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(Paul Christopher, Labour@Brock, https://socialistproject.ca/2019/06/transforming-capitalist-power-from-streets-to-state/, 6-25)

Any attempt to fundamentally transform capitalist society also needs to form alliances with state workers, especially the front-line providers of public services (Therborn 1978, 279-30). But attempts to create dual power institutions on large scales will not win support from otherwise sympathetic state workers. Since their jobs depend on the public sector, they “would support the democratization of administrative apparatuses, but hardly their decomposition” (Sirianni 1983, 114). It is not merely that disaffected state workers are capable of wide-ranging sabotage of revolutionary efforts. More importantly, public sector unions can also be positive, active participants in democratizing state structures and empowering egalitarian social movement and labour movement organizations. This is possible even in some of the more coercive institutions of the state. For example, Toronto immigration officers in the late 1980s who were fed up with the lousy services they were forced to provide, formed coalitions with immigrant rights groups, and, in coordination with them, engaged in a work-to-rule campaign for more resources, boycotted overtime and excessive caseloads, and dealt only with those clients who could be reasonably seen during the working day. The joint picket-lines of these producers and users of public services garnered such significant community support that the government was forced to respond by hiring 280 new immigration officers (McElligott 2018). Indeed, establishing councils between the producers and users of public goods would go beyond specific reforms and begin to transform the state. Another reason why alliances must be formed with state workers is that dual power institutions have never managed highly integrated and complex administrative systems above local scales. The knowledge necessary to plan and run industry on national scales cannot be cultivated merely through improvisation (Sirianni 1983, 118). Furthermore, a sum of autonomous institutions linked by a system of mandates likely cannot develop a ‘collective will,’ a spirit of compromise within the bounds of a generally recognized solidarity. For example, during popular participation in urban planning, if a town opposes having a waste collection centre that they would rather pass off to their neighbours, this will require some form of centralized arbitration to distribute benefits and burdens between legitimate interests (Bensaid 2007). Indeed, this would be crucial for, among other things, ending the environmental racism that locates undesirable facilities in racialized communities.

(Paul Christopher, Labour@Brock, https://socialistproject.ca/2019/06/transforming-capitalist-power-from-streets-to-state/, 6-25)

During the crucial early period of any revolutionary transition, it is likely that there would need to be in place an already existing nation-wide infrastructure. This long-term and widespread cultivation of democratic capacities, of both the skill and the will, is crucial not only to prevent major societal disorganization and disintegration. It is also necessary to account for the fact that, when dual power institutions reach a certain scale, they have often prioritized their own survival and become quite competitive with each other. Take, for example, the Russian case: “the soviet system was continually plagued by problems with credentials, forged mandates, co-optation of outsiders into executive organs, violation of formal divisions of authority, highly uneven representation due to the lack of consistent formal regulations, and the disproportionate influence of the more powerful, strategically located, or politically favored factories, unions, garrisons, and local soviet bodies” (Sirianni 1983, 104-5). In other similar cases of dual power, such as the Spartacists in Germany, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in Spain, and the Hungarian council government, these problems occurred to the extent that they attempted to displace the existing state institutions. During revolutionary transitions, this often provoked attempts to counter the widespread disorganization and competition through authoritarian centralization (Sirianni 1983, 106-7; 117-8). Thus, autonomous institutions are susceptible to becoming precisely that which they intend to avoid. These are some of the major problems that will confront any attempt to change the world without taking power or by ‘smashing’ power. Although the state cannot be thought of as an instrument that lays ready to hand, there is some truth in Louis Blanc’s refrain, “Not to use it as an instrument is to encounter it as an obstacle” (1964, 232). The risks of potential co-optation inherent to the struggle for public office are profound, but they entail fewer difficulties than altogether refusing to operate on the terrain of the state. This attempt to cut the Gordian Knot forgets that the state holds the sword. It substitutes an impossible strategy for one that is merely excruciatingly difficult.

(Joanna Wuest holds the Fund for Reunion–Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship in LGBT Studies and is a lecturer at Princeton University.https://www.thenation.com/article/society/mutual-aid-pandemic-covid/ , 12-16)

But scale wasn’t their only goal. Unlike organizers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin—who conjoined labor, civil rights, and demands for a federal minimum wage and jobs program—the Panthers were interested in building dual power institutions that would one day compete with the state. As party member Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin explained, their aim was to bypass the state by building “our communities into dual power communes, from which we can wage a protracted struggle with capitalism and its agents.” But as the Panthers’ influence waned, an increasing number of self-styled community leaders became integrated into a political and entrepreneurial elite that largely neglected policies that would materially benefit the working-class Black population. Some would even come to assist a revanchist capitalist class in pillaging the welfare state and breaking the back of labor. There is a striking parallel between these developments and the trajectory of 19th century ethnically organized mutual aid outfits and related small-business ventures, which just as often evolved into capitalist enterprises and municipal political machines as they did vehicles for reform. And while a handful of those groups paved the way for strong unions and welfare policies, Black power came onto the scene at a time when the American left was enervated and there were few similar opportunities for egalitarian influence. A left-wing politics of mutual aid and self-care gave way to accommodation and brokerage. By the late 20th century, liberals pushed for a more limited deployment of the state, inaugurating the practice of leasing out state functions to private entities like nonprofits. By the late 1970s, an all-out assault on labor and the welfare state began to roll back 20th-century workers’ wins. As the United States went into lockdown last spring, the country entered a pandemic-induced recession with scant social protections. Faced with a hollowed-out welfare state and inadequate relief from the federal government’s initial stimulus, Americans had no choice but to rely on the generosity of their neighbors, friends, and colleagues. Since March, people from weekend volunteers to full-time anarchists have done extraordinary things to distribute food staples and provide shelter for those who found themselves hungry and homeless. Still, given that nearly a quarter of American households with children are carrying rental debt and that a permanent exodus of the poor and working class from major urban hubs is underway, such efforts are confined mainly to the margins. Weathering the current crisis requires nurturing useful hope while avoiding palliative delusions. That means ditching our magical thinking about the sustainability of those mass mobilizations of goodwill that make the nightly news and pepper the pages of left-wing periodicals (both of which neglect the fact that charitable giving actually plummets during recessions). It also means recognizing that crises are excellent opportunities for revanchist right-wing forces to further raze state institutions and slam the lid on cries for justice. When labor-left movements were strong and could afford to go on the offense, the Great Depression created an opening for reform. If there is a lesson from mutual aid’s role in these past triumphs, it is that such community work was subordinated to the tasks of invigorating trade unions and pushing the state to enact universal programs. Kropotkin was not wrong about our natural inclination to cooperate. But how we organize and nurture that cooperative instinct is crucial. A crisis can bring us together to rebuild durable structures for the collective good. It can also exacerbate the dog-eat-dog mentality that neoliberalism has cultivated for decades. Our country is coming to resemble a long-sought libertarian fantasy, with only atomized acts of compassion for those left out. We would do well to guard against this despotic individualism—the natural condition of the social without the state—and to be sober about what spurred this renaissance of mutual aid and what it portends.

