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There have since been many small-scale trials of UBI, but the biggest and most ambitious study occurred over two years in Finland. It’s final results were released in May 2020. Universal Basic Income Is A Bad Idea UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME IN PRACTICE The Finnish study is the most recent and thorough case study on the topic and, as such, should be relied upon as the go-to data. Participants in this study received 560 euros ($600) per month from 2017 to 2018. Those included were part of a randomly selected group of 2,000 jobless people between the ages of 25 and 58. The funds they received included no strings attached. The study’s original aim was to examine how the social security system could be reshaped to promote active employment participation by giving people a stronger incentive to work. In short, would giving unemployed individuals a basic income increase the national employment rate? The answer is no. The landmark trial concluded that Universal Basic Income would bring happiness, but it would not boost the job market. The basic income improved the mental well-being of recipients, making them feel more secure with their finances. However, it did not show that it would activate people at the lower ranks of society to seek self-reliance. “In simple terms, the idea was to test if the carrot works better than the stick in encouraging the unemployed to accept new job offers and to seek income from entrepreneurial activities. With that respect, the results were disappointing. Basic income recipients did not have more workdays or higher incomes than those in the control group. Despite the fact that basic income recipients had clearly better incentives to work, there were no statistically significant differences between the groups. The results show that among the young and the long-term unemployed other obstacles for work, such as outdated skills and health issues, are more important than financial incentives.” (Source: University of Helsinki)

Third, insofar as a basic income is advanced as part of a strategy for improving labor market options by way of exit, instead of intensified efforts to support collective solidarity and coordinate bargaining between different categories of workers, it could actually worsen the bargaining power of the least advantaged workers. It could do so by driving a wedge in between different workers’ factions, thereby harming collective solidarity in ways that are particularly damaging to vulnerable workers. Let us return to the fact that workers are heterogenous in respect of their skills and employment positions. Consider the implications of introducing a basic income while assuming (realistically) that firms are under constant pressure to keep down labor costs in order to maintain global competitiveness. Workers can plausibly be placed on a continuum both in terms of their opportunities to find alternative employment and in terms of how valuable their retention is to the employer. At any given point in time these two factors often coincide and cluster in the same group of people. This implies that the same workers who are valued by management are also better equipped to find alternative employment. Their exit may thus constitute a real threat to the employer. In response to higher-value workers’ exit threats under a basic income regime, management may decide to improve the employment conditions of these workers as part of a retention strategy for high-value employees, but simultaneously decide to save on labour costs by further reducing pay and working conditions for the precariat.13 Although universally given to all, in this scenario basic income may end up driving a wedge between groups of workers because the exit option at the higher end of the distribution results in worsened conditions for those at the bottom whose right to exit fails to translate into an improved bargaining position.

Given the enormous fiscal implications, most UBI schemes will likely not be generous enough to cover basic living costs, meaning that recipients will require additional sources of income, particularly from paid work. In this regard, UBI cannot make up for lack of fulfillment of worker’s rights or access to decent work, especially for women and transgender and gender-diverse people experiencing multiple and intersecting inequalities in access to employment. Trade unionists have rightly warned that UBI does not solve issues of low pay, precarious work or lack of negotiating power in the workplace and could potentially detract from the need to tackle exploitative labour conditions and strengthen workers’ rights, including through living wages, universal job guarantees, affirmative action, unionization and collective bargaining.29 In this case, UBI would merely act as a band aid for a broken economic system and divert attention from more radical, transformative change needed to address structural inequalities.

DISADVANTAGES OF UBI Naval Ravikant, co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of AngelList outlines other reasons we should be avoiding Universal Basic Income. He believes that those who are down on their luck don’t want handouts. “The moment I start giving money to you, I’ve lowered your status. I’ve made you a second-class citizen.” Naval Ravikant Naval believes that it is better to help lower-income individuals gain meaningful lives through education and success. “You have to teach a man to fish, not basically throw your rod and leftover carcasses at him and tell him ‘here, eat the scraps,'” he continues. Others believe that there are better uses of government funds than the “handouts” of UBI. In a recent Financial Times article, Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford, claims that “Individuals gain not only income but also meaning, status, skills, networks, and friendships through work. Delinking income and work, while rewarding people for staying at home, is what lies behind social decay.” Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, professor at the Columbia Business School, and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute believes that people have a desire to work and gain dignity from doing so. This previous statements strike a chord with me. Self-sufficiency is an essential aspect of well-being. Steve Taylor, Ph.D., says, “Self-sufficiency is the quality of feeling secure and content with oneself, a deep-rooted sense of inner completeness and stability.” What would be the knockoff effects if we take this away from an entire populace? Will we see a drop in production? Would there be higher levels of unhappiness and self-worth?

