Free Money for Surfers: A Genealogy of the Idea of Universal Basic Income - Los Angeles Review of Books

Dubbing the idea a “people’s QE” (or Quantitative Easing), the latter has warned that “virtually none of the measures which worked in 2008, particularly cutting interest rates, are going to have the slightest bit of impact.” Instead, O’Neill urged governments to give money “directly to people” in order “to compensate for […] very tough instructions to self-isolate and stop working.” The usual suspects — British Tories, GOP ideologues — voiced their concerns, but cash transfer skepticism sounds increasingly out of touch as the world’s economies grind to a collective halt. With its subtitle “The Idea of a Guaranteed Income and the Politics of Redistribution in Modern Britain,” Sloman recontextualizes the UBI within a wider timeline of conceptions of redistribution and social policy.The book is also about so much more than basic income. The success of William Beveridge’s 1942 report, with its vision of a welfare system that would support citizens “from the cradle to the grave,” Sloman notes, cast “into the shadows the alternative visions of welfare which were canvassed by his contemporaries.” But in the 1930s Britain had already witnessed a proliferation of proposals and ideas that were meant to reshape the distribution of income and head off the disastrous consequences of the Great Depression.Among these was the “State Bonus” promoted by Quaker engineers Dennis and Mabel Milner in 1918, probably the first basic income in the contemporary sense due to its uncoupling from land ownership. This shift would slowly legitimize what the economist John Kay called “Redistributive Market Liberalism.” In this perspective, even if the state had to retain a “dominant role in matters of income distribution,” it should completely “discharge this responsibility with as little interference as possible in the workings of the free market.”This “RMT” perspective was best illustrated by the British writer and politician Juliet Rhys-Williams. “Married women and those acting as unpaid housekeepers,” Rhys-Williams argued, “would receive the benefits of the contract without being required to register for employment.” Though her plan was never fully implemented, the attention she raised around cash transfers financed by general taxation as an alternative way to tackle poverty established, as Sloman notes, “tax-benefit integration […] as a market liberal cause, rooted in a critique of both Fabian paternalism and the labourist assumptions of the National Insurance system.”In the United States, the most prominent spokesperson for this tax-benefit integration was Milton Friedman. As Sloman notes, “despite Margaret Thatcher’s ideological suspicion” of the “transfer machine,” the Conservative governments of the 1980s “nevertheless made strategic use of transfer payments to offset the distributional effects of neoliberal reforms, particularly in the housing and labour markets,” and contributed to the further fusing of tax and welfare policy.Leftists often see the Thatcherite 1980s as a period of universal retreat. Instead of the state putting everyone to work, consumer entitlements became the alternative to top-down nationalization; in the 1990s, the Blair revolution in the Labour Party would complete this curious hybrid.¤ Few movements did more to reorient the British welfare state around the transfer model than the “Third Way,” as Sloman shows. New Labour governments, as Solomon Hughes notes, “redistribute[d] money and resources […] increased welfare benefits,” and gave “money to rebuild schools and hospitals worn away by the Thatcher years.” But they did this by “redistributing power away from the base to the corporations.” Together with the new humanitarianism of the Iraq War, Blair’s cash grants became the utopia for a world that had lost faith in all utopias.¤The “austerity” of the 2010s is often presented as a stark break with the exuberance of the Blair years. David Cameron’s coalition government duly sought to halt the spending splurge and shrink the state for a “Great Society.” Once the full effects of austerity became visible, however, old habits died very hard: rather than cutting tax credits, Cameron found himself continuing the transfer revolution set in motion by New Labour, notably with the development of Universal Credit.British UBI advocates have of course found much to criticize in these austerity years. As Sloman notes, “at a discursive level […] David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith successfully challenged New Labour’s focus on income poverty.”At the level of policy, however, Cameronism secretly continued the tax credit revolution started by Blair and further expanded the transfer state. “[D]espite the Conservatives’ anti-welfare rhetoric,” Sloman writes, the period after 2010 saw the “development of […] an ambitious attempt to merge tax credits and other working-age benefits into a single system of means-tested income support, subject to new forms of conditionality,” while “efforts to reduce welfare spending have become increasingly fraught.” Behind the Tories’ backs, the transfer paradigm survived intact.¤Beyond the obvious strengths of the fiscal anti-poverty strategy, however, there are enough reasons to remain skeptical about the transfer paradigm. Instead, De Grauwe (hardly a socialist) proposes raising temporary unemployment benefits to 90 percent of regular salaries and sending money “to those who see the biggest decreases in their incomes.” “Governments have to spend,” De Grauwe claims, “but not simply at random.” Prioritizing UBI thus risks undermining the narrow momentum for an extended welfare state that has opened up, from increased and expanded unemployment insurance to more public services.