. PI cannot
dispense with oversight altogether because it is not truly
universal; and for that reason it cannot rely on the simplest
delivery schemes. And because PI is by definition meant
to be much more comprehensive and expansive than workfare,
frontline oversight would be prohibitively costly and not
a practical option. PI's failures in terms of delivery systems
may not be decisive (we regard them as certainly less troublesome
than the ones discussed before), nevertheless it is clear
PI will face important difficulties and some of the solutions
discussed in the literature may not be available in practice.
Administrative Difficulties, Political Implications
If
the arguments presented in the previous section are plausible,
we now find ourselves in a situation where PI may be intuitively
attractive, yet faces considerable difficulties at the level
of implementation. Needless to say, we don't think it would
be wise for anyone to endorse a scheme that is manifestly
unworkable. So what lessons can be learned in terms of building
a political coalition around PI? Should Citizen's Income
advocates maintain their support for PI in spite of these
practical concerns, or instead refocus on making Citizens'
Income itself more politically palatable?
To
offer at least a partial answer to this important question,
let us consider three obvious strategies that participants
in a PI coalition might entertain:
- The
Ironclad Administration Strategy: accept that PI is a
strategy that will require considerable administrative
resources, but consider this a price worth paying
- The
Soft Workfare Strategy: rejecting prohibitive administrative
costs means we restrict the notion of 'social participation'
to bring PI closer to a soft workfare policy
- The
Lax Enforcement Strategy: reject administrative costs
as well, but now take a very lax attitude to enforcement
of rules, effectively turning PI into a Citizens' Income
While
the first strategy remains faithful to the goals of marrying
universal inclusion and weak reciprocity, it comes at a
high price. First, there are the budget and organisational
costs associated with extensive bureaucracies, which in
an era of budgetary conservatism and general welfare retrenchment
for fiscal reasons seems to raise unsurmountable difficulties.
But in addition to those there are also the costs associated
with intrusion and error, borne by PI recipients and even
the larger population. When these costs increase, it is
fair to say support for the proposed scheme is likely to
plummet and therefore we do not regard it as a promising
or stable strategy.
Rejecting the first alternative leaves us with two competing
options: we can turn PI into a workfare or into a Citizen's
Income scheme, respectively. On the workfare alternative
we emphasise those interpretations of social participation
that are easy to specify, easy to monitor, happen to point
at populations easily identified, and so on. Inevitably,
this approach reinforces the primacy of existing practices
and institutions by redrawing PI along lines that already
feature prominently in current welfare programs. Such a
solution is likely to be vehemently opposed by those within
the Citizen's Income movement who endorse PI precisely because
it counters the current restrictive notions of productive
activity as being tied to education and the labour market.
And such opposition in turn will mark the political death
of the PI proposal.
This
then brings us to the third strategy, often floated by Citizen's
Income supporters, where we allow PI to 'erode' gradually
into a full, unconditional basic income. All this really
requires is for administrators to take a very broad attitude
when interpreting what counts as social participation and
a correspondingly lax attitude when it comes to enforcing
such requirements.
This
way very few individuals would find themselves de facto
excluded from the scheme, and in a next phase policy-makers
can then further 'harmonize' (read: universalize) the scheme
by putting a genuine Citizen's Income in place. The main
problem with this proposal is that it invokes precisely
the opposition of those PI advocates who, for ethical or
political reasons, take reciprocity and free-riding seriously.
Their opposition is likely to be as vehement to this strategy
as the rejection of workfare-by-stealth by the Citizen's
Income camp. Furthermore, there is no reason to suspect,
as some Citizen's Income advocates rather naively assume,
that soft workfare supporters of PI will not pick up on
any attempt to introduce (by stealth) a Citizen's Income
through the PI path. For all these reasons, we are still
awaiting a convincing argument suggesting that PI will necessarily
evolve into a Citizen's Income and not into a version of
a workfare scheme, which we think is equally (if not more)
plausible.
Lessons
for Citizen's Income
Our
analysis of some of the implementation issues in introducing
a scheme that maintains an effective broad participation
income suggests three related lessons for supporters of
Citizen's Income policies more generally.
First,
our analysis suggests that the current enthusiasm for participation
income as a political and ethical compromise capable of
attracting a broad coalition of support is probably illusory.
The illusion persists only because of the lack of detailed
analysis of PI so far, and we argue that we must consider
the practical impact of the scheme's design in earnest before
rushing to embrace a policy like PI, no matter how intuitively
appealing for Citizen's Income advocates.
Next, our analysis offers important insights in the debate
about the political feasibility of PI and related schemes.