A UBI will be too small to lift the poor out of poverty – it will only help people on the threshold

An alternative case for basic income draws from classic commitments to social democracy, or an economic system in which the state limits corporate power, ensures a decent standard of living for all, and encourages decent work. In the social democratic view, however, a basic income would be only part of the solution to economic and social inequalities—we also need a revamped public sector and a new and different collective bargaining system. Indeed, without such broader reforms, a basic income could do more harm than good. This agenda will of course make zero progress during the Trump administration. But questions surrounding work and rising inequality are not going away. After all, Trump exploited fears of a jobless or insecure future in his campaign, signaling a return to our industrial heyday, with good-paying factory jobs implicitly promised to whites, men, and Christians. On the left, meanwhile, there is grassroots energy and momentum to think big and to address these issues head on, in all their complexity. But we still need a vision of good work and its place in our society, one that recognizes how our economy—and our working class—have changed dramatically in recent decades. I do not think for a moment that I have all the answers. But I do think an ambitious agenda around technology, work, and welfare can be a focal point and political resource for organizers, and perhaps even candidates, in the years to come. Consider the life of a truck driver forty years ago versus today. In 1976 long-haul truck drivers had a powerful, if flawed, union in the Teamsters and enjoyed middle-class wages and excellent benefits. They also had a remarkable degree of autonomy, giving the job a cowboy or outlaw image. Drivers had to track their hours carefully, of course, and submit to weigh stations and other inspections of their trucks. But dispatchers could not reach them while they were on the road, since CB radios have limited range. Truckers would call in from pay phones, if they wanted. No longer. Trucking companies today monitor drivers closely through “telematics” devices that gather and analyze data on their location, driving speed, and delivery efficiency. Some even note when a driver turns the truck on before fastening his seat belt, thereby wasting gas. As sociologist Karen Levy has shown, some long-haul trucking companies use telematics to push drivers to drive for all the hours permitted per day under federal law, at times waking them up or even overriding drivers’ own judgments about whether it is safe to drive. UPS has used the technologies to reduce its stock of drivers, and many have noted the stress that “metrics-based harassment” puts on workers. We need a revamped public sector and a new and different collective bargaining system. While the specter of self-driving vehicles is out there, this is the current reality for many drivers and will be for the foreseeable future. We have seen stunning advances in autonomous vehicles in recent years, but there is a vast difference between driving on a highway or broad suburban streets in good weather conditions and navigating narrow and pothole-filled city streets, not to mention making the actual delivery to houses, apartments, and businesses. As labor economist David Autor and others have argued, we are nowhere close to fully automated production or distribution of goods, since so many jobs involve nonrepetitive tasks. In other words, the reports of the death of work have been greatly exaggerated. Technological development is nevertheless altering the political economy of labor markets in profound ways. As we can see in the truck driver example, many firms are deploying information technologies to erode workers’ conditions and bargaining power without displacing them. And of course truck drivers are not alone. Many other firms today use advanced information technologies to push for more efficiency, in the process reducing workers’ discretion, ultimately requiring them to work harder, faster, and for less. For example, where once taxi drivers’ folk knowledge of the optimal path from A to B in a crowded city was a valuable skill, now Uber and Lyft can calculate the best route through GPS technology and machine learning processes based on data gleaned from hundreds of thousands of trips. Other technological innovations make it easier—which is to say more efficient—to purchase labor without entering formal employment relationships and accepting the attendant legal duties. In the past firms tended to employ workers rather than contractors, or to pay employees above-market wages, in scenarios where it was difficult to train or monitor them. Workers who felt valued in this way would work diligently and remain loyal toward firms, ultimately reducing overall labor costs. Again Uber’s model helps illustrate. The company’s app reduces consumers’ and drivers’ search costs significantly. Rapid scalability reduces Uber’s costs of identifying and contracting with new drivers and riders; its GPS-based monitoring of its drivers enables it to know whether they are speeding or otherwise driving carelessly and whether they are accepting a sufficient number of fares; and its customer rating system enables it to manage an enormous workforce without managerial supervision. The net result is an economic organization of global scope based largely on contract where the firm disclaims any employment relationship toward its workers and therefore any employment duties toward them. To be clear, there are powerful arguments that Uber drivers meet the legal test for employment, given the company’s pervasive control of their work and its economic power over them. But given the ambiguities of current law, Uber has few economic incentives to bring drivers inside the firm, making them employees, or to extend them generous wage and benefit packages. Similarly Amazon’s analytics help it to keep wages low: with barcode scanners tracking pickers’ and packers’ efficiency, the company does not have to pay workers as well to keep them motivated. Finally, extensive data about market structures and consumer demand can enable firms to exert power over their suppliers or contractual partners, driving down costs—and therefore wages and conditions—through their supply chains. Walmart has long leveraged its unparalleled market data to estimate the lowest possible price suppliers will accept for goods, putting downward pressure on their profits and their workers’ wages. Amazon does the same today, and franchisors such as McDonald’s set prices and detailed product specifications for their franchisees. The reports of the death of work have been greatly exaggerated. Many firms today have substituted algorithmic scheduling for middle-managers’ local knowledge, using data on past sales, local events, and even weather forecasts to schedule work shifts. A Starbucks employee, for example, has little schedule predictability since she is at the mercy of the algorithm, and a McDonald’s worker can be sent home early if computers say sales are slow. This push to limit labor costs through finely tuned scheduling practices also alters workplace norms, since workers cannot appeal to a computer’s emotions in asking for more or less time, a raise, or a slower pace of work. The net effect of all of this is that power in our labor and product markets is increasingly concentrated in a few hands. Crucially such management techniques and new production strategies are often more efficient than the status quo. Amazon has undeniably lowered prices for goods through its use of automation. Similarly a recent MIT study calculated that just three thousand multi-passenger cabs using a version of Uber’s algorithm could serve Manhattan’s need