Until relatively recently, it was possible to organize the most important publications on the Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposal into the three broad areas that Erik Olin Wright (Envisioning Real Utopias, London, UK, and New York, NY: Verso, 2010): its normative desirability, its technical viability, or its political feasibility. Although the question of the past and the history of this proposal have always been present, only now has the historiographical question taken hold as a space with its questions and answers.
This book is, first and foremost, a vindication of the enormous capacities of intellectual history to access the density of ideas circulating in our present. Together with the recent Peter Sloman book (Transfer State: The Idea of a Guaranteed Income and the Politics of Redistribution in Modern Britain, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019) and the collective work edited by Sloman, Daniel Zamora, and Pedro Ramos Pinto (Universal Basic Income in Historical Perspective, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), this book shows the productivity that a historiographical approach has in illuminating the experience contained in some of the proposals that organize current economic policy expectations. The book is designed to make a specific contribution to the literature on the history of social policy: the history of the shift from a preference for redistribution in kind to redistribution in cash.
Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, distancing themselves from a history prone to falling into the “mythological” reconstructions against which Quentin Skinner warned, opt for a social-contextual history approach in the style of Elen Meiskins Wood. Although texts and languages remain at the center, the aim is to permanently blur the boundaries between political or economic, specialist or activist texts. The intellectual history of UBI forces us to finally observe the “changing views of economic justice, social rights, state provision, markets, and political organization, refracted through a policy unique in its disrespect for ideological boundaries” (p. 10).
What Philippe Van Parijs and Jannik Vanderborght (2017) had divided into a “prehistory” and a “history” of the UBI is here marked between “mythology” and “history.” Until the interwar period, agrarian and communist languages imposed specific limits on imaginable political horizons. Before this moment, what is observable are proposals on the distribution of property and not properly a cash policy. Then, from this point on, the nerve center of the story becomes Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax (NIT) proposal, traced in some of his writings since 1939.
The central hypothesis is that the intellectual roots shared by the range of UBI proponents come from discussions involving a substantial shift from the past in thinking about the relationship between politics and the state. The codification of welfare language in terms of marginal utility by Arthur Cecil Pigou, or the market socialism positions of Abba. P. Lerner and Oskar Lange, allowed ethical judgments to gradually creep in as part of formal economics’ “positive” language. Instead of being politicized and constituted through a political process, needs could be technically revealed as individual preferences. This transit generated the suspicion that in-kind transfers were less efficient than the price system in achieving this. In the context of the development of the national accounting system in the United States and the rise of massive taxation after WWII, fiscal policy became the favored tool of economic and social stabilization.
The 1960s and the post-New Deal United States saw the triumph of cash in different social and political discourses. Post-war remedies had lost effectiveness in the face of persistent poverty; “Other America” and discussions about automation pushed welfare reformers to call for welfare for all. The rise of income guarantee proposals shows the generalization of a growing cultural shift in understanding the economic system and the state’s role. The end of the goal of full employment and the beginning of a post-labor world paved the way for the emergence of UBI in mass activism. The discussions of the “new left” by Claus Offe, Toni Negri, or André Gorz, through Michel Foucault, built the basis for the contemporary emergence of the proposal in the 1980s in the context of European deindustrialization. While the North tried to think welfare beyond the “Welfare State,” the South planned development beyond “Development.”
The so-called global history of UBI, the history of globalized economic languages around the preference for cash, traces the discussions that began to be articulated since the 1970s on the critique of the developmental strategy. From post-apartheid South Africa in the 1990s through India, Mexico, and Brazil, the discourses questioning industrialization and full employment as the fundamental path to development converged in the language of the institutions of globalization governance. The consequences of the Volcker Shock generating the debt crisis in Latin America set the stage for developing the vast transfer programs accompanied by the World Bank. The book concludes with a novel epilogue on the genealogy of the discussions within Silicon Valley “technopopulism,” where the proposal still has a large following today.
Finally, the somewhat arbitrary decision to construct a narrative based on only one of the characteristics of the UBI, the preference for cash vs. kind, makes it difficult to see this story as a history of the UBI rather than cash transfer policies in general. The main problem that remains unresolved here is the escape from the “origin” question and the “mythologies” presented at the beginning. In this narrative, Milton Friedman becomes at the center and prospectively orders history. However, while dismissing the ideas of Juan Luis Vives or Thomas More as mythologies is fully convincing, it is less so, for example, with Thomas Paine. It would be necessary to demonstrate that the UBI was “unthinkable”—in Skinnerian terms—at the end of the eighteenth century. This is much more complex in a context where we know that Paine worked as an excise tax collector and was part of the discussion on reforming the poor laws.
This dividing line with arguments centered on property redistribution raises the question of whether, for example, Piketty’s well-known universal inheritance proposal, taken directly from Paine, might not represent a still-present genealogy of this past linking the question of property redistribution and “cash preference.” Perhaps a more ambivalent history of the current tensions within the very concept of UBI could help to reduce this teleological “temptation” and better illuminate the “disrespect for ideological boundaries” of our present economic policy horizons.
