ABOUT THIS BOOK
A sweeping intellectual history of the welfare state’s policy-in-waiting.
The idea of a government paying its citizens to keep them out of poverty—now known as basic income—is hardly new. Often dated as far back as ancient Rome, basic income’s modern conception truly emerged in the late nineteenth century. Yet as one of today’s most controversial proposals, it draws supporters from across the political spectrum.
In this eye-opening work, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas trace basic income from its rise in American and British policy debates following periods of economic tumult to its modern relationship with technopopulist figures in Silicon Valley. They chronicle how the idea first arose in the United States and Europe as a market-friendly alternative to the postwar welfare state and how interest in the policy has grown in the wake of the 2008 credit crisis and COVID-19 crash.
An incisive, comprehensive history, Welfare for Markets tells the story of how a fringe idea conceived in economics seminars went global, revealing the most significant shift in political culture since the end of the Cold War.
REVIEWS
"At once a fascinating intellectual history of the idea of Universal Basic Income, and a trenchant but well-reasoned and nuanced critique of it: this book must be read by anyone who is interested in or affected by one of the central policy tropes of our times."
— Jayati Ghosh | University of Massachusetts Amherst
"No book in recent memory offers a comparable analysis of the multiple, sometimes outright contradictory uses of social policy in modern capitalism: the incredible variety of purposes, left and right, progressive and reactionary, to which social reformism can be put. This is history of ideas in its best, embedded in a social history that does not shy away from taking on the vexing relationship between ideas and interests — full of surprising turns, and great fun to read."
— Wolfgang Streeck | Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
"From Gracchi to Trump, leftists to rightists, monarchists to republicans, legalists to revolutionaries, one idea has been supported by these diverse thinkers, politicians and philosophers in some form or at some time. It is the idea of guaranteeing minimal income to all citizens. It was utopian in poor societies, it is feasible in today's rich societies, and it already exists in some variation. But can it be pushed further, to include all and be delivered regardless of circumstances? Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora take us into an intellectual journey on which we shall meet almost every thinker we know, but they will be, most of the time, traveling with rather unexpected intellectual companions. Enjoy the ride!"
— Branko Milanovic | City University of New York
"While pundits focus on enemies such as central planning, trade unions, and public ownership, they evade conversations on the limits and contradictions of capitalism but Welfare for Markets does not hold back. This brilliant book on the intellectual history of basic income is a necessary step and a must-read!"
— Carolina Alves | Girton College, University of Cambridge
"On the surface, this book is an intellectual history of the concept of universal basic incomes. And the book is indeed a brilliant account of the genealogy of just this idea. But far beyond that, Welfare for Markets is an analysis of the relation between social welfare, the real production and provisioning of goods, and money. Welfare for Markets is a beautifully written book that allows us to step outside our troubled times to see visions for the future with new eyes."
— Isabella Weber | author of "How China Escaped Shock Therapy" | University of Massachusetts Amherst
"Welfare for Markets is a brilliant historical account of universal basic income as the Trojan Horse for politics seeking to dismantle the welfare state and to replace the collective provision of public goods with grants for markets."
— Daniela Gabor | University of the West of England, Bristol
"[Jäger and Zamora Vargas] have teamed up again with this carefully researched historical reference that examines public welfare proposals from diverse ideological perspectives. They show that capitalist free markets do not benefit all individuals...This eye-opening work should be considered as a first purchase."
— Library Journal
"Welfare for Markets is a stimulating and comprehensive book that fulfils the promise of offering 'a global history of basic income'...Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas explore, in time and space, the different proposals for guaranteed income in order to unfold the worldviews that underpin them."
— Œconomia
"The strengths of Jäger and Zamora’s historical approach are indisputable. They amply demonstrate what others have only hinted at—the depths of the political-economic and cultural shifts that led to the ascendence of market fundamentalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Their history is both broad and deep. Certainly it will become the authoritative account of the origins of UBI."
— Jacobin
"Though meticulously researched, Welfare for Markets is a slim volume of succinct and lucid argumentation."
