On July 11, 2018, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang was interviewed by the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) about his central campaign plank : a $1,000-per-month “freedom dividend” for every citizen.Footnote 1 Yang had outlined his views on basic income in his book The War on Normal People, published earlier that year.Footnote 2 The proposal, however, was hardly novel. The BIEN was founded in 1986 by Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs, an early and influential proponent of basic income.Footnote 3 The story of Welfare for Markets begins less than two years later, with a journalist asking Van Parijs for his opinion on the $1,200 “economic impact payments” authorized by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Americans discovered that the government could simply deposit money into their bank accounts: no forms, no applications, no means testing, no qualifications, no nothing. Ordinarily, the government simply chooses not to hand out money with no strings attached. What changed?
Daniel Zamora Vargas and Anton Jäger argue that the economic impact payments were the culmination of tectonic shifts in the postwar landscape: the breakdown of the New Deal social order, the rise of consumer sovereignty, and new ways of thinking about development in the Global South. The aim of the book is to trace the “drivers, causes, and sources of our UBI moment” exemplified by the CARES Act [3]. Welfare for Markets sets out to show us how someone like Andrew Yang could run for US President on a platform of basic income or why an incumbent Republican administration, constitutionally hostile to free money, would reach to basic income in an emergency. But the ambition of the book goes further.
Welfare for Markets expands the historical narrative begun in Peter Sloman’s Transfer State geographically and temporally into a “global history of basic income,” tracing how the increasing bipartisan appeal of basic income is a “prism refracting a series of epochal changes in late-century political culture” [9].Footnote 4 The motivating puzzle, as many other reviews have noted, is explaining what could bring such disparate figures as Desmond Tutu, Mark Zuckerberg, Milton Friedman, and Yanis Varoufakis together in the same pro–basic income camp. The answer, they argue, is a shared “way of thinking about needs, poverty, and the state that was slowly formulated in the interwar period, only to triumph in the decades following the Second World War” [9]. This specific way of thinking is never given a name. Rather, it is a shared set of assumptions about “labor, needs, the state, [and] social citizenship” [11]. Through basic income, the authors “observe changing views of economic justice, social rights, state provision, markets, and political organization, refracted through a policy unique in its disrespect for ideological boundaries” [10]. The aim of the book is to provide a “better understanding of the processes that gave us our current basic income” and thereby illuminate these broader political transformations [15].
The core argument is that the rise of basic income as a discursive touchstone marks a deep skepticism about the ability of collective action to solve collective problems. Instead, individuals are furnished with vouchers to secure their own individual solutions. New markets are created to replace old public goods. The point is not to de-commodify, but to extend access beyond what the market spontaneously enables. Welfare is thus achieved in markets rather than outside of them [10]. In perhaps the most quotable line in the book, authors argue “basic income became the utopia for a world that had lost faith in utopias.” [9] The “UBI moment” thus indexes the retreat of more emancipatory political projects. The bipartisan embrace of basic income is grimly symptomatic of the general foreclosure of political possibility in the present.
The method is to disrupt the “dubious teleology” of some existing studies of basic income. To this end, the authors turn to the Cambridge school—Quentin Skinner, JGA Pocock, and their descendants—to develop a “‘radically historicist’ history [that] fixes our eyes both on shocks that rocked twentieth-century capitalism and how these shocks turned basic income into an elegant tool to deconstruct and rethink social policy” [16].Footnote 5 In keeping with this tradition, the book’s greatest strength is the chapters that carefully chart how basic income proposals emerge from and respond to particular ideological and political conjunctures.
