BIGidea
Pay a monthly dividend to all citizens.
Agriculture and urbanization whittled such networks down to the nuclear family or even the individual. The larger institutions that took their place—church, state—left gaps. These shifts occurred over centuries, so few noticed, except when cultures on either side of the change collided. Take, for example, Charles Eastman, who was born Ohiyesa to the hunter-gatherer Sioux in 1858 and was horrified by the deprivation he saw in Victorian Boston:
"We knew well what it is to endure physical hardship, but our poor lost nothing of their self-respect and dignity. Our great men not only divided their last kettle of food with a neighbor, but if great grief should come to them, such as the death of child or wife, they would voluntarily give away their few possessions and begin life over again in token of their sorrow. We could not conceive of the extremes of luxury and misery existing thus side by side."2
Thomas Paine and Henry George
Encounters between egalitarian societies and complex, unequal ones led people in the latter to consider a basic income more than once. Thomas Paine, an intellectual architect of the American Revolution, was struck by the Iroquois' way of life (they were farmers, not foragers) and made an effort to learn their language. In 1795 he considered the toll that "human invention" had taken on society. "Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made," he wrote, but
"…it has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before."
Paine proposed that a "groundrent" of £15 be paid to every individual upon turning 21, followed by £10 every year after turning 50. He argued that "every person, rich or poor," should receive the payments "to prevent invidious distinctions." Napoleon Bonaparte was sympathetic to the idea, but never implemented it.
A century later Henry George, an American economist active after the Civil War, called for "no taxes and a pension for everybody" via a public land fund. He was influenced by Paine and cited Sioux chiefs' astonishment at visiting East Coast cities to witness "little children at work."
The past 100 years
In the 20th century, the basic income cause was taken up by the left. Huey Long, a populist senator from Louisiana, proposed a minimum income of $2,000 to $2,500 in 1934 (as well as a maximum income of 300 times the average). G.D.H. Cole, a political economist at Oxford, advocated a "social dividend" as part of a planned economy. In 1953 he became the first to use the phrase "basic income."
In the 1960s—perhaps coincidentally, as anthropologists were documenting the !Kung and other fast-fading hunter-gatherer cultures—the idea of a guaranteed minimum income entered the political mainstream. Martin Luther King endorsed it. Experiments were run in New Jersey, Iowa, North Carolina, Indiana, Seattle, Denver, and Manitoba. Nixon pushed to make it federal law, though he insisted that his "basic Federal minimum" included work incentives and so was different from the $1,000 annual "demogrant" George McGovern would have given to every citizen.
Imagining a 21st Century Basic Income
Today the idea of a basic income has again entered the mainstream. Unsurprisingly, given its scattered lineage, boosters make different arguments from diverse ideological vantage points. Broadly speaking, proponents on the left see it as an antidote to poverty and inequality. On the right its appeal has more to do with increasing the efficiency of the welfare state.
Another distinction, which cross-cuts left and right, is between reformers who want to rationalize policy in light of current issues and futurists who aim to radically overhaul society—or save it from radical overhaul due to automation. In practice, any given basic income proponent is likely to employ several of these arguments, without regard for political taxonomies.
Would people stop working?
In a 2014 working paper weighing a basic income against traditional unemployment insurance, economists at the St. Louis Fed projected that voluntary unemployment would rise rapidly as a basic income's amount rose. Voluntary quitting would in turn raise the tax burden on workers needed to fund the payout, encouraging more people to drop out of the workforce: "The likelihood of quitting rises exponentially in response to increases in UBI [universal basic income] benefits." However, the authors argue, a basic income of $2,000 (2011) or so is "clearly sustainable."15
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