— Boston Review
"Welfare for Markets [dismantles] the mythological history of UBI, which presents it as a timeless ideal of social justice backed by enlightened thinkers through the ages: Thomas More, Thomas Paine, Orestes Brownson, Charles Fourier and GDH Cole, among others. According to Jäger and Zamora Vargas, the supposed progenitors of basic income were anything but."
— New Statesman
"[There] are vital insights that can be gleaned from Welfare for Markets, which deftly surveys many of the philosophical and political quandaries that basic income poses."
— American Affairs
"Welfare for Markets [describes] how shocks to twentieth-century capitalism turned basic income into an ideal tool for deconstructing and rethinking social policy."
— Journal of Economic Literature
"Welfare for Markets is a well-chosen title for an illuminating analysis of the intellectual history of basic income."
— Counterfire
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Welfare without the Welfare State - Anton Jäger, Daniel Zamora Vargas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226825236.003.0001
[basic income;capitalism;neoliberalism;2008 recession;COVID-19;Global North;Global South]
The idea of a basic income has become one of the most resonant and controversial policy proposals in recent history. Conceived as an unconditional grant sent to every citizen, it now finds supporters from tech tycoons such as Mark Zuckerberg to UN Secretary General António Guterres. Both in the Global North and South, proponents sell it as an idea ‘whose time has come’. The history of the idea has rarely been the subject of sustained attention, however. Exposing this gap,this introduction introduces the book's historical ambitions. Rather than tracing the proposal back to a mythic early modern period, the book focuses on howthe idea first arose as a market-friendly alternative to the post-war welfare state in the United States and Europe. With the demise of state-led development and industrialization in the South, it went planetary in the 1990s, only to receive a further boost with the 2008 credit crisis and the 2020 COVID crash. Situated on the intersection of intellectual, social, economic and policy history, it also shows how any history of the basic income can hardly be a history of the basic income alone, revealing developments central to our political present. (pages vi - 12)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 1: An Anti-Mythology - Anton Jäger, Daniel Zamora Vargas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226825236.003.0002
[republicanism;producerism;socialism]
The recent surgesof interest in basic income have gone hand in hand with newaccounts of its rise. Often perceived from the present, the growing popularity of the UBI as a “five-hundred-year-old idea” has gone hand in hand with its insertion into an old and mighty family tree, encompassing thinkers from Thomas More to Thomas Paine to Milton Friedman. This chapter argues against suchteleological readings, and shows how earlier grant thinkers only fit awkwardly in the current basic income scene. Two older political traditions account for this difference. The first is a classical republican tradition which centered on how a free state could achieve stability through land distribution, conceived through the medium of an 'agrarian law'. The second was a producerist tradition that insisted on the centrality of a work ethic to this republican order. In both traditions, property ownership and republican rule were intimately connected, with radicals seeking to redistribute factors of production to citizens rather than increase income for wage-dependent workers.Inthe end, it was the erosion of these older political “languages", both materially and intellectually, that opened space for new notions of cash transfers to emerge in the 1930s and 1940s. (pages 12 - 32)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 2: Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax and the Monetization of Poverty - Anton Jäger, Daniel Zamora Vargas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226825236.003.0003
[welfare;New Deal;neoliberalism;Milton Friedman;war on poverty]
Milton Friedman’s negative income tax stands out as one of the most renowned and controversial ideas to establish a universal floor of income for every citizen. First elaborated in the early 1940s, it attracted widespread attention among economists and policy makers in the aftermath of Johnson’s War on Poverty. This chapter focuses on the intellectual setting in which Friedman envisioned his radicallynew way of thinking about poverty and needs. Tracing back the origin of the proposal in the context of the New Deal and its fiscal revolution, this chapter shows how Friedman hollowed out redistributive considerations from the hierarchies of needs, notions of duty, or citizenship that were common in British welfarist conceptions and preexisting notions of equality in which the state played a key role by replacing it with a monetary and market-friendly conception of poverty. (pages 32 - 54)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 3: Cash Triumphs: America after the New Deal Order - Anton Jäger, Daniel Zamora Vargas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226825236.003.0004