for taxis. The potential benefits here are staggering, especially if coupled with a modern mass transit system: shorter commutes, less car ownership, less pollution, and more urban space. But the line between innovation and exploitation is far from clear. While some workers will thrive as their unique skills and talents are rewarded by new technologies, many others will have less autonomy, less generous wages, less time for social connection, and unpredictable schedules. And under current laws, we can expect such trends to accelerate. Our labor and employment laws still envision the economy of the 1930s, which was dominated by massive industrial firms with hundreds of thousands of direct employees. Those laws rarely touch modern “fissured” work relationships such as Uber’s relationship with its drivers, Walmart’s relationship with its suppliers’ workers, or McDonald’s relationship with its franchisees’ workers. Those laws also limit workers’ ability to unionize or bargain effectively since they encourage bargaining at the firm or even plant level whereas today’s modal workplace is growing ever smaller. Workers have fewer and fewer means to exert power on their own behalf. How would a basic income impact workers and firms in this context? It would surely protect workers against the economic harms of unemployment and underemployment by giving them unconditional resources, and it would enable them to bargain for higher wages and to refuse terrible jobs. But a basic income would do little to reduce corporate power, which is a function not just of wealth but of the ability of firms to structure work relationships however they wish when countervailing institutions—such as a powerful regulatory state—are absent or ineffective. Yes, a basic income would make it easier for workers to organize and demand reforms—Andy Stern dubbed it “the ultimate permanent strike fund”—but the threat of termination or retaliation would still prevent many workers from protesting or striking in the first place. And of course many have argued that a basic income would make minimum wage and collective bargaining laws less necessary, since workers’ material needs would be met by the state. But cash benefits and reasonable wages are not morally equivalent. In Robert Solow’s memorable phrase, the labor market is a “social institution” governed in part by norms of reciprocity and mutual respect. Workers often demand higher wages from larger and more profitable employers. And they work less diligently when they feel disrespected. So there is a major difference between a generous wage on the one hand and a meager wage supplemented with cash from the state on the other. Generous wages help make firms’ economic responsibility roughly commensurate with their economic power. Meager wages signal disrespect, and state transfers are impersonal. In fact, without labor market regulations in place, the impact of a basic income on very low-wage work could be disastrous. If a basic income were not extended to green card holders, guest workers, or “irregular” immigrants (those who enter or stay without authorization), such workers would be far cheaper to employ in menial jobs, at which point they would be permanently enshrined as a laboring underclass. (Currently minimum wage laws apply regardless of work authorization, on the grounds that differential treatment would undermine standards for all.) A basic income could even be designed to serve white nationalist ends. In fact, far-right European parties have often embraced the welfare state as a means of defending citizens against a purported tide of immigrants. A standalone basic income also will not ensure equal access to quality education, health care, mental health care, housing, and transportation. Liberal markets systematically fail to provide such goods to the poor and working class, for the simple reason that they often are not profitable when provided on equitable terms. Giving cash to individuals to purchase them will not suddenly change matters. Popular debates have largely ignored these limits of a standalone basic income, an oversight that is not entirely accidental. As a tax-and-transfer program, basic income would be consistent with a wide variety of political-economic systems, including neoliberal capitalism, social democracy, and various forms of socialism, but much of the basic income literature has a libertarian streak. On the right, Milton Friedman proposed a negative income tax in large part because he hoped it would reduce government bureaucracy. On the left, Philippe van Parijs’s now-classic argument for the policy held it would maximize what he called “real freedom” better than standard welfare-state policies. And Silicon Valley’s take exemplifies an “everyday libertarianism,” which views market results, including pre-tax incomes, as presumptively fair. Unlike many libertarians, basic income proponents accept the necessity and fairness of income and wealth taxation. But a basic income is still no cure for the moral ills of liberal markets. Since labor cannot be separated from workers, it will never be a classic commodity, and labor markets will never be stock exchanges for faceless buyers and sellers. Low wages carry a stigma that low bids for soybeans never will. In the long run, companies cannot treat workers or even consumers as line items on a balance sheet without risking a revolt. Uber is now paying a high price for ignoring this lesson. The company’s flagrant disregard for our moral economy and its open embrace of a cutthroat, winner-take-all libertarianism made it a pariah in many quarters well before it faced allegations of a workplace culture of sexual harassment. In my view, the more compelling arguments for basic income are rooted in commitments to equality as well as freedom. Take Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1797), which prefigured the later case for social insurance. The earth, he argued, had been “the common property of the human race” in its natural state. Private property enabled the few to profit from the earth’s resources, but all are entitled to compensation through a “citizens dividend.” G. D. H. Cole updated Paine in the twentieth century, arguing for a “social dividend” on the grounds that all production is “a joint result of current effort and of the social heritage of inventiveness.” Auto manufacturers did not discover electricity, after all, and Silicon Valley did not invent the Internet. Rather than a means of maximizing freedom, a basic income would help meet our duties toward one another. Workers cannot appeal to a computer’s emotions in asking for more or less time, a raise, or a slower pace of work. A still more compelling case for basic income builds on Elizabeth Anderson’s and Philip Pettit’s (quite distinct) arguments that a just society must ensure that no group of citizens is subordinate to another. Extreme poverty causes subordination since it forces us to beg or to work at terrible jobs. Means tests are equally degrading since food stamps and similar programs tend to restrict what we can buy, again stigmatizing the poor. This argument is quite different from the libertarian case for a basic income since it does not view basic income as a replacement for the welfare state. Rather it asks basic income to serve a discrete and limited purpose: making sure nobody falls through the cracks. And if one agrees that we need to root out subordination, we will need to do much more than pass a basic income. A just society would not just eliminate penury and then leave people to their fates. It would also strive for a fair distribution of power. This point strikes me as obvious, but we can miss it by focusing on unemployment and poverty. A society in which a few make decisions and the many take orders is an oligarchy, not a democracy.

