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Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income
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.
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.
264 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 18, 2023
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543 people want to read
About the author
Anton Jäger
15 books49 followersAnton Jäger is een Belgisch historicus en publicist. Zijn werk handelt over ideeëngeschiedenis, meer bepaald de verhouding tussen kapitalisme en democratie. Jäger studeerde aan de universiteiten van Essex en Cambridge en doctoreerde in 2020 aan die laatste universiteit.
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Anton Jäger (b.1994) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Catholic University of Leuven. He has published widely on populism, basic income, and the contemporary crisis of democracy. His work has appeared in Jacobin, the Guardian, and the New Statesman.
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Anton Jäger (b.1994) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Catholic University of Leuven. He has published widely on populism, basic income, and the contemporary crisis of democracy. His work has appeared in Jacobin, the Guardian, and the New Statesman.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 5, 2023
This fascinating book attempts to piece together a history of basic income as an idea, putting it in context alongside the rise of cash transfers in the midst of changing views of the role of work, the state and the primacy of the individual. After situating basic income as an idea which emerged in a recognisable form in the early 20th century - particularly the interwar period - the authors provide several angles through which to see and understand its rise. In particular, they identify three 'victor[ies] in defeat' of the idea of a UBI or negative income tax: post-war USA, post-68 Europe and in changing strategies for development following the implementation of structural adjustment programs across the Global South. In each case, the authors contend, while genuinely universal basic incomes were seldom implemented, cash-based welfare programs (as opposed to universal services and in-kind benefits more generally) spread to the point of being hegemonic in policymaking circles.
It is a well-written book, and surprisingly concise considering the breadth of its content. In my view one of its strengths is in the way it insists upon the nuances of many of the thinkers and ideas discussed. One minor criticism I would make is that, as someone who is far from an expert in the topics and thinkers referred to, the book sometimes assumed what seems to me a high level of prior knowledge across a number of domains. Perhaps it would have benefited from being slightly longer, to afford the authors the space to provide more introductions to the issues discussed.
Nonetheless, I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone wishing to read a critical review of how the idea of basic income came to be so popular across such disparate groups.
It is a well-written book, and surprisingly concise considering the breadth of its content. In my view one of its strengths is in the way it insists upon the nuances of many of the thinkers and ideas discussed. One minor criticism I would make is that, as someone who is far from an expert in the topics and thinkers referred to, the book sometimes assumed what seems to me a high level of prior knowledge across a number of domains. Perhaps it would have benefited from being slightly longer, to afford the authors the space to provide more introductions to the issues discussed.
Nonetheless, I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone wishing to read a critical review of how the idea of basic income came to be so popular across such disparate groups.
August 10, 2023
Short but essential. Jager and Vargas-Jones make a strong case for how Cambridge School PTIH might be relevant for the 21st C in analytical terms. Taking UBI as an especially interesting history of a contested concept, the idea functions as a prism to trace the advent of the 'second capitalist revolution' sometime in the 20th c. J and V-J trace this through a number of strands. After a classical opening move - exploding the various mythologies of coherence at work in the supposed pre-histories and invented traditions of UBI (More, Fourier etc. alongside some unusual early 20th c. suspects) - the book properly begins by investigating Milton Friedman's early career spent carving out a niche for a negative income tax (and markets more broadly) as a disillusioned economic planner (a familiar Left to Right convert?) in the mid-century welfare world followed by the cross-spectrum uptake of his ideas amidst the crucible of '60s America. Later chapters trace parallel maneuvres unfolding within the European left and institutions of international development from the 70s through to the early 2000s terminating with a very suggestive gloss on UBI in the "techno-populist" present, this final chapter providing a succinct statement of what I've taken to calling the Mair - Bickerton - Jager thesis of disintermediation as social logic. There is a lot going on here for 179 pages, an admirable breadth and depth worth dipping into for the footnotes alone, and that, in tandem with the acknowledgements page and the strength of its narrative, puts J and V-J at the heart of some of the cutting edge stuff going on with contemporary scholarship into everything we mean when we use the concept of "Neoliberalism". Why do some of us continue to bandy around such a concept? Why is this of any use? Why, said in the tepid terms of the academy, is this a worthy research programme? As we approach the first quarter of the 21st century, I think what is becoming clearer in all of these studies is some answer, at present very vague, expansive in its outline, to the following question: what disappeared with the twentieth century? These are high stakes, epochal in scale. Among many other things, Jager’s sense of the proportion is arrived at through Baudrillard's lamentations on that latter theme and through a powerful, personal nostalgia for a time before disintermediation disfigured us. Now, this latter sentiment is something I share and something worthy of further discussion given it's an affect on the make that I continue to observie with some ambivalence. A tangent for another day. What I am trying to say is that the actuality of the so-called market turn demands all the sound and fury. We live now, in a market civilization. Only histories attentive to the century, the present conjuncture as one of change, transformation, and crisis will allow us to grasp this. To close: on the final few pages across a glowing series of quotations, Marcel Gauchet (a name unknown to me previously, ignorance I intend to amend) lays this transformation bare in precise and brutal terms: 'Once the absolute independence of individual actors is consecrated, the coordination of the whole necessarily takes the form of a market ... a more or less automatic arbitration between the initiatives and, offers, and demands of the various actors involved. In themselves these ideas are nothing new. What is new is the extent of their application: they are beginning to shape social life from top to bottom' (WFM, 178; 2014).