(Paul Christopher, Labour@Brock, https://socialistproject.ca/2019/06/transforming-capitalist-power-from-streets-to-state/, 6-25)

In general, the extra-parliamentarist tendency on the radical left argues that founding an egalitarian society requires creating and expanding institutions that are ‘autonomous’ from the states that they will eventually replace. These parallel institutions include popular assemblies, cooperatives, ‘free zones,’ ‘social centres,’ councils in workplaces, schools, barracks, and neighbourhoods, and in the Leninist and Maoist traditions, political parties that are skeptical of taking elected office in any circumstances that do not provide a reasonable prospect for a total rupture from capitalism. In this essay, I will refer to these currents as the ‘dual power’ strategy (Lenin 1970), although they have also been described as ‘counter-power,’ ‘diarchy,’ or ‘autonomism.’ There are several, likely insurmountable practical problems for dual power strategies. These problems will arise for extra-parliamentarists whether they seek to ‘smash’ the state or to ‘exodus’ from it. Those who espouse the dual power strategy often treat it as a general model that is applicable to every capitalist country. But when genuinely autonomous institutions have actually competed with their national states for political legitimacy and sovereignty, it has been under the most exceptional and temporary circumstances. It occurs amid defeat in war, as was the case for the Paris Commune, Russian Soviets, and the councils in post-WWI Germany and Austro-Hungary, or defeat in colonial war, as was the case for Portugal in the 1970s. It also arises in response to direct attacks by fascist forces, as with Spain in the 1930s. In all of these cases, parliamentary institutions were non-existent or much weaker and more corrupt than is typical (Sirianni 1983, 91-8; Bensaid 2007). In every other case, autonomous institutions have been tolerated by the central state because they exist in single neighborhoods or in rurally isolated areas that do not directly encroach upon its power, as is true of the significant achievements of the Zapatistas. To paraphrase Wainwright, there is a lot of autonomy on the margins (2006, 52). Beyond these rare cases, dual power organizations are confined to local levels and limited scales. The bulk of their activities have been focused on supervising governmental agencies and providing basic necessities, such as food, fuel, and housing. Where they have grown beyond local levels and when they are established in more urban, populous, and politically central locations, they are short-lived. Therefore, these parallel institutions do not last long enough to show the majority of people that they are a legitimate alternative to the claim to sovereignty by the national state. While the case of the Russian Soviets before the Bolsheviks took power is an important inspiration for projects to develop dual power, it is even more exceptional. It was aided by the collapse of Russia’s outdated state, its relative isolation from the rest of Europe, and the length of time that its dual power organizations lasted, which was comparatively lengthy, but still less than a year (Sirianni 1983, 109-10; 117). Although there has been a widespread erosion of parliamentary institutions and practices since the 1970s (Mair 2013), even if similar conditions emerge again, there are other profound obstacles to dual power strategies. The most frequent criticism of attempts to build parallel institutions is that, wherever they gain much significance, they will face constant state repression (Bensaid 2006, 10; Callinicos 2006, 63-4). This not only includes outright coercion. It also has more subtle forms. Agencies comprised of volunteers who deliver important services like health and education are harassed by the state over things like licensing. To be clear, this problem is not unique to the extra-parliamentarist tendency, as is shown by the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende’s parliamentary socialism in Chile. The point is that the proposed alternatives to political parties, such as unions, workers’ councils, and neighbourhood councils, have often benefitted from the election of sympathetic political parties, which have a better chance of holding back the coercive state apparatuses and creating supportive legislation (Sirianni 1983, 111-3). Nevertheless, even if state repression is somehow overcome, there are a number of other significant shortcomings to dual power strategies. If parallel institutions grow beyond the local scale they could not mobilize the resources necessary to meet society-wide needs. Consequently, these institutions would face permanent fiscal crisis. Governments will not grant taxation powers to organizations that are not connected to existing state institutions. Furthermore, it would be impossible to organize a disciplined withdrawal from tax-collection, not only because this would be difficult to coordinate, but also due to widespread fears of interrupting the public services upon which workers, the poor, and the marginalized especially depend. Furthermore, it would be quite difficult for dual power institutions to coordinate and fund their activities beyond local scales for an extended period of time. Among other things, they would have to contend with elected municipal governments that control services above the local level and are backed by fiscal reserves from provincial, state, and national governments (Sirianni 1983, 112-4; Albo 2007). This proved difficult even in Red Vienna in the 1920-30s and Red Bologna in the 1970s, where a variety of councils were supported by radical left municipal governments. For example, when Bologna dramatically expanded schooling and established parent-teacher councils, the central government in Rome interfered by allocating a mere 25 teachers for its afternoon schools in 1972-3 compared to the 2,000 it sent to Milan in 1974 (Jäggi, Müller, and Schmid 1977, 124). Furthermore, some radical left governments have provided conditional institutional and financial support to civic initiatives like councils and services while also prioritizing their autonomy, even from these left governments themselves. Take, for example, the ways in which the Australian ‘femocrats’ in the 1970s and the Greater London Council in the 1980s supported and greatly expanded women-led childcare cooperatives and rape crisis centres (Findlay 2018; Wainwright 2018).