Turn - A UBI hurts the poor – it creates the illusion of a cure-all, scales back assistance with income and is vulnerable to rollback

Estimating overall distributive outcomes would need to take into account the effect of abolishing other cash benefits and the impact of UBI on real wages. Most proposals assume that a UBI would replace existing minimum income schemes. In relative terms, the removal of these schemes would reduce incomes at the bottom and middle of the distribution more than top incomes. For overall distributive effects of UBI to remain progressive, financing of the UBI would need to correct for this by putting higher burdens on rich households. Modelling by the OECD (2017) has shown that while the richest income groups would tend to be the greatest net losers from a UBI, there are some scenarios in which low to middle income groups would be the greatest net losers due to the removal of existing cash benefits. Furthermore, distributional outcomes of a UBI would depend on effects on real wages. In response to a UBI, employers might decrease wages (Zamora, 2017) because they know that people's living costs are now partly covered by the basic income. In addition, producers might increase prices in response to higher taxes on capital or profits, thus passing costs on to consumers and reducing real incomes. Impacts on wages might differ by sector. For instance, wages of unpopular, low-pay jobs may increase if workers can reduce their labour supply for such jobs due to the greater financial security they would have with the UBI (Calnitsky, 2018). Conversely, wages in higher paid sectors might fall, for instance if a UBI would lead to higher labour supply here due to the impacts of progressive income taxation. Such shifts in wages may have additional redistributive effects.

To conclude, in this thesis, I have argued that Van Parijs’ theory of distributive justice, which grounds his basic income offer, is blind to racial inequality, and therefore to racial injustice. I revised his theory to make it insusceptible to charges of blindness to racial injustice as well as suitable for grounding a basic income that can help reduce or eliminate racial inequality. According to Van Parijs’ theory, people’s freedom should not only incorporate the absence of hindrance in doing what they might want to do. It should also include their real access to the opportunities to do what people might want to do, hence he defines freedom as critically including a principle of the leximinning of real freedom, or more precisely, of opportunities. I have argued that on this account, a leximin chooser would be unable to consider a racially equal society as more just than a racially unequal society. That is, Van Parijs’ theory is blind to racial injustice. To deal with this, I argued for racially-sensitive versions of leximin and real freedom. I proposed a filtered leximinning of modified real freedom theory of distributive justice. And as I have suggested earlier in this conclusion, this theory will ground a basic income offer, albeit with close resemblances with Van Parijs’s, that can help eliminate or at least reduce racial inequality.

By tackling wealth inequality, we can ultimately put America on the road to greater racial and gender economic justice. Income is crucial for building wealth, but efforts to improve incomes alone will not close gaps in wealth along racial and gender lines. As such, we also need to consider how anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and sexism have rigged the rules of our economy to deny certain populations equal access to prosperity and liberation. This will enable us to have a more comprehensive discussion about intersectionality and the numerous issues that need to be addressed—in addition to boosting incomes—in order to create the conditions where everyone in the US truly has the ability to build wealth and thrive. This paper proposes a multi-pronged approach to designing a guaranteed income policy that includes: • Dismantling narratives that dehumanize Black and brown people and question their deservedness to receive public assistance; • Eliminating state-sponsored wealth extraction through our criminal justice system; and • Establishing a truth and reconciliation process in the US. Incorporating these elements into a no-strings-attached cash benefit for all residents can create the conditions that are necessary for true gender and racial economic justice to be achieved.

Finally, UBI raises important questions around who is included in a purportedly ‘universal’ scheme. For example, if receipt were attached to narrow notions of citizenship, incarcerated or formerly-incarcerated persons (a group often including disproportionately high numbers of people of colour and people living in poverty), migrants and their children (particularly those who are undocumented), unhoused people and those without government-issued IDs that reflect their identity (including many transgender and intersex individuals) might all experience exclusionary treatment.30 Box 2 further discusses the extent to which UBI could address structural inequalities.

In addition to direct community input for the design of a guaranteed income, it is important to understand that a guaranteed income is ultimately an income policy solution, and income is only part of the equation when thinking about wealth. When designing a policy platform to address gender and racial wealth inequity, key considerations include: shifting harmful narratives that impede us from seeing everyone as deserving; addressing current wealth extraction policies as well as historic impediments to building wealth for women and people of color; tackling wealth concentration and corporate power; and healing generations of trauma caused by economic instability. Below, we outline design elements that can help us create a society where everyone has the ability and wherewithal to live with dignity, freedom of choice, and security.