March 6, 2025
everything is cybernetics ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
March 28, 2024
Review forthcoming in the Journal of Markets and Morality
May 19, 2023
Jager & Zamora Vargas look at the issue of basic income as an historical issue. They trace the idea & how it has been discussed on both the right & the left & how modern concepts of basic income are dependent on these often conflicting genealogical ideas. It is a nuanced & important study for anyone who wants to learn the history of basic income as an ideological & economic idea.
"The globalization of basic income spoke to that shared vocabulary of forms and concepts birthed by the second capitalist globalization. Most prominently, however, the basic income can tell us something prominent about the rise of neoliberalism." 11
"[Bertrand] Russell proposed a version of basic income that was obligation-free, individual, and universal. "Under this plan," he claimed, "every man could live without work," and recipients would "bring colour and diversity into the life of the community." 27
"One of his ideas would become especially popular in the following decades: the negative income tax (NIT). Friedman had first drafted a version of his proposal while he was at the US Treasury in the early years of World War II working of the general reform of the income tax. "It arose," he recalled, "as part of the thinking about an appropriate structure of the income tac which would take care of averaging fluctuating incomes over time." 34
"The most influential formulation Friedman relied on to shape his own NIT as an alternative to Social Security was, he acknowledged, 'the literature associated with Lady Rhys-Williams and the idea of the social dividend." 35
"This aim-maximizing freedom rather than welfare-would naturally shape his views about poverty." 41
"It was indeed during the war that the US federal government shifted from class taxation to mass taxation. But 1945 two-thirds of Americans were paying taxes, whereas before the war the government reached only 4 to 8 percent of the working population." 51
"As with the poverty question, guaranteed income emerged here as an interesting alternative both to full employment and to service-based social policies." 75
"All these organization served as representatives of a new 'postindustrial left' that had sprung up in the 1960s and 1970s. They also discerned the profoundly destabilizing consequences that new cybernetic techniques had on received notions of state and labor. These provided handy tools for undermining the Forest order first created by postwar planners." 98
"Foucault increasingly began to conceive social security as a tool meant to standardize the conduct of individuals. As he remarked in 1983, 'Our social security systems impose a particular way of life that subjects individuals, and any person or group who, for one reason or another, does not want to cannot access this lifestyle, to marginalization by the same set of 'institutions." 110
"The first stipulated that 'the income guarantee is not implemented through guaranteed work,' which Van Parijs saw as the doctrine underlying the 1834 reform of the English poor law, which decreed the construction of workhouses. This view, he claimed, was rejected, 'by all basic income proponents,' since it implied a degrading view of assistance." 120
"Basic income here was both an index of retreat-the demise of an older social statism-and an accelerant of entrenchment. The proposal flourished in the wake of a double disorganization: the weakening of a dense union movement as a countervailing power and the dwindling of mass parties tied to a hinterland of civil society organization. In its place came a new 'technopopulist' politics, focusing on public relations and media outreach, in which community activists spoke for a silent constituency as 'advocates without members.' Unlike older interest groups, these would principally voice their welfare demands in the abstract: increased cash rather than specific resource allocation." 169
"The link between politicians and the public also shifted instead of attending to an organized civil society, they began to project 'opinions' onto an atomized public. This revolution also implied a dramatically different view of human needs. Rather than being seen as constituted through a democratic process and transactional politic, needs could simply be revealed as consumer choices or in our new virtual ecosystems...The increasing popularity of Alaska's dividend model remains one of the best illustrations of this shifting conception of welfare-from a concrete notion of poverty as a lack of access to socially constituted needs (housing, employment, education, health care) to an abstract definition of poverty as a lack of money." 172
"As Gauchet insists, the 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. After 'the end of labour, the end of production, and the end of political economy,' money had now 'found its proper place...an orbit which rises and sets like some artificial sun.' Through the prism of basic income, we receive just a fascinating glimpse of this orbital movement." 178-179
"The globalization of basic income spoke to that shared vocabulary of forms and concepts birthed by the second capitalist globalization. Most prominently, however, the basic income can tell us something prominent about the rise of neoliberalism." 11
"[Bertrand] Russell proposed a version of basic income that was obligation-free, individual, and universal. "Under this plan," he claimed, "every man could live without work," and recipients would "bring colour and diversity into the life of the community." 27
"One of his ideas would become especially popular in the following decades: the negative income tax (NIT). Friedman had first drafted a version of his proposal while he was at the US Treasury in the early years of World War II working of the general reform of the income tax. "It arose," he recalled, "as part of the thinking about an appropriate structure of the income tac which would take care of averaging fluctuating incomes over time." 34