(Ella, PoliSci&Gender Studies@Utah Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World )

Unfortunately, Connolly is inconsistent in this regard, for he also positions Foucauldian self-artistry as an "essential preliminary to," and even the necessary "condition of," change at the macropolitical level.104 That is, although Connolly claims that micropolitics and political movements work "in tandem," each producing effects on the other/os he sometimes privileges "action by the self on itself" as a starting point and necessary prelude to macropolitical change. This approach not only avoids the question of the genesis of such reflexive action and its possible harmful effects but also indicates that collective efforts to alter social conditions actually await proper techniques of the self. For example, in a rich discussion of criminal punishment in the United States, Connolly contends that "today the micropolitics of desire in the domain of criminal violence has become a condition for a macropolitics that reconfigures existing relations between class, race, crime and punishment."106 Here and elsewhere in Connolly's writing the sequencing renders these activities primary and secondary rather than mutually inspiring and reinforcing.107 • It is a mistake to grant chronological primacy to ethical selfintervention, however. How, after all, is such intervention, credited with producing salient effects at the macropolitical level, going to get off the ground, so to speak, or assuredly move in the direction of democratic engagement (rather than withdrawal, for example) if it is not tethered, from the beginning, to public claims that direct attention to a specific problem, defined as publicly significant and changeable? How and why would an individual take up reflexive work on the desire to punish if she were not already attuned, at least partially, to problems afflicting current criminal punishment practices? And that attunement is fostered, crucially, by the macropolitical efforts of democratic actors who define a public matter of concern and elicit the attention of other citizens.lOs For reflexive self-care to be democratically significant, it must be inspired by and continually connected to larger political mobilizations. Connolly sometimes acknowledges that the arts of the self he celebrates are not themselves the starting point of collaborative action but instead exist in a dynamic, reciprocal relation with cooperative and antagonistic efforts to shape collective arrangements. Yet the self's relation with itself is also treated as a privileged site, the very source of democratic spirit and action. This tendency to prioritize the self's reflexive relationship over other modes of relation defines the therapeutic ethics that ultimately emerges out of Foucault's and, to a lesser degree, Connolly's work. This ethics not only elides differences between caring for oneself and caring for conditions but also celebrates the former as primary or, as Foucault says, "ontologically prior." An ethics centered on the self's engagement with itself may have value, but it is not an ethics fit for democracy. (44-5)

(Robyn Eckersley (2018): The Green State in Transition: Reply to Bailey, Barry

and Craig, New Political Economy, DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2018.1526270 chool of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australi)

(Phil, a PhD candidate in philosophy at Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany , 3-16)