[New Deal;New Left;automation;New Right;Keynesian;Michael Harrington;James Boggs;Daniel Moynihan;Arthur Kemp;post-war]
This chapter focuses on the career of the basic incomein the United States in the 1960s. Placedin the twilight hour of the New Deal order and American industry, it shows how concerns surrounding automation, structural unemployment, and welfare reform drove both the New Right and New Left to embrace cash transfer solutions and gradually turnskeptical of the old welfare order, premised on an exclusionary male model of a working breadwinner. To critics such as the socialist writer Michael Harrington or the labor activist James Boggs, the cash-centred welfare offered by basic income would sublate the New Deal order and eliminate its paternalistic vestiges. For conservatives such as Daniel Moynihan and Arthur Kemp, they avoided social utopianism and a sclerotic public sector, but also had little time for laissez-faire minimalism, reconciling the market with a modicum of security.In this account, the rising fascination for basic income was part of a wider transformation of the Keynesian paradigm, including thepolicy categories that had shaped the social and economic thought of the post-war order. (pages 54 - 91)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 4: The Politics of Postwork in Postwar Europe - Anton Jäger, Daniel Zamora Vargas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226825236.003.0005
[cybernetics;post-work;Fordism;basic income;globalization]
This chapter charts the trajectory of basic income in post-war Europe. In particular, it investigatesits debt to anti-work and anti-state currents, focusing on the debates which took place in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands fromthe 1960s to the 1980s. Across this period, New Left thinkers such as Jan-Pieter Kuiper, Jan Tinbergen, Robert van der Veen, Roel Van Duijn, and Philippe Van Parijs theorized European versions of a basic income in response to the perceived crisis of ‘the society of labor’. Indebted to American cybernetics and French antistatism, their conceptualization of basic income left a powerful mark on later debates and set the stage for the proposal's globalization at the close of the century. (pages 91 - 125)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 5: Rethinking Global Development at the End of History - Anton Jäger, Daniel Zamora Vargas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226825236.003.0006
[development;cash transfers;industrialization;Global South;post-colonialism]
Over the last thirty years, cash transfers have become increasingly popular as a tool for poverty alleviation in the Global South.Following the“lost decade”ofthe structural adjustment programsin the 1980s,countries like Mexico, Brazil, orSouth Africa implementedambitious conditional cash transfers (CCT)with significant effects on poverty alleviation.FromGuy Standing’sfailed attempt to promote the ideain South Africajust after the fall of the Apartheid to the pilots conducted by the Silicon Valley funded GiveDirectly inKenya,it took more than two decades for UBI to be perceivedas aserioustool for development.This chapter puts historical context on this success story.In a Global South increasingly unable or unwilling to decasualizelabor, direct investment, or socialize resources,thisnew cash nexusreinvented developmentoutside the state-centered framework set up by post-colonial thinkers, Marxists, and modernization theorists alike.In the place ofeconomic independence from northern metropoles, development wasslowlyredefined as a commitment toguaranteeing to everyone, through market exchanges,a floor of income.Along the way,the very definition of ‘development’began to indeliblychange. (pages 125 - 163)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Epilogue: Basic Income in the Technopopulist Age - Anton Jäger, Daniel Zamora Vargas
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226825236.003.0007
[techno-populism;Silicon Valley;individualization]
In December 2020, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a $15 million donation for a basic income pilot across several American cities. About seven months earlier, economies crashed in the midst of a global COVID-19 pandemic, leaving behind a workforce desperate for funds.After a twenty-year detour, cash transfers had made a spectacular comeback to the West, showing how the periphery prefigured developments in the metropole.This chapter concludes the history of the basic income after the COVID shock. After focusing on current tech enthusiasm for the proposal and its precedents, it points at dividends for the scholarlycurrent literature. These span themes in social policy, the secular crisis of civil society, and the increasingdepoliticizationof human needs.In this latter sense, story of basic income will never be the exclusive province of policy makers, economists, politicians, social scientists, or activists; it is only partially covered by terms such as neoliberalism, neoclassicism, automation, or deindustrialization. Instead, it hints at a more profound break at the heart of modern political culture: the occurrence of a “second capitalist revolution” somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century, when humanity undertook its second move from markets to market societies. (pages 163 - 180)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