We firmly believe that any political compromise around such
a scheme must be credible in the sense that it must be capable
of reassuring different factions, each firmly holding on
to a distinctive set of ethical and political priorities,
and that the compromise won't come unstuck, favouring one
side or another, in the process of implementation. It is
because of PI's failure on this count that we claim that
administrative instability is likely to lead to political
instability.
Finally,
at the most general level, we hope that we have demonstrated
the importance of taking administrative analysis much more
seriously when considering PI, Citizen's Income and related
policies. Much of our work arises from a discontent with
how Citizen's Income advocates fail to appreciate what the
field of public administration can bring to the debate.
Contrary to the so-called 'transmission-belt' model of administrative
analysis, where implementation only appears on the scene
after ethical, political and economic questions have been
resolved, we firmly believe that a public administration
perspective offers key insights into how various Citizen's
Income policies should be designed and implemented. If we
want to move the debate from ideas into policy, this is
a perspective that Citizen's Income advocates ignore at
their own peril.
Notes
1
Anthony Atkinson (1996) 'The Case for a Participation Income'
The Political Quarterly 67(1), pp. 67-70, at p. 67
2 Atkinson, ibid., pp. 68-69
3
This includes Philippe Van Parijs, Bob Goodin, Brian Barry
and Claus Offe, amongst others
4
Citizen's Income advocates worry much less than soft workfare
proponents about the 'only those' restriction, but if we
are to seriously consider PI as a political compromise then
the price of getting the scheme in place is to take social
participation (and its associated restrictions) very seriously.
This perspective informs our analysis of PI throughout
5
See Colin Diver (1983) 'The Optimal Precision of Administrative
Rules', Yale Law Journal, 93 (1), pp. 65-109, for a detailed
discussion
6
Such error can lead to both underinclusive (eligible recipients
being denied a grant) and overinclusive (non-eligible individuals
receiving a grant) outcomes. Again, we take no strict position
on which of these types of error is worse, but simply note
how the practical problem often spills over into political
and even ethical assessment of the scheme at hand
7
Obviously a failure to set a suitably precise standard for
determining eligibility will spill-over into the area of
determining beneficiaries
8
One could imagine a situation where all sorts of institutions
set up their own degrees, leading to a proliferation of
what former UK Education Minister Margaret Hodge called
'Mickey Mouse courses': a B.Sc. in Surfing, anyone?
9
The worst case scenario would lead to a type of postcode
lottery with your chances of obtaining a PI differing considerably
depending on where you live - an unacceptable outcome for
any PI advocate
10
The basic income literature generally seems to assume that
removing barriers is sufficient to ensure that everyone
will flock to the grant, but fails to see that the scheme
has no way of checking whether everyone effectively receives
it. Or at least this is the case in those proposals that
explicitly or implicitly want to do away with any type of
administrative control
11
A cadaster is a list of assets or addresses and of their
ownership. Here the term refers to lists of individuals
maintained by a government
Conference
report
The
United States Basic Income Guarantee Network conference,
7th to 9th March, 2008
At
a time when the United States contemplates political life
after Bush, the USBIG network held its 7th Annual Congress
at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts on the
aptly themed topic 'Framing a BIG Discussion for the Next
Election and Beyond'. As before, the conference was organised
as part of the Eastern Economics Associaton (EEA) annual
meeting.
The
congress featured the usual mixture of academics, policy
analysts and grassroots activists that USBIG aficionados
have come to appreciate. In the context of USBIG this occasionally
volatile mix always seems to lead to interesting engagement
across the divides. And so it was this time round: USBIG
2008 brought participants the usual mixture of philosophical
reflection and hard-nosed political analysis, flavoured
with a good dose of unabashed optimism that sets apart many
a basic income conference.
Papers
ranged from discussions of poverty (Collins, Butler, Lightman
and Gee Um) the importance of work (Standing, Roy, Harvey
and Smith), theoretical reflections about freedom (Widerquist,
Harvey, Howard, Oberman and Jubb) or the religious basis
of the BI proposal (Clark and Farris), to detailed discussions
of BI in various countries, including the US (Sheahan and
Shafarman), South-Africa (Wamai), Canada (Mulvale) and Ireland
(Healy and Reynolds) and more general presentations on the
politics of BIG (Vanderborght and De Wispelaere), amongst
other topics.
Highlights included Guy Standing's engaging outline of the
new pilot project set up by the Basic Income Grant Coalition
in the rural village of Otjivero, Namibia (see http://www.bignam.org/page5.html).