This thesis is written by a supporter of a universal basic income. What I argue, in essence, is that the blindness to racial injustice present in the theory of justice Van Parijs uses to ground it leads to a basic income proposal that is likely to perpetuate racial injustice. And over and above demonstrating how Van Parijs's theory is susceptible to the charge that it is blind to racial injustice, I propose revisions to his theory aimed at proofing it against that charge. In the conclusion, I suggest ways that the changes I make to the theory could be said to affect what a basic income offer that ameliorates racial injustice should look like but systematic research in this last area will have to take place outside this thesis. This thesis is laid out in the following way: in chapter one, I discuss Van Parijs's theory of distributive justice. I describe the components of Van Parijs's conception of real freedom, namely, security, self-ownership and leximin opportunity. Security is the idea that a free society incorporates a well-enforced regime of property rights. Self-ownership is the idea that each person owns themselves and cannot be forced to perform actions they do not want to. Combined these two components make up formal freedom on which freedom is merely the absence of hindrance from exercising your property or selfownership rights. But for Van Parijs, real freedom must also offer an answer to our intuition that if I do not have the money to get on a cruise, I am not really free to get on that cruise. The last component of real freedom is opportunity, which is the absence of being hindered from what you might want to do by any other circumstance, and which is especially given effect by providing people with the means and resources to do the things they might want to do or live as they might want to. With the addition of the opportunity component, Van Parijs argues that to achieve distributive justice opportunity should be leximinned, subject to formal freedom being respected. Leximinning opportunity means that a society should be considered more just than another society if those with the least opportunities in that society have more opportunities than those with the least opportunities in the other society. Van Parijs justifies the introduction of the basic income as the result of taking the leximinning of people’s opportunities seriously. For him, monetary incomes serve as a measure of people’s opportunities in market societies. In chapter two, I offer one criticism of this theory of justice outlined in chapter one. I argue that this theory of justice is blind to institutional racism.4 I demonstrate this using a thought experiment involving two societies that are identical in every way (they have the exact same number of income strata and the occupants of each stratum have the exact same amount of opportunities in both societies) except that race is a determining factor in membership in the lowest stratum of one of the societies, whereas it is not the case for the other. I argue that the society in which race is a determining factor in people ending up in the lowest stratum is an institutionally racist society, but also that a Van Parijsian leximin chooser (that is, someone choosing between both societies solely based on the leximin principle) would be unable to prefer the non-institutionally-racist society to the institutionally racist society. In essence, the leximin principle would judge both societies as equally just.

In fact, without labor market regulations in place, the impact of a basic income on very low-wage work could be disastrous. If a basic income were not extended to green card holders, guest workers, or “irregular” immigrants (those who enter or stay without authorization), such workers would be far cheaper to employ in menial jobs, at which point they would be permanently enshrined as a laboring underclass. (Currently minimum wage laws apply regardless of work authorization, on the grounds that differential treatment would undermine standards for all.) A basic income could even be designed to serve white nationalist ends. In fact, far-right European parties have often embraced the welfare state as a means of defending citizens against a purported tide of immigrants. A standalone basic income also will not ensure equal access to quality education, health care, mental health care, housing, and transportation. Liberal markets systematically fail to provide such goods to the poor and working class, for the simple reason that they often are not profitable when provided on equitable terms. Giving cash to individuals to purchase them will not suddenly change matters. Popular debates have largely ignored these limits of a standalone basic income, an oversight that is not entirely accidental. As a tax-and-transfer program, basic income would be consistent with a wide variety of political-economic systems, including neoliberal capitalism, social democracy, and various forms of socialism, but much of the basic income literature has a libertarian streak. On the right, Milton Friedman proposed a negative income tax in large part because he hoped it would reduce government bureaucracy. On the left, Philippe van Parijs’s now-classic argument for the policy held it would maximize what he called “real freedom” better than standard welfare-state policies. And Silicon Valley’s take exemplifies an “everyday libertarianism,” which views market results, including pre-tax incomes, as presumptively fair. Unlike many libertarians, basic income proponents accept the necessity and fairness of income and wealth taxation. But a basic income is still no cure for the moral ills of liberal markets. Since labor cannot be separated from workers, it will never be a classic commodity, and labor markets will never be stock exchanges for faceless buyers and sellers. Low wages carry a stigma that low bids for soybeans never will. In the long run, companies cannot treat workers or even consumers as line items on a balance sheet without risking a revolt. Uber is now paying a high price for ignoring this lesson. The company’s flagrant disregard for our moral economy and its open embrace of a cutthroat, winner-take-all libertarianism made it a pariah in many quarters well before it faced allegations of a workplace culture of sexual harassment. In my view, the more compelling arguments for basic income are rooted in commitments to equality as well as freedom. Take Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1797), which prefigured the later case for social insurance. The earth, he argued, had been “the common property of the human race” in its natural state. Private property enabled the few to profit from the earth’s resources, but all are entitled to compensation through a “citizens dividend.” G. D. H. Cole updated Paine in the twentieth century, arguing for a “social dividend” on the grounds that all production is “a joint result of current effort and of the social heritage of inventiveness.” Auto manufacturers did not discover electricity, after all, and Silicon Valley did not invent the Internet. Rather than a means of maximizing freedom, a basic income would help meet our duties toward one another. Workers cannot appeal to a computer’s emotions in asking for more or less time, a raise, or a slower pace of work. A still more compelling case for basic income builds on Elizabeth Anderson’s and Philip Pettit’s (quite distinct) arguments that a just society must ensure that no group of citizens is subordinate to another. Extreme poverty causes subordination since it forces us to beg or to work at terrible jobs. Means tests are equally degrading since food stamps and similar programs tend to restrict what we can buy, again stigmatizing the poor. This argument is quite different from the libertarian case for a basic income since it does not view basic income as a replacement for the welfare state. Rather it asks basic income to serve a discrete and limited purpose: making sure nobody falls through the cracks. And if one agrees that we need to root out subordination, we will need to do much more than pass a basic income. A just society would not just eliminate penury and then leave people to their fates. It would also strive for a fair distribution of power. This point strikes me as obvious, but we can miss it by focusing on unemployment and poverty. A society in which a few make decisions and the many take orders is an oligarchy, not a democracy. This is what I mean by the “social democratic” case for a basic income: it would help build a post-industrial welfare state by alleviating dire poverty. But it is unlikely to pass and would do little good unless coupled with other efforts to ensure broadly dispersed power, including a substantially revamped public sector and new and stronger regulations around work. The public sector agenda should begin with a massive investment in human services. This would include primary, secondary, and higher education; childcare and elder care; health care; and mental health services. All of these are critical to human flourishing and economic growth, especially in a technologically advanced economy. There is also the added benefit that these sectors are among the least vulnerable to automation since they require interpersonal communication and human judgment: turning them into basic rights of citizenship would create millions of jobs. Extensive job training and placement programs for unemployed workers would reduce the devastations associated with job losses. This should be coupled with a guarantee that the government will stand as employer of last resort, as William Darity and Darrick Hamilton have advocated. Classic WPA-style public works would be one option, but we might do more good by thinking locally: retrofitting houses and other smaller buildings for energy efficiency, as john a. powell and others have suggested, or building and repairing local parks and schools, or training unemployed workers for jobs in childcare, education, elder care, or health care. Some subset of the projects could be identified through participatory budgeting or other deliberative processes and carried out in partnership with local governments or organizations. Then we should consider unconditional cash benefits in some form, ideally a generous basic income, especially if technological unemployment becomes significant. But we need to design it correctly. If certain immigrants are denied a basic income, then we must establish a transparent pathway to citizenship and ensure that they enjoy generous wages. Currently many states restrict convicted felons from voting or collecting many public benefits. If that pattern holds with a basic income, that group could also become a pool of menial labor.