The modern history of basic income begins with Milton Friedman’s negative income tax proposals, which “constituted one of the first and most coherent versions of a noncontributory guaranteed cash transfer scheme” [35]. Through Friedman’s proposals, the authors read the development of a uniquely American strand of welfare economics responding to the anxieties and limitations of the incumbent British model and interpersonal utility comparisons. The crucial inflection point for the modern history of basic income is 1962: both Michael Harrington’s The Other America and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom were published that year. Though fundamentally opposed in their political visions, both engage in a “monetization of poverty,” recasting the role of the state in collective provision in a fundamental way. No longer would the state be concerned with social justice or public goods. Instead, the state would use the “monetization of poverty” to act on the conditions of the market “rather than on the market itself.”Footnote 6
The postwar social structure, founded on employment and what Melinda Cooper calls the “Fordist family wage,” was disintegrating.Footnote 7 In 1964, a group including Harrington, Tom Hayden, Gunnar Myrdal, Bayard Rustin, James Boggs, and many others sent an open letter to Lyndon Johnson diagnosing the many pathologies of the prevailing political and economic order. Full employment as the policy aim of New Deal liberalism was threatened by the rise of automation. On the left, basic income emerges as a logical solution to this problem: income can be elegantly decoupled from wage labor. On the right, basic income is also an expedient mechanism for providing a social minimum without the welfare state. In a debate at Cornell University, both Friedman and Harrington expressed increasing skepticism about the ability of big-government liberalism to address the persistent problem of poverty amid postwar plenty [62]. Harrington writes, “it is not that Washington has done too much but that it has so often done too much of the wrong thing.”Footnote 8 Milton Friedman couldn’t agree more. On several levels, Welfare for Markets is an ironic mirror of Francois Ewald’s monumental study of the French welfare state, L’État Providence. One of Ewald’s many memorable lines also applies to basic income: “beware a bourgeois solution to a bourgeois problem.”Footnote 9
Welfare for Markets compiles some of the authors’ previous work on basic income. Chapter 2 was first published in Modern Intellectual History earlier this year, and Chapters 3 and 4 were first published in an edited volume entitled Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective. Footnote 10 In the introduction to a different edited volume on basic income, published in French in 2016, Zamora writes: “Under the cover of a benevolent redistribution of wealth, [basic income] threatens to leave along the way what has been the central political issue of the last 150 years: the conflict between capital and labor. It is a reminder of the decisive importance of this question … and demonstrates why it is imperative to be against basic income.”Footnote 11 In that earlier work, Zamora describes UBI as straightforwardly “une idée néolibérale.” In Welfare for Markets, the authors are less certain. They conclude, “instead of focusing on monocausal neoliberalism… the global rise of cash transfers [hints] at a deeper and messier market turn that ran through many traditions and currents in the late twentieth century” [176].
The authors conclude by arguing that the resurgence of basic income in the “technopopulist age” “relied on an armory of arguments built up by two generations of basic income activists and the expiration of older remedies for market dependency… Basic income here was both an index of retreat—the demise of an older social statism—and an accelerant of entrenchment” [169]. The link between these localized episodes, the CARES Act, and the technopopulist moment is not entirely clear. According to a variety of news sources, the idea of direct payments to individuals was conceived by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin (several years earlier, Mnuchin and his wife infamously posed with a sheet of freshly printed money). Mnuchin pushed Trump to adopt stimulus payments rather than a payroll tax cut and successfully sold the idea to Congressional Republicans. The stimulus payments marked less of a “new utopia” with a long theoretical lineage than a movement of pure political pragmatism in the face of an unprecedented crisis. The infamous Payroll Protection Program (PPP) that shoveled free money to business owners—perhaps the greatest act of patronage politics in recent memory—was three times the size (~$1 trillion) of the economic impact payments and could perhaps more aptly be described as “welfare for markets.”
It is surely right that basic income marks a defeat of more radical political projects by both right and left. But it is also crucial to note that meaningful basic income schemes will never be enacted. As Jäger says himself in a recent interview: “The eternal contradiction of basic income proposals is that affordable schemes are insufficient, and sufficient schemes are unaffordable.”Footnote 12 If basic income is neither an actually existing policy regime nor a realistic policy proposal, then what exactly is it doing in the “technopopulist age”?