If a future in which Putin launches a nuclear strike becomes reality—this very well could be our reality, the timeline in which we exist—the consequences for humanity would be catastrophic. The most obvious reason concerns the immediate destruction and radioactive fallout, which could contaminate large areas with lethal doses of radioactive particles. Historically speaking, the first time many people came to realize that radioactive fallout from a nuclear conflict could affect individuals far from the detonation site was in 1954, after the U.S. detonated a massive thermonuclear weapon in the Marshall Islands that had an explosive yield 2.5 times larger than expected. Not only did 23 Japanese fishermen downwind suffer acute radiation poisoning (thus causing an international incident), but radioactivity was detected around the entire world. This demonstrated that even a relatively small-scale war with thermonuclear weapons (or “H-bombs”) could blanket the planet with DNA-mutating radiation. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell and his friend Albert Einstein wrote in their 1955 Russell-Einstein manifesto, the last document that Einstein put his signature to before passing away: No doubt, in an H-bomb war, great cities would be obliterated. But this is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced. If everybody in London, New York, and Moscow were exterminated, the world might, in the course of a few centuries, recover from the blow. But we now know, especially since the Bikini test [of the 1954 Marshall Islands incident], that nuclear bombs can gradually spread destruction over a very much wider area than had been supposed. … No one knows how widely such lethal radio-active particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration. To which they added (in dated language) that “we have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.” Indeed, the Bikini test triggered a pervasive feeling among intellectuals and the public alike that I would describe as “panic”: many leading scientists, including those who had helped design and build the first atomic bombs, became extremely concerned that humanity really might annihilate itself in the near future by converting Earth into a vast radioactive graveyard. But nuclear fears declined in 1963, one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis—described by Arthur Schlesinger as “the most dangerous moment in human history”—when the Soviet Union and U.S. signed the “Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.” Tensions eased, and the Kremlin and Pentagon installed a direct connection between them, popularly called the “red telephone,” which still exists today, as a means for keeping communications open to resolve crises and avert catastrophe. Then, in the early 1980s, something important happened: two scientists, Paul Crutzen (who also helped establish that CFCs destroy the ozone) and John Birks, discovered that radioactive fallout might not be the most dreadful consequence of a nuclear war. Instead, we should be even more concerned about the possibility that nuclear explosions ignite firestorms, or conflagrations with gale-force winds, one of which was actually started by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. These firestorms are so hot that they can, through convection, lift large quantities of black soot high up into the atmosphere—above the layer in which all the weather we experience here on the ground occurs. Since weather is one way that particles in the lower atmosphere are removed, black soot circulating high above this weather can remain aloft for very long periods of time. This is bad because black soot would act like a blackout curtain, blocking incoming light from reaching Earth’s surface, thus causing temperatures to plummet and plants to stop photosynthesizing. Without plants, the food chain collapses, followed by civilization; humanity might not even survive this “nuclear winter” scenario. As Sagan explained in a 1983 article published in Foreign Affairs, the “cold, dark, radioactivity, … and ultraviolet light following a nuclear war … would imperil every survivor on the planet. There is a real danger of the extinction of humanity.” In a different article published the same year he declared: There is little question that our global civilization would be destroyed. The human population would be reduced to prehistoric levels, or less. Life for any survivors would be extremely hard. And there seems to be a real possibility of the extinction of the human species. It is unclear whether Putin is cognizant of this danger, whether he understands that even a limited nuclear exchange could pose a direct threat to the entire human species. Consider that, according to a study published in 2007, “a small-scale, regional nuclear war could kill as many people as died in all of World War II and seriously disrupt the global climate for a decade or more, harming nearly everyone on Earth.” As the authors of the study wrote, a nuclear war in the subtropics involving just 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs would generate substantial global-scale climate anomalies, although not as large as the previous “nuclear winter” scenarios for a full-scale war. However, indirect effect on surface land temperatures, precipitation rates, and growing season lengths would be likely to degrade agricultural productivity to an extent that historically has led to famines in Africa, India and Japan after the 1784 Laki eruption or in the northeastern United States and Europe after the Tambora eruption of 1815 [which resulted in the “Year without a Summer” the following year]. Climatic anomalies could persist for a decade or more because of smoke stabilization, far longer than in previous nuclear winter calculations or after volcanic eruptions. Of course, Putin using tactical nukes in Ukraine might not provoke a nuclear response from NATO, but who feels comforted by the possibility that it wouldn’t? As a recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists states, “the notion that a nuclear war can be ‘limited’ is dangerous. In practice and in the fog of war, once nuclear weapons are used in a conflict involving nuclear-armed adversaries, there is no guarantee it would not quickly become an all-out nuclear conflagration.” What’s worse—zooming out from the current geopolitical predicament for a moment—is that, as the German philosopher Günther Anders pointed out in 1957, since nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented, this is a predicament that humanity can never escape. Any day, the actions of a “mad man” (as Sagan put it) or an error like what happened in 1995 could end the human adventure forever. To quote John F. Kennedy’s eloquent words, eerily spoken one year before the Cuban Missile Crisis: Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. But is it even possible to contemplate this day? To grasp the threat in a way that’s morally and emotionally commensurate with its seriousness? This is where the philosophy of Anders, in particular, can help. In an insightful paper on nuclear omnicide, Anders argued that the onset of the Atomic Age has turned every person on the planet into “inverted Utopians.” Whereas “ordinary Utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize,” he wrote, “we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing.” This is the “basic dilemma of our age” that “defines the moral situation of man today,” namely, that “‘we are smaller than ourselves,’ incapable of mentally realizing the realities which we ourselves have produced.” He elaborated: The apocalyptic danger is all the more menacing because we are unable to picture the immensity of such a catastrophe. It is difficult enough to visualize someone as not being, a beloved friend as dead; but compared with the task our fantasy has to fulfill now, it is child’s play. For what we have to visualize today is not the not-being of something particular within a framework, the existence of which can be taken for granted, but the nonexistence of this framework itself, of the world as a whole, at least of the world as mankind. Such “total abstraction” (which, as a mental performance, would correspond to our performance of total destruction) surpasses the capacity of our natural power of imagination. A psychological consequence of this is what Anders called “Apocalyptic Blindness,” whereby the divergence between our capacity to destroy and our ability to imagine has become so great that we are simply, by our very natures, unable to properly register the danger. We cannot adequately comprehend the true magnitude of nuclear self-annihilation, the stakes of human extinction, and this leads us to not take the risk seriously enough. Not only would the nuclear winter scenario kill everyone alive today, Anders noted, but it would eliminate the possibility of future generations and permanently erase the memories of all those who came before us—in his words, a “second death.” According to Sagan, writing in 1983, if humanity persists for another 10 million years and the population remains stable, there could come to exist another 500 trillion future people. This is a conservative estimate. Our extinction would also foreclose the further development of science, the arts, and morality, which some philosophers argue would constitute an extra tragedy above and beyond the loss of any number of individuals. It could be that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the first sentence of the last chapter of our collective story on Earth—who knows? But it’s a possibility worth taking seriously. For Anders, the first step toward eliminating the nuclear threat is overcoming our Apocalyptic Blindness, our refusal to acknowledge that the danger is real and the consequences would be catastrophic. To do this, he argued that we must strive, every day, as best we can, to imagine the enormity of our disappearance in a nuclear holocaust. “Our imperative,” he wrote, must be to “‘Expand the capacity of your imagination,’ [which] means, in concreto: ‘Increase your capacity of fear.’ Therefore: don’t fear fear, have the courage to be frightened, and to frighten others, too. Frighten thy neighbor as thyself.” Is fear really the best response? The answer is that it depends. Anders had a very particular notion of fear in mind—specifically, a kind of fear that motivates rather than incapacitates. In his words, what we need is “1) a fearless fear, … 2) a stirring fear, since it should drive us into the streets instead of under cover, 3) a loving fear, not fear of the danger ahead but for the generations to come.” Standing before the threat of nuclear conflict, individuals must choose activism rather than nihilism, we must make our voices heard: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” There is no law of nature according to which human self-annihilation is inevitable—every single threat facing us could be surmounted, if only the political will could be summoned. Climate change is solvable. Nuclear war is preventable. Even asteroids can be deflected away from our planet. The first step toward becoming an activist for the preservation of our species, though, is understanding the true gravity of the situation humanity currently finds itself in.

(Chris Blattman is an economist and political scientist who studies global conflict, crime, and poverty. He is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The University of Chicago, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-roots-of-war/)

Medellín’s hostile peace is not unusual. Indeed, its gangs are an allegory for our wider world. The globe is a patchwork of rival territories. Controlling them brings wealth and status. Different groups covet their neighbors’ resources and prey on the weak, but most do their best not to wage war. Now, when I say war, I don’t just mean countries duking it out. I mean any kind of prolonged, violent struggle between groups. This includes villages, clans, gangs, ethnic groups, religious sects, political factions, and nations. At every one of these levels, compromise typically wins for the same reason it does in Medellín: war is ruinous. Nothing destroys progress like conflict. Fighting massacres soldiers, ravages civilians, starves cities, plunders stores, disrupts trade, demolishes industry, and bankrupts governments. It undermines economic growth in indirect ways too. Most people and business won’t do the basic activities that lead to development when they expect bombings, ethnic cleansing, or arbitrary justice; they won’t specialize in tasks, trade, invest their wealth, or develop new ideas. These costs of war incentivize rivals to steer clear from prolonged and intense violence. Of course, it seldom feels like peace is our natural state. “The story of the human race is war,” said Winston Churchill, “except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world.” Certainly it often seems so, especially today as a major conflict rages in Ukraine and the number of civil wars in the world climbs to levels not seen since the 1990s. But that sentiment is misleading and comes from ignoring the quieter moments of compromise. One example of peace came two weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan. Pakistan was outraged, but violence did not break out. Calm ensued, as it has for decades. War would have been so costly that both sides strove to avoid it. Likewise, for two decades, President Vladimir Putin tried every means possible to co-opt Ukraine without invasion: dark money, propaganda, political stooges, assassinations, and support for separatists. War was his last resort. He succeeded in subjugating neighbors such as Belarus and Kazakhstan without a major fight, and he hoped to repeat the trick in Ukraine. Look around and tense instances of peace appear everywhere, whether it’s the gloomy impasse between North and South Korea or the constant deadlock over Taiwan. We see it at lower levels too. Take ethnic and sectarian groups, who are mostly covered in the news when they purge or pillage their neighbors. When social scientists tallied the number of rivalries in the world and counted how many turned violent, however, they found that fewer than one in a thousand actually fight. We forget this because few people write about the conflicts avoided. Instead, our gaze is often pulled to the horrific, violent struggles that do happen. That’s natural. We have to pay attention to wars, but we shouldn’t focus solely on the hostilities that do occur. Solely examining the times that peace failed is a kind of selection bias—a slanted accounting of the evidence that distorts our view of the world. It is a mistake that has two important consequences. One is that we exaggerate how much we fight. Yes, our natural condition is conflict and competition, but most of the time this jostling is not violent. Enemies prefer to loathe in peace. The second and greater harm of selection bias is that we mistake the roots of war and follow fruitless paths to peace. When we trace the steps leading up to a fight, we find familiar features: ancient hatreds, poverty, historical injustices, and an abundance of arms. But when we look at the times rivals did not fight, we often see many of the same preceding conditions. We ought to be skeptical, then, that these are the causes of the violence. To discern why we fight wars, we should begin with why we do not.

(Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is Associate Professor of Sociology at University College London https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-world-speculation-made/)

This world is one we can still recognize as ours. Following a period of unbridled financialization during the later part of the twentieth century (heralded by the momentous repeal of the Glass-Steagall legislation allowing commercial banks to act as financial traders), contemporary economies and societies are once again steeped in the whirlpool of speculation. In today’s turbocharged financial markets, speculation is even more opaque because of the highly complex technologies on which it relies: machine learning, algorithmically powered, superfast trading systems whose inner workings are often indiscernible even to traders themselves. High-frequency automated trading takes place in virtual pits, with data scientists and coders quietly monitoring a ceaseless search for patterns through stacks of data, including predictive analysis of social media content that informs trading decisions (not all that different from the practices of yesteryear’s financial astrologists). On the most obscure end of these markets, speculators submerge themselves in “dark pools,” which are exclusive forums for block trading securities that evade transparency requirements of formal exchanges, where dealings appear even more detached from reality. The complexity of this kind of trading means that it is often impossible to tell whether a product like the derivative will be used to hedge an uncertain event or derive profit from it. At the same time, speculative wagers are now placed not merely on the uncertainty of the future, but also on the volatility of uncertainty itself. At Chicago’s CBOE, a spinoff of the CBOT and the largest modern options exchange in the United States, volatility has its own index commonly called the VIX or “fear index”—a measure of expected price swings in the S&P options market. CBOE’s virtual pit even trades volatility as an “asset class” with its own “index futures.” The denizens of these new temples of finance continue to fire up the public imagination. On first blush, we may intuitively recall the greedy yet charming hedge funders—immortalized by Leonardo DiCaprio’s gregarious performance as Jordan Belfort in the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street—as the exemplary speculators of our time. But on closer inspection, a new and more tragic figure is emerging to usurp the suave megatrader of financialized capitalism from its throne. The modern-day speculator resembles Dr. Alexander Hoffmann, the tragic high-tech Frankenstein protagonist of Robert Harris’s 2011 bestseller The Fear Index: a tormented physicist-cum-financier confronted with VIXAL-4, an omniscient AI algorithm with the power to predict fear—including Dr Hoffmann’s own fear of losing himself entirely in a battle with the mercurial forces of finance. The novel was adapted to a TV series with actor Josh Hartnett rummaging the streets of Geneva injured, haunted, limping, and sweating while searching for clues to his own past and future, plunged into a nightmare reality where it is impossible to distinguish fact from fiction. Yet beyond this dreamlike world of hyper-technologized finance, contemporary markets’ thirst for volatility is reminiscent of our own immersion in the gamified reality of financialized digital media, where speculation breaks out of the organized digital pits to become a mass spectacle. With retail trading of highly volatile assets exploding in the post-2008 crisis era, meme stocks and crypto trading platforms, decentralized finance (“defi”) and decentralized applications (“dApps”) provide the online bucket shops for our time’s virtual punters. Mass “shorting” events such as the GameStop saga—a grassroots short squeeze on the price of the iconic video game retailer organized via social media and making headlines in January 2021—betray a world where volatility is treated as an opportunity in society writ large, with ordinary people sowing (rather than averting) uncertainty to reap profit. Following a long trail of speculators for whom the worlds of wizardry and reason were never too far apart, today’s short-sellers care little about untangling reality and fiction in their “augmented” everyday lives, from the Metaverse and Web 3.0 to the in-game trading of nonfungible tokens. They are drawn to strange narratives, increasingly untethered from material reality and woven into the mainstream. Perhaps most alarmingly, the confusion sown by this radical fragmentation of everyday experiences promotes right-wing conspiracy fantasies and regressive movements such as QAnon, which are moving rapidly from the fringes of political discourse to center stage. Under such conditions speculation once again emerges as an apt and imaginative response to the chaotic volatility wrought by financialized life—importantly, as a collective rather than merely individual act. The kind of speculation involved in these gamified worlds evokes a yearning for community and imagined connectivity, a joint “hedging” of uncertainty. Wagers across the economy and politics—from “crypto bros” coordinating their short sells around meme stocks to profit from destabilized prices to voters in Middle England sowing Brexit chaos in the hope of disrupting the liberal-technocratic status quo—are oriented toward new solidarities and often confusing political alliances. Such speculations place demands on the future in ways that encompass (rather than redress) doubt, ambivalence, and cynicism. Speculation is a definitive feature of contemporary life across the spheres of economy and politics. Since the early stages of nineteenth-century financialized capitalism, it has often been understood as a phantasmatic or parasitic logic driving the financial markets’ rapacious pursuits. But under the increasingly uncontrollable uncertainty of our financialized world, speculation also becomes a more productive mechanism to imagine community and collective coping with disorienting volatility. Speculation, in this sense, is not merely a symptom (as mainstream critiques in both economic and political theory often suggest) but a structure, something more foundational and generative. Therefore, it may also contain valuable answers to the financialization of modern life: if the only certainty about our future is its inherent indeterminacy, another future will always be possible, and fighting for it will never be futile. But how do economies and societies take up this challenge? This proposition has implications for how we might rethink the political use of speculation. Speculation can be a weapon mobilized not only against (neo)liberal democracy (for example, in the case of nativist conspiracists and right-wing populists), but against finance itself: as an instrument for orienting a radical collective imagination toward more inclusive myths and future narratives that help those in the margins of capitalist society resist the logic of capital. As such, speculation should also be understood as a field of action that may enable movements to challenge the paradigm from which they emerge, by encouraging us to figuring out who we are and who we can be in the face of radical uncertainty. How can we envision resistance in the sense of genuinely alternative life patterns, capable of defeating the oppressive forces of finance capitalism? What are forms of struggle and subjectivity that exceed the set menus of political choices offered by neoliberal risk management? How can the communities formed under the fog enveloping homo speculans nurture such alternatives? And, finally, how can the necessity of imagining the future without access to adequate resources become an instrument for overturning the conditions producing financialization in the first place? We may call these types of radical and progressive speculation “counter-speculation”: collective political action to pursue solidarity amid uncertainty. Today we find the traces of counter-speculation when groups that are traditionally subjected to the speculative violence of finance (women, racialized, and queer people) rise to wage their own bets on the future. In doing so, they reimagine that future. As new speculative communities emerge from the allegedly invincible “There Is No Alternative” doctrine, the challenge for progressive movements will be learning to occupy this new uncharted territory of possibility. We can expose the nefarious forces of exclusionary ignorance while finding ways to retain trust in a shared reality. Better yet, we can acknowledge that such a shared reality contains the myths of our own making.

(Michael, PoliSci@Pen, , 6-17-15)

Attempts to bridge the gap between academia and the real world, especially in the area of international relations, have accelerated over the last few years. There are several initiatives ongoing, including the Bridging the Gap project, the Tobin Project, the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations (TRIP), and a variety of others. The Bridging the Gap project, for example, trains academics how to ask policy relevant questions and write for public policy audiences. To complement these efforts, our understanding of what policy relevance “is” needs improving. In particular, distinguishing between research with significance for policy and research that is policy actionable — promoting realistic policy actions — can bring analytical clarity to the concept of policy relevance and help enhance efforts to bridge the gap. A fear that academia is becoming more irrelevant drives these efforts to bridge the gap. From former MacArthur President Robert Gallucci’s call for more relevance to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s fear that academic insights are not useful for the real world to writing by Peter Campbell and Michael Desch, Steve Van Evera, and Jim Steinberg and Frank Gavin, along with others, there is a sense that academics are not doing enough. On the other hand, the information age has been a game changer in the ability of academics to communicate directly with the policy world, and increasingly in their willingness as well. Just in the area of international relations, from blogs run by academics (e.g. Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, Duck of Minerva, Political Violence at a Glance, Lawfare, and others) to social media avenues such as Twitter to media outlets that consistently publish academics with policy insights (e.g. War on the Rocks, Foreign Policy, and Defense One), academics have a greater number of venues than ever to publish policy-relevant insights based on their scholarship. Anecdotally, it seems easier to take advantage of the opportunity than ever. Yet, if improving policy relevance in academia, as well as the ability of the policy world to consume academic research (if presented correctly), is an important goal, it makes the question of what exactly policy relevance “is” a vital one. Policy relevance often seems to be in the eyes of the beholder. A lack of precision in what policy relevance is, however, can encourage thinking about the issue that does not accurately capture reality, and leads to confusion when different people use the term in different ways. One way forward is to distinguish between four key concepts that seem at the core of discussions of policy relevance. What follows separates the components of policy relevance from the quality of the work itself, e.g. whether it holds together intellectually. While that is a crucial consideration for evaluating the overall utility of any piece, this is an attempt to drill down on the concept of policy relevance itself. Policy significance: Policy significance, most simply, is research that has implications for the policy world. A good deal of international relations research, even that involving advanced statistical methods and lots of academic jargon, arguably passes this bar. For example, Paul Staniland points out, in a response to Thomas Ricks, the utility of many recent political science articles and books for understanding topics ranging from how rockets launched from the Gaza Strip influence voting patterns in Israel to what we can learn about the emerging balance of power in East Asia from studying the period before the outbreak of World War I. A critic might respond, however, that many of these pieces are written in ways that make them inaccessible to mainstream policymakers, or that they are too long for policymakers to read. That is often true. As Paul Avey and Michael Desch’s research on how policymakers view academic journals shows, policymakers doubt the utility of academic journal articles featuring quantitative work and game theory (whether any senior policymakers read any journal articles, regardless of method, is a different question). Thus, the potential significance of research and writing for understanding a public policy issue alone is only part of the issue, though it is a useful sub-category. Policy accessibility: Policy accessibility reflects the essential readability of research — whether presented as a book, journal article, or blog post — for the policy world. A journal article and blog post by the same person on the same issue could be just as policy relevant as each other, but have very different levels of policy accessibility. The journal article might feature many theoretical references and discussions of academic debates that make it policy relevant, but not policy accessible. The blog post, in contrast, on the exact same research, might be policy accessible. One might even further refine this concept by distinguishing between writing that is policy accessible at the working level in the government, which is often staffed by younger people with more recent engagement with academic research, and writing for senior policymakers. Senior policymakers have even less time than their busy staffers to consume outside writing, and, unless they come from academia, potentially less familiarity with academic concepts. Another way to refine the concept of policy accessibility is to think about different venues as having different levels of policy accessibility for different audiences. Even within the policy world, venues more targeted at the Defense Department (DoD) versus the public conversation on an issue might require writing in somewhat different ways. Demonstrating fluency with DoD jargon and policy levers can be important for being accessible to busy staffers in a DoD office. In contrast, writing a mass media op-ed requires using more public language designed for the broadest audience. Policy actionability: Policy actionability refers to a recommendation that is possible to implement for the target of the recommendation. Most academic work is not policy actionable, fundamentally. For example, implications from international relations research are things such as whether countries with high male-to-female ratios are more likely to start military conflicts or that countries that acquire nuclear weapons become harder to coerce. Understanding the motivations for countries to have nuclear weapons has broad policy implications, but it is not a specific thing that is going to drive U.S. policy on Iran or North Korea, except in the broadest way. Academic research of this type shows what happens, on average. For research that is only policy significant, however, policymakers then figure out whether the particular case they are dealing with, e.g. Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine, fits the baseline and gives them useful information. That is to say, the policymaker is taking policy significant research and making it policy actionable. For example, understanding that democracies generally do not fight each other, the phenomenon known as the democratic peace, could shape policymaker expectations about whether a given dispute between two democracies will escalate into violence, all other things being equal, and then influence a policy response. For example, Peter Feaver and Eric Lorber’s piece on Obama’s Iran strategy and the role of economic sanctions is clearly policy significant and written in an accessible way. It points to challenges involved in a sanctions “snapback” against Iran if nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 go south, but does not recommend a specific course of action for the Obama administration. Its larger contribution is to the public debate on the topic. In a different way, some policy relevant writing is actionable in theory, but not in practice. Arguing that the United States should withdraw from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), for example, is a specific policy recommendation, but it is not a realistic recommendation given the strong commitment of the United States to remaining in NATO. It can be useful for agenda setting or dialogue generating, however. Policy actionable writing is different. Policy actionable writing, taking political and bureaucratic realities into account, generally does one of two things. First, policy actionable writing does the translation-function itself. It explains, for example, investment decisions the U.S. military should make based on lessons learned from research on military innovation. Second, policy actionable writing engages directly in a debate such as whether the United States should deploy ground troops to confront the Islamic State in Syria and the Levant or arm Ukraine, drawing on academic research or concepts to make the argument in favor or against. Public debate: Finally, academic writing in the public sphere can also help set the agenda for discussion, even though it is not necessarily designed to influence short-term public policy activities. Books and articles by scholars such as Paul Kennedy or Samuel Huntington exemplify this type of agenda-setting research. This type of writing can affect how policymakers think about various essential issues and evaluate the world when they make decisions, but does not explicitly guide any particular choices. For a recent example of an academic engaging public debate in a shorter format than a book, take John Mearsheimer’s article in Foreign Affairs on Western responsibility for ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine. His provocative suggestion that the United States should work with Russia to make Ukraine a neutral buffer state stimulated public dialogue, even though it was unlikely to be implemented, given the commitment of the Obama administration (and any other likely U.S. administration) to pushing back against Russian aggression. Gaining a better sense of what exactly constitutes policy relevance is a useful and arguably vital task. Too often, the debate about policy relevance devolves into rhetorical bomb throwing where it is entirely possible that both sides are right, depending on the metrics used and the definition of policy relevance used. No one wants academia to whither into obscurity. In reality, some writing might score highly in some of these areas, but lower in others, while other research might score highly across the board, and so on. Distinguishing between the significance, accessibility, actionability, and public debate functions of writing can provide a clearer understanding of what constitutes policy relevance. This framework can aid the field of international relations, as well as others, in moving the discussion forward and promoting policy relevance that we can all get behind.