Incarceration radically undermines a person’s capacity to build wealth. This is due to the loss of income and job growth opportunities during time spent in prison. Additionally, there is difficulty in finding steady, high-quality employment upon release due to state and local legal barriers, employer bias towards people with criminal records and convictions, and continued systemic burdens such as continued supervision placed on the formerly incarcerated. The continued push towards mass incarceration is closely tied to the movement to criminalize poverty through local and state fines and fees. Since 2010, over 48 states have either increased their criminal fees or adopted new fees (Shapiro 2014). In North Carolina, fees have risen by 400 percent, leading to the startling fact that 20 percent of people incarcerated in a county jail in North Carolina are there for failure to pay their fines and fees debt (Hunt and Nichol 2017). The Ferguson Report, written by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in the aftermath of the police shooting and death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, brought national attention to the unconstitutional and discriminatory impact of the practices and priorities held by local government. Local law enforcement agencies and the courts engaged in patterns that systematically targeted communities of color, essentially using community residents as cash registers to fund the municipal budgets through fines and fees related to non-violent offenses, such as traffic violations, loitering, sleeping on the sidewalk, and other causes for ticketing (US Department of Justice 2015). The DOJ deemed these acts to be unconstitutional. Ferguson was representative of the systemic racism prevalent in many other municipalities: Over-policing of communities of color has led to disproportionate rates of stops and arrests of people of color, forcing these communities to pay exorbitant fines and fees and extracting their wealth—and in many cases driving them into debt (Bingham et al. 2016). Additionally, even if women are not the ones being arrested and/or fined, they are the ones primarily paying the fine, fee, or bail money for their sons, grandsons, brothers, partners, uncles, and other family members (deVuono-powell et al. 2015). 63 percent of court-related costs were paid for by family members outside of the system, and 80 percent of these family members were women. Further, close to 90 percent of costs for phone calls and visits to an incarcerated person are incurred by women (deVuono-powell et al. 2015). This creates an additional financial burden to the layers of economic insecurity women of color already experience from race and gender discrimination in the labor market. These practices and the crusade towards mass incarceration and criminalization of nonviolent crimes effectively strip wealth from Black and brown women and communities. In many cases, these realities prevent people of color from building wealth at all. It is clear that any policy discussion about a guaranteed income must both address the historic barriers placed on women and people of color to build wealth and eliminate current wealth extraction policies that are reinforced by current governmental policies. Putting money into people’s pockets through government interventions won’t mean anything if that money is taken by the government with the other hand.

McLean (2015, p. 2) notes that ‘basic Income is in some ways a microcosm of wider feminist controversies regarding how the state can recognise the unpaid work women largely do without reinforcing existing inequalities, also known as Wollstonecraft’s Dilemma (Lister, 1995; Pateman, 1988)’. Indeed, feminists involved with policy making sometimes find themselves falling into one of two camps: that of a more pragmatic approach and that of a more idealistic approach. The former aim to take the situation they see at a current time in front of them, such as mothers doing most of the childcare, and to support women in that situation. The latter might rather take issue with the root imbalance of this situation and aim to create a new situation where fathers are doing more childcare. Arguably, many aspects of the current Swedish welfare state are more radically ambitious than the idea of basic income in that it seeks change to the gendered division of both paid and unpaid work. The implementation of a basic income would be gender-neutral and so, in theory, fathers and mothers would have the same support. In practice, however, and especially given the likely low level of basic income, this policy might have the (unintended) consequence of encouraging a return to the breadwinner model of parenting, with one parent better able to stay at home, but another parent still needing to remain firmly attached to the labour market. Once again, we have a political movement, which has not fully embraced the challenge from radical feminism to move us beyond the ‘fundamental biological condition’ as observed by Shulamith Firestone (1970, p. 1) towards an equal distribution of care work.