"The most influential formulation Friedman relied on to shape his own NIT as an alternative to Social Security was, he acknowledged, 'the literature associated with Lady Rhys-Williams and the idea of the social dividend." 35
"This aim-maximizing freedom rather than welfare-would naturally shape his views about poverty." 41
"It was indeed during the war that the US federal government shifted from class taxation to mass taxation. But 1945 two-thirds of Americans were paying taxes, whereas before the war the government reached only 4 to 8 percent of the working population." 51
"As with the poverty question, guaranteed income emerged here as an interesting alternative both to full employment and to service-based social policies." 75
"All these organization served as representatives of a new 'postindustrial left' that had sprung up in the 1960s and 1970s. They also discerned the profoundly destabilizing consequences that new cybernetic techniques had on received notions of state and labor. These provided handy tools for undermining the Forest order first created by postwar planners." 98
"Foucault increasingly began to conceive social security as a tool meant to standardize the conduct of individuals. As he remarked in 1983, 'Our social security systems impose a particular way of life that subjects individuals, and any person or group who, for one reason or another, does not want to cannot access this lifestyle, to marginalization by the same set of 'institutions." 110
"The first stipulated that 'the income guarantee is not implemented through guaranteed work,' which Van Parijs saw as the doctrine underlying the 1834 reform of the English poor law, which decreed the construction of workhouses. This view, he claimed, was rejected, 'by all basic income proponents,' since it implied a degrading view of assistance." 120
"Basic income here was both an index of retreat-the demise of an older social statism-and an accelerant of entrenchment. The proposal flourished in the wake of a double disorganization: the weakening of a dense union movement as a countervailing power and the dwindling of mass parties tied to a hinterland of civil society organization. In its place came a new 'technopopulist' politics, focusing on public relations and media outreach, in which community activists spoke for a silent constituency as 'advocates without members.' Unlike older interest groups, these would principally voice their welfare demands in the abstract: increased cash rather than specific resource allocation." 169
"The link between politicians and the public also shifted instead of attending to an organized civil society, they began to project 'opinions' onto an atomized public. This revolution also implied a dramatically different view of human needs. Rather than being seen as constituted through a democratic process and transactional politic, needs could simply be revealed as consumer choices or in our new virtual ecosystems...The increasing popularity of Alaska's dividend model remains one of the best illustrations of this shifting conception of welfare-from a concrete notion of poverty as a lack of access to socially constituted needs (housing, employment, education, health care) to an abstract definition of poverty as a lack of money." 172
"As Gauchet insists, the 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. After 'the end of labour, the end of production, and the end of political economy,' money had now 'found its proper place...an orbit which rises and sets like some artificial sun.' Through the prism of basic income, we receive just a fascinating glimpse of this orbital movement." 178-179
December 18, 2023
En Welfare for Markets, Anton Jäger y Daniel Zamora Vargas presentan al mismo tiempo una historia intelectual del ingreso básico universal (UBI) y una historia del pensamiento económico sobre como durante el siglo XX, en especial su segunda mitad, tanto economistas como políticos y el público en general ha cambiado la forma de pensar respecto a la pobreza y la desigualdad y las mejores formas para combatirlas.
Es una historia verdaderamente global pues pasa por los debates intelectuales en Estados Unidos, Inglaterra, Holanda, México, India y otras tantas naciones que han cambiado con el tiempo sus aproximaciones al desarrollo económico. Es una historia de las ideas sobre el trabajo atadas a la industrialización y posteriormente a economías post-industriales. Es una historia de un cambio de paradigma político de un modelo más o menos universal de social democracia con provisiones corporativas de un estado de bienestar, digamos el consenso posterior a la Segunda Guerra Mundial, a un modelo de asistencialismo social que pasa por el resquebrajamiento político de los sindicatos, los partidos de izquierda y la idea del desarrollismo, en la que más que pensar en derechos se piensa al ciudadano como un consumidor.
Es un extraordinario libro que vale mucho la pena y que es una gran contribución para pensar en como ha cambiado no solo nuestro capitalismo, también la forma en que lo pensamos.
Es una historia verdaderamente global pues pasa por los debates intelectuales en Estados Unidos, Inglaterra, Holanda, México, India y otras tantas naciones que han cambiado con el tiempo sus aproximaciones al desarrollo económico. Es una historia de las ideas sobre el trabajo atadas a la industrialización y posteriormente a economías post-industriales. Es una historia de un cambio de paradigma político de un modelo más o menos universal de social democracia con provisiones corporativas de un estado de bienestar, digamos el consenso posterior a la Segunda Guerra Mundial, a un modelo de asistencialismo social que pasa por el resquebrajamiento político de los sindicatos, los partidos de izquierda y la idea del desarrollismo, en la que más que pensar en derechos se piensa al ciudadano como un consumidor.
Es un extraordinario libro que vale mucho la pena y que es una gran contribución para pensar en como ha cambiado no solo nuestro capitalismo, también la forma en que lo pensamos.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews