By Yuen Pau Woo
When the British Columbia government announced in 2018 that it had appointed an expert panel to “test the feasibility of a basic income in British Columbia,” advocates had high expectations that the results would are final.
As it turned out, the report released at the start of 2021 came to a definitive conclusion, but not the one defenders had hoped for. When asked whether British Columbia should move to a Basic Income as a central part of its transfer payment system, the authors are unequivocal: “Our answer is no”.
Although the report’s conclusions are well motivated, they are not conclusive. Relying heavily on a particular conception of a “just society”, the authors have produced a formidable set of calculations to defend their cause. However, the normative framework they chose and the metrics they prioritized led to a fatality.
Since the underlying decision is between conditional and unconditional transfers, and the primary measure is the impact on targeted areas of individual deprivation, there could only be one outcome for the study.
An unconditional benefit, by definition, is an untargeted benefit. Therefore, an unconditional basic income can never improve on targeted outcomes versus conditional benefits that are, well, targeted, for the same amount of investment.
This is certainly the case with poverty reduction targets, on which the British Columbia report concludes that a basic income approach would cost more to achieve than targeted measures. No surprise here.
The findings of the BC report are supported by what the authors claim to be an approach consistent with a “fairer societyâ€. They are based on a liberal normative model of social welfare of the just society inspired by political philosophers John Rawls and Elizabeth Anderson. It is a perfectly respectable theory, but it rests on the primordial importance (even the duty) of paid work and on a strict vision of reciprocity in social relations.
Relaxing either of these premises does not imply a less just society, only a different conception of what a just society means. The British Columbia report prefers what could be described as “participating income” over “basic income,” but that assumes that the economy offers worthy participation opportunities in the sense of what politicians like to call it. “Decent jobs for the middle classâ€.
The fact that this term even exists confirms that there are a lot of “undecent†jobs in our market economy. The idea of ​​”participation income” also values ​​formal paid jobs over non-formal and unpaid forms of participation which may in fact offer greater personal reward and social good – think eldercare.
Are the values ​​of personal dignity and social benefits certainly as important to a “just society†as reciprocity?
The blinders used in the BC report effectively turned a study that was supposed to look at the feasibility of a basic income in BC into a study of designing a better income transfer scheme without using the income. basic. If the authors were serious about studying the feasibility of Basic Income, they would, at the very least, have conducted a thought experiment in which the feasibility could be tested under a different view of the just society.
They didn’t have to agree with the alternate framework, but such an approach would have been true to what I believe was the point of the exercise.
Had the alternative path been chosen, the authors might have done more than lip service to the potential benefits of Basic Income in areas such as health care and criminal justice costs, volunteering, creative and entrepreneurial activities, early childhood development. , precarious work, etc.
Instead, they basically dismissed those factors by saying either that the benefits were illusory or that there wasn’t enough data to calculate their value.
It is true that there is little data to measure the potential broader and longer-term benefits of Basic Income, but on this subject I would like to make two points:
First, the authors did not have the same qualms about estimating the impact of transfer payments on disincentives to work. These “elasticity” measures are notoriously unreliable and extremely difficult to generalize to all sectors, age groups and regions.
In addition, these estimates are generally based on short-term observations. There is every reason to believe that long-term elasticities lead to less work disincentives, but the report is silent on this issue.
Second, all feasibility studies face problems with data unavailability or uncertainty, and the more sophisticated ones address this problem using tools such as break-even analysis.
For example: if it is plausible that there are basic income social benefits in the form of savings for, say, the criminal justice system, what is the order of magnitude of these benefits that would prompt policy makers to seriously consider the idea?
This kind of reasoning does not appear in the report and it is because the framing of the study excluded it from the outset.
One obvious way to “test†Basic Income is to run pilot projects. The authors reject this idea because they believe that the short-term impacts of existing basic income-type programs are already known and that the longer-term impacts can only be determined if the pilot project is, by definition, to be determined. long term.
They then move away from a longer-term pilot project by thinking a priori that if Basic Income is not a good idea in principle, a long-term Basic Income pilot would be a bad idea in principle. convenient.
In fact, a pilot project could answer the central question that led researchers to exclude Basic Income in the first place: how would communities in which Basic Income was tested react to unconditional transfers, given that is it supposed to “violate†the work obligations and social reciprocity essential to a “just society�
Would the community react as the authors presume, ie consider these transfers as “unjust� For the answer to this question, I am inclined to turn to empirical rather than political theory.
It turns out that this political theory is largely based on the thinking of Elizabeth Anderson, who is skeptical of Basic Income in theory, but open-minded in practice. It is regrettable that the authors of the BC report do not share his open-mindedness:
“I am not convinced that the costs to the goals of social democracy would be worth the gains provided by a UBI, but I am open to empirical evidence to the contrary.”
We are awaiting empirical evidence.