Equally
unforgettable was Eduardo Suplicy's video account of his
recent trip to Baghdad, recording his lobbying efforts in
persuading the Iraqi government to adopt a BIG. Those who
want to hear one of BIG's most charismatic advocates link
up the thought of Tom Paine and James Meade with the Koran,
while wearing full protective battle gear, should consult
the video at http://www.senado.gov.br/eduardosuplicy/Audio/audio_english.asp#.
One
minor point was the comparatively low turnout: it appears
the congress did not really succeed in attracting many of
the regular EEA attendants, which is a bit of a shame. Then
again, the fact that the USBIG session was neatly tucked
away in a corner of a long, winding corridor may well have
had something to do with this. And perhaps the congress
featured rather too many non-US invited speakers: while
a cast dominated by Belgians and Irish speakers may be a
refreshing novelty in Boston, it must at times have come
across as a bit too European for the regular participants.
Nevertheless the USBIG organizing committee is to be congratulated
for yet again bringing us another successful conference.
We already look forward to USBIG 2009.
The program and selected papers are available for consultation
on the USBIG website at www.usbig.net.
Jurgen
De Wispelaere, Oxford
Reviews
Luigino
Brunl and Pier Luigi Porta (eds), Handbook on the Economics
of Happiness, Edward Elgar, 2007,xxxvii + 596 pp,
hbk, 978 1 84376 826 7, £150
Start
with chapter 2. This will introduce you to a wide variety
of definitions of happiness: from Genovesi's happiness as
social relations (an idea connected to Aristotle's vision
of the virtuous man 'living well' by serving his city),
to Adam Smith's understanding that wealth and happiness
are by no means directly correlated, to Alfred Marshall's
compromise (extreme poverty makes happiness difficult to
achieve), to Bentham's utilitarianism and happiness as psychological
hedonism, and to rational choice theory and the question
of the relationship between happiness and indifference curves.
This chapter, which started life as an article in the Journal
of the History of Economic Thought, concludes with a
series of vital questions, the most important of which is:
'The whole theoretical building of modern economics has
been grounded on the key idea that an increase in wealth
will lead to an increase in wellbeing, or happiness ….
If, instead, having more economic goods does not lead to
well-being but to bad-being, if 'goods' become 'bads' (because
they make living unhappy ….), then the very philosophical
and social bases of the job of the political economist are
called into question' (p.45). This chapter raises all sorts
of interesting questions about the definition of 'happiness'
and the definition of 'economics', as does the book as a
whole - which is why this chapter is a good place to start.
Clearly
I can't treat each of the twenty-four very different contributions
to this book with the same degree of detail as that. Of
the book as a whole I would say that it really is a treasure-store
of good things, and at the same time it is a deconstruction
of the boundaries we often assume between disciplines. There
is ethics, political economy, history, philosophy, social
science, and theology ('God, 115' ought to be in the index).
There is much discussion of the meaning of 'happiness' and
of its relationship to 'choice', 'preference', 'pleasure',
etc. (and maybe there should have been more discussion of
the meaning of 'economics'), and there is debate of various
paradoxes of happiness (e.g., pp.233ff) and particularly
of the finding that in developed countries increased income
does not result in increased happiness. On why this might
be the case chapter 13 argues that technological innovation
makes nonrelational goods cheaper in relation to relational
goods - and if, as many of the chapters suggest, it is such
relational goods as time with friends, places to meet, the
arts, etc. which generate happiness (understood as social
and public happiness) then happiness will decline and individual
hedonism will increase.
Whether you're looking for economic realities expressed
through mathematical formulae, classical history, Immanuel
Kant's ethics, or sustainable development, there's something
here for you.
No short book review can do justice to this wide-ranging
and thought-provoking collection. I suggest that you read
it. I wouldn't recommend that you buy it: you can probably
see why. Ask your library to obtain it, and then borrow
it.
Jon
Kvist and Juho Saari (eds.), The Europeanisation of Social
Protection, Policy Press, Bristol, 2007, xi + 308pp.,
paperback, 1847420192, £25, hardback, 1847420206,
£65
This
book consists of papers from a conference organized by the
European Union's Finnish Presidency in 2006 to examine social
security and health care systems from a European perspective;
for, whilst such systems are organized by nation states,
they are increasingly influenced by a European context.
The EU is responsible for social inclusion, competition
policy, employment policies, economic policies, and the
free movement of EU nations' citizens and their ability
to seek employment anywhere in the EU, and these responsibilities
are having a considerable impact on health and social security
policies in nation states.
The
papers published here examine social protection and health
policies in eleven nation states and ask to what extent
a European social model has influenced them. What emerges
from the papers is the considerable diversity of social
security systems in member states, a growing understanding
that 'the institutional design of social protection systems
and the incentives they create for organisations, households
and individuals [are] more important factors in explaining
differences in economic and employment performance than
the absolute levels of social expenditure or replacement
rates of certain benefits' (p.5), and a widespread debate
about relationships between the internal market, competition
law and national social security systems.
It
is no surprise that the chapter on the UK, appropriately
titled 'The United Kingdom: more an economic than a social
European', concludes that
the
UK perspective is that social policy is best left to Member
States. …. The government is undoubtedly
anxious about, and embarrassed by, its poor record on
poverty and inequality. But it is much prouder of its
record with respect to relatively high economic growth
and relatively low unemployment. (pp.57-8)
The
conclusions of most of the other chapters are rather more
ambiguous, but there is a clear desire on the part of the
nation states with the largest economies to maintain national
control over social security policy.
The
editors conclude: 'We find strong evidence at the EU level
pointing towards the Europeanisation of social protection.
In short, not only the Council but also the Commission have
been increasingly active in social protection issues' (p.19).
On
the evidence presented this seems a little too optimistic
in relation to the larger economies; but the situation is
very different in relation to Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands,
the Czech Republic, and Spain. Here there is increasing
willingness to see further EU involvement in social policy.
Eventually
the debate could go either way: towards the entrenchment
of national systems, or towards greater co-ordination and
eventual convergence. Whichever way it goes it will be a
slow and complex process. Maybe one way forward might be
for the EU to establish a social protection policy agenda
alongside the very different national systems. Such a two-tier
solution would leave states able to develop their own policies
in line with their own social needs and would provide a
European social protection system coherent with the free
movement of EU citizens between member states and with the
increasing Europeanisation of economic policy.
A
European Citizen's Income would do nicely.
Martina
Klett-Davies, Going it Alone? Ashgate, 2007,
166 pp, hbk, 978 0 7546 4388 3, £55
'The
nuclear family consisting of a father, mother and their
child or children is declining; divorce and cohabitation
rates are increasing rapidly …. women are having their
children at a much later age and having fewer children than
ever before ….. But the most striking change in family
composition has been the escalating number of lone parent
families' (p.1) - and usually it's mother and child or children.
This
book is a study of how lone mothers in Germany (where 20%
of mothers are lone mothers) and in Britain (25%) understand
themselves as carers, dependents or paid workers in relation
to the welfare state, and it reveals a wide diversity of
experience, suggesting that to define lone mothers as a
single category might not be the best route to understanding
a complex situation. The study reveals several contradictions,
and in particular that between the welfare state as an instrument
of oppression and the welfare state as an escape from both
private patriarchy (the male-dominated family) and public
patriarchy (in the workplace).
Klett-Davies
shows that many lone mothers in poverty engineer rich social
lives for themselves and their children, and that many poor
mothers end up better off financially when they leave a
marriage; and more generally she finds that lone mothers
are firmly part of late modernity's trend towards an individualization
in the context of which people create their own destinies
and thus a 'reflexive modernity'.
This
book will be of use both to those with a particular interest
in lone motherhood and to those with an interest in broader
social trends, because each chapter relates to Klett-Davies'
study of 70 lone mothers and also to important concepts,
theories and institutions. Chapter 2 rehearses a variety
of social science discourses ('social threat', 'social problem',
etc.); chapter 3 discusses late modernity and individualization;
and chapter 4 lone mothers' relationships to the welfare
state in Germany and Britain. The author shows how the British
Government's benefits, taxation and active labour market
policies position lone mothers as employees rather than
as caregivers and at the same time punishes them in the
labour market with a severe poverty trap (pp.46ff). Policy
on the family has become an arm of employment policy (p.48).
Klett-Davies' solution is 1. a Citizen's Income and 2. men
becoming more competent in flexible paid work as well as
in care and family work (p.49).
Chapter
5 records lone mothers' experience of paid employment (they
see themselves primarily as mothers and see employment as
both a means to that end and as a preparation for post-childcare
employment). Chapter 6 discusses the use of type categories
in social research such as this study and formulates variables
to enable lone mothers to be categorised; and the following
chapters record the experiences of mothers the author has
placed in the categories she develops: 'pioneers', 'copers',
'strugglers', and 'borderliners'. The final chapter discusses
differences between the experiences of German and British
lone mothers (more changes occur with the age of the child
in Germany than in Britain) and suggests policy implications
of the research results. The policy suggestions are in the
fields of employment, childrearing, and education. The suggestions
made in ch.4 in relation to the benefits and tax system
are not reiterated here, and they should have been. A final
section returns to the notion of individualization as a
means to understand a complex picture.
This
well-written and thorough book will serve students and researchers
well, and it will also be of considerable use to policy-makers.
Viewpoint
What
does the Stone Age have to do with us?
by
Karl
Widerquist, University of Reading, Karl@Widerquist.com
What
does the Stone Age have to do with modern justice? According
to property rights advocates: everything.
Property
rights advocates claim that government regulation, taxation
and redistribution violate the rights of property holders.
Where do these rights come from, and do they come with responsibilities?
The detailed argument for strong private property
rights relies on two important claims. (1) Property began
as private property; governments interfered with it later.
(2) Private property hurts no one; everyone today is better
off than our Stone Age ancestors.
Property
rights advocates often make these claims without any reference
to evidence. How do we know property began as private property?
How do we know everyone is better off today? These claims
do not hold up in the light of evidence which have I found
in anthropological studies, including Stone Age Economics
by Marshall Sahlins (1974), Bronze Age Economics
and How Chiefs Come to Power by Timothy Earle (1997;
2002), and The Evolution of Political Society by
Morton Fried (1967).
In
the earliest agricultural societies land was owned (if at
all) by villages or large extended families with each individual
having the right to use it. In societies where property
rights had become exclusive, the original owners were not
businessmen but chiefs. Ownership of resources was synonymous
with ownership of the government, because early economies
were too simple to support separate spheres of power such
as government, religion, and business. All of these powers
were usually vested in one person. The Hawaiian Islands
provide a relatively recent example of the creation of property
rights. After the first few centuries of human settlement,
each major Hawaiian Island was run by a chief whose authority
came from his ownership of land and irrigation systems.
Chiefs appointed local lords to allocate land to peasants
in exchange for service to the chief. In short, each chief
ran his island as a for-profit business.
Property
rights advocates sometimes claim that only recent history
matters, but taxation is not new. Government taxation is
simply the exercise of a right that Western governments
have held since they were kingdoms. Western private property
rights were created when the titles of medieval vassals
gradually became tradable. If the property rights system
that the king set up is unjust, his rights belong to his
people, not to the people who hold the titles he bestowed.
Revoking
the king's power to tax his title holders has about as much
to do with 'freedom from interference' as redistribution
from landlords to tenants or stockholders to management.
Property rights advocates' second claim (that a capitalist
economy makes everyone better off than a hunter-gatherer
economy) can be informed by observations of hunter-gatherer
communities that survived into modern times. Stone Age people
from the arctic to the tropics lived surprisingly carefree
lives. They worked an average of three to four hours per
day (including commuting and cooking). They slept more than
we do. They appeared to feel secure about their ability
to always find necessities. They worked at their own pace,
and they never had to answer to a boss. No one gave
orders and no one was excluded from the resources they needed
to survive.
The
average modern worker has more access to luxuries, better
medical care, and a longer life expectancy than a hunter-gatherer.
But he or she works longer and harder, follows orders, and
has less economic security. Even though the average
modern worker lives longer, some die younger of preventable
complications of poverty such as malnutrition and exposure.
In short, the transition from hunter-gatherer society to
modern capitalism has not been an unequivocal improvement;
it has been a tradeoff. But a tradeoff is not good enough
to meet the standards that property rights advocates set
for themselves.
I
did not put forward the standard that the poor must be at
least as well off as their Stone Age ancestors. Property
rights advocates chose it because they thought it was easy
to meet. It is. A society, as productive as ours, can easily
make everyone far better off than they would be as hunter-gatherers.
To do so, we need to make sure that everyone has access
to some minimally acceptable standard of living without
having to follow anyone's orders. Perhaps we can require
them to take orders if they want to share the luxuries that
capitalism produces, but we should recognize, as our Stone
Age ancestors did, that it is wrong for anyone to come between
a human being and the resources she needs to survive.
An
unconditional basic income guarantee might be the only policy
that can do that. The only way to live in modern society
without being subject to some else's orders is to have money.
We, the better off, haven't done even the least we can do
to justify our property rights, because we have convinced
ourselves that we have the right to boss around the poor.
We have property, and they don't; therefore, supposedly,
we have the right to make them do what we say for 40 hours
per week. Yet, anthropological evidence shows that our property
rights come between the poor and their ability to meet their
own needs with surprisingly little effort. Even by the standards
set by property rights advocates-the poor do not owe us
anything; we owe them.
Bibliography
Earle,
T. (1997), How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy
in Prehistory, Stanford: University Press.
Earle,
T. (2002), Bronze Age Economics: The First Political
Economies, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Fried,
M. H. (1967), The Evolution of Political Society: An
Essay in Political Anthropology, New York: Random House.
Sahlins,
M. (1974), Stone Age Economics, London: Tavistock.
©
Citizen's Income Trust, 2008
|