Basic income is likely to gain momentum as the next social welfare trend to sweep over the world with ideas of how to improve the fairness and efficiency of distributing money. Other earlier movements with similar ambitions to transform societies, ranging across the political spectrum from socialism to neo-liberalism, have led to very different consequences for strata of citizens, but have in common that they have de-prioritised gender equality in favour of other interests. Advocates of basic income suggest that in addition to pragmatic gains, such as a more efficient state administration, primarily a basic income will empower citizens, leading to the potential for greater human flourishing. Our question is whether this empowerment will be gendered and if so, how? So far, the basic income debate addresses gender only in so far as it would raise the income of the poorest, of whom a larger proportion are women. However, it is less clear how it might contribute to a transformation of gendered behaviour, making possible divergent shapes of life where binary and set notions of gender are not a restriction. We discuss the idea of basic income from a perspective of gender equality in the Swedish context. 1. Introduction Basic Income is a social welfare movement currently gaining momentum across the world. It has ambitions to transform societies, with a particular emphasis on the empowerment of citizens, and greater human flourishing among its central goals. History shows us that a common characteristic of political movements this ambitious is that they have tended to de-prioritise gender equality in favour of other interests. Our question then is whether this empowerment would be gendered, and in that case how. Our discussion is hypothetical as basic income is suggested and debated, but not yet implemented. The basic income debate addresses gender in so far that it would raise the economic situation of the poorest, of whom a larger proportion are women. Thus, gendered economic inequality may be decreased. Less clear, is how it might contribute to a transformation of gendered behaviour, supporting possible divergent ways of being where binary and set notions of gender are not a restriction. Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect a basic income to be a panacea for all social ills and advocates are not making such a claim. We discuss the idea of basic income from a feminist perspective in the Swedish context (as outcomes may vary substantially across countries, depending not least on progress already made towards gender equality). We consider that a basic income alone is unlikely to deliver on gender equality, as whilst it could be a necessary ‘instrument of freedom’, money alone is not a sufficient instrument with which to realise gender equality: other structures are also needed.

AZ: Occupy was the movement that brought the “one percent” into our lexicon. It got people talking about the distribution of wealth in our society. For example, there’s this sound bite that gets repeated that, since 2008, every year the top 1% of Americans get richer and the lowest 50% of Americans get poorer. We’re talking about these figures this way because of Occupy and I think that’s informed the basic income debate. Now, I don’t think there will be a women’s movement for basic income. The issue with women’s movements in general is that women are dispersed throughout society. So much about the condition of a particular woman depends on the class they are born into. I don’t think we can really mobilize women until we have an individualized system of taxation. Our household reporting of income obscures the distribution of wealth that takes place within families and couples. I think a separation between men and women in taxation could mobilize women in the way that other individually based concerns like the wage gap have. The problem, of course, is that the wage gap is only one part of the economic reality of women. It only affects women who are actually earning wages.

Sweden is known to be a particularly normative society, in that it is perhaps more difficult than in less normative societies (all societies are normative to some extent) to live outside the accepted ‘best practice’ norms. This currently shows up for those outside the normative universal worker model. Would a basic income exacerbate this existing social divide between those remaining on a low level of income and those on more average or higher levels of income? Would it create a two-tier system: a ‘them and us’ of lower income groups reliant on basic income and top up benefits and the higher income groups (who possibly resent paying for it all whilst having less ‘free’ time)? So, the Swedish ‘universal worker’ model, or ‘work line’, which is such a core principle of many policies which are generally agreed to support gender equality, is possibly going to rub along as an awkward partner with a basic income. There seems to be a fundamental ideological conflict between the two ideas, a conflict much deeper than economic considerations of state budget, often expressed in the ‘right to work’ and also to meaningful work, not least by the trade unions, which may undermine the universal worker model, bringing its existence into question. If the universal worker model did not continue to hold firm, this would likely undermine related efforts to reduce gender inequalities. Sweden is a good case indicating that structural interventions based around a universal worker model are needed to reduce gender inequalities still today and probably far into the future. It is not clear that a basic income payment would challenge gender inequalities. Indeed, it may reinforce a (male) breadwinner model even in a country like Sweden where norms are clearly moving towards gender equal sharing; the gender wage gap would likely prevail, and we may see a tendency towards women (in particular mothers) quitting labour market work in favour of living on a basic income.

In spite of sending the message that oneʹs social value should not be entirely dependent on whether or not one holds paid employment, introducing a BI would lead to further public devaluation of care‐based lifestyles. It has already been argued that a BI would result in improvements with respect to the ability to choose between paid and unpaid work, as well as between different types of work (Robeyns, 2001). This consequence, welcome in a world where men and women have equal bargaining powers and where preferences are formed under structurally just circumstances, would in fact perpetuate the traditional gendered division of labour resulting (as already mentioned) in a drop of womenʹs participation in paid work. A BI would, all things being equal, lower the costs for individuals to pursue their preferences. It is precisely this feature – which makes it attractive to liberals (and, of course, to libertarians) – that should worry feminists. As long as most men will resent doing care work as demeaning, tedious, and unimportant, or otherwise regard it a threat to their masculinities, a BI will also perpetuate the devaluation of care. Thus, given the pressure that social environments put on individuals, for the more gender conservative groups the existence of a BI would raise the costs for individuals (of both sexes) to engage in gender‐symmetrical lifestyles. Moreover, gender‐unjust norms would be more deeply entrenched – and here comes my next argument.

1. Gender‐Symmetrical Lifestyles as a Criterion of Gender Justice To judge the degree to which a policy promotes gender justice,1 I suggest an operational definition of “gender justice” based on an ideal of gendersymmetrical lifestyles: A society is gender just when the costs of engaging in a lifestyle characterized by gender‐symmetry (both in the domestic and in the public sphere) are, for both men and women, less or equal to the costs of engaging in a lifestyle that is gender asymmetrical. A gender‐symmetrical lifestyle is one in which women and men engage equally in paid work and family life, which includes unpaid care work for dependants. I start from the assumption that work and family are the central concerns of most peopleʹs lives, if we understand these as the following: “work” includes market and nonmarket activities that are productive of goods or services, and “family” includes various long‐term living arrangements based on emotional attachments typically involving extended periods of dependency related to child care, old age, illness and sometimes life‐long disabilities. It is reasonable to expect that, in order to lead fulfilling lives, the majority of people will need ample opportunities to thrive in both their working and their family lives. Hence, just social arrangements should make “work and family” the default position and should minimize the costs of choosing this situation, for both men and women, relative to either the work only or family only situation. An additional argument in favour of gender‐symmetrical lifestyles is to be found in the feminist literature, which argues that caregiving should be recognized as a universal duty of citizenship (Bubeck, 1999; Kittay, 1999). Introducing a BI would be compatible with gender justice and possibly beneficial for justice, all things considered, only if it does not raise the costs of engaging in gender‐symmetrical lifestyles. But we have reasons to believe that a BI is likely, in the long run, to raise the costs of gender‐symmetrical lifestyles. I rely on already developed arguments indicating that, should a BI be introduced, it would be reasonable to expect an overall drop in female labour (Kesenne, 1990; Robeyns, 2001; Bergmann, 2004); differing income effects for different groups of women (Robeyns, 2001); and a drop in womenʹs bargaining power within the household, decreased self‐esteem and loss of social capital (Robeyns, 2001). Additionally, work on womenʹs preferences and behaviour with respect to combining home and career in the context of public policies suggests that a BI would increase the polarization between home‐centred and work‐centred women (Hakim, 2000). Research by Catherine Hakim shows that if cash is provided instead of services (for example, home care allowances instead of services such as childcare), female preference patterns become more polarized: more women become either career‐oriented or home‐oriented and fewer try to adapt in order to combine home and career (Hakim, 2000).2 Suppose, based on the similarities between a BI and the open‐ended (cash) benefits discussed by Hakim, that the introduction of a BI would lead to more polarization of womenʹs lifestyle preferences. The group of adaptive women would shrink, and there would be less incentive for adapting policies that make the costs of gender‐symmetrical lifestyles the cheapest option for both men and women.

The central question asked by those sceptical of the viability of a basic income is how the costs incurred would be borne by a society, initially and over time. In terms of the level of payment, Van Parijs and Vanderborght (2017) suggest a quarter of GDP per capita might be appropriate. For Sweden in 2017, this would amount to 114 450 SEK yearly (approximately €950 monthly).The recent Swiss Referendum in 2016 suggested 2,500 Swiss francs (approximately €2,155) per month. The Finnish experiment lands at €560 monthly, which is not sufficiently high to be considered a basic income in the sense suggested by its advocates. It is likely that a basic income payment would indeed be quite low due to the demands even a guaranteed minimum income would make on any tax base (Tobin, 1970). As such, other possibilities for funding might include changes to the tax treatment of capital or banking on public ownership of natural resources (Van Parijs & Vanderborght, 2017). In the case that the payment was relatively low, such as is typically the case for ‘cash for care’ policies, this has been associated with women becoming more rather than less financially dependent on their male partners (e.g. Mandel, 2009). Similarly, evidence from the Canadian guaranteed annual income experiment suggests mothers took longer maternity leaves, leading to increased economic dependency on their male partners (Forget, 2011). Policies can be multi-dimensional in the way that they support citizens, going beyond financial support and services. Taking parental leave as an example, this is a policy—in the Swedish context at least—that aims to tackle gendered patterns of behaviour, by promoting fathers’ involvement with small children to a greater extent than might occur in the absence of the policy instrument (e.g. the daddy quota) (Castro-García & Pazos-Moran, 2016; Duvander & Johansson, 2012; Haas & Rostgaard, 2011). Parental leave is also a form of employment protection, and originally was a key determinant for women being able to keep an attachment to the labour force after becoming parents (Cedstrand, 2011). It is also credited with changing norms and behaviours. In Sweden, the reserved part for each parent in the parental leave was intensively debated when first introduced in the 1990s, but then extended without almost any debate in the 2000s (Cedstrand, 2011). So basic income poses a risk in its simplicity if there is the possibility that it might replace more complex policy instruments with financial benefit alone.