(Janet Banfield, Sam HamptonORCID Icon &Monika Zurek, all Geo@Oxford, Towards a pedagogical policy turn in geography Journal of Geography in Higher Education Volume 46, 2022 - Issue 2)

In re-opening the policy debate, we do not wish to rehash old quarrels, and we acknowledge both compelling postcolonial arguments against striving for policy impact, and radical geographical reasons to resist the pressure for demonstrable short-term impact. However, disciplines make their greatest impact through their students. Our professional experience indicates increasing desire for applied learning opportunities to complement the theoretical and critical emphasis of human geography and the scientific niches of physical geography. Yet, definitional, institutional and structural issues perpetuate the devaluation of extra-academic policy experience and the division between policy work and curriculum direction. There is a growing imperative to act among young people but with students increasingly coming to university to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to enter the policy world yet graduating without meaningful exposure to extra-academic policy work, we are failing to provide them with the policy-specific scaffolding that they both desire and require to capitalise on their academic skills, make informed career choices and fully realise their – and our – potential.

(Janet Banfield, Sam HamptonORCID Icon &Monika Zurek, all Geo@Oxford, Towards a pedagogical policy turn in geography Journal of Geography in Higher Education Volume 46, 2022 - Issue 2)

25 years after Harvey’s intervention, debate raged in the 2000s as human geographers contemplated the character and desirability of policy impact. Martin (Citation2001) explained geographers’ limited influence on policy through a turn towards theoretical rather than empirical work, and called for a new “geography of public policy”. Dorling and Shaw (Citation2002) sympathised but argued that a policy turn was unlikely because geographers do not value it, are not good at it, and are not validated by policy makers. Ward (Citation2005, Citation2006, Citation2007) expanded the debate by highlighting impactful geographical contributions, including refuting normative notions of relevance, which focused too narrowly on policy audiences and short term, measurable impact. Public geography, by contrast, concerns itself with diverse publics and multiple modes of scholarship, including activism, participation, and pedagogy. Students, he argued, are our “first public, for they carry geography into all walks of life” (Ward, Citation2006, p. 500). Subsequently, and re-articulating the value of participatory scholarship (Pain, Citation2003, Citation2004, Citation2006), Pain et al. (Citation2011) expressed concerns that the forthcoming UK Research Excellence Framework assessment (REF) would entrench elitist notions of impact and underplay community knowledge exchange. Since this flurry of frustration, the policy debate amongst human geographers has subsided, and Martin’s vision of a “policy turn” has not materialised, although the relationship between geography and policy impact continues to attract comment, with (for example) physical geographers embodying critical reflexivity and concern for policy relevance through the emergence of critical physical geography (Lane, Citation2017; Lave et al., Citation2018); and transdisciplinary concerns surrounding anthropogenic environmental change reigniting disciplinary interest in the value of an explicitly geographical perspective (André, Citation2017; Schwanen, Citation2018). Nonetheless, the residue of the earlier debate constrains geography’s potential to make meaningful policy impact. Ward’s (Citation2006) criticism that geography is too focused on policy audiences encourages us to cast our eyes elsewhere, while both Martin’s (Citation2001) call for a geography of public policy – while encouraging active engagement – and Dorling and Shaw’s (Citation2002) lament seemingly objectify policy as something to be studied rather than practised by geographers. It is hardly surprising that Pain’s (Citation2003, Citation2004, Citation2006) advocacy of participatory research in social geography has not translated into policy work, if policy is seen as external and to be critiqued rather than practised. This, though, conflicts with blossoming undergraduate interest in and demand for more practically oriented educational experiences to prepare them for engaging with pressing issues of environmental and social justice beyond the ivory tower. Geography graduates pursue myriad careers, and many aspire to policy roles, typically in sustainability, international development or spatial planning. Currently, geography is growing (in the UK), with GCSE, A-Level and undergraduate entries in England increasing since 2010 (Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), Citation2020). At the same time, the diverse skills developed by geographers are attractive to employers across varied sectors (Prospects Luminate, Citation2020), but how sustainable can this be if the type of policy work to which students increasingly aspire is conspicuously absent from the policy work to which they are exposed in their curricula?

Poverty is understood as income poverty in this work. Although this reflects an indirect approach to the poverty concept in general, it is in line with the focus on monetary transfer payments.168 Since income determines each individual’s opportunity set, differences in income poverty and inequality are indicators for changes in real freedom before and after a policy reform. In order to measure this type of poverty, Foster and Sen (2010) mention two aspects that are of importance. First, those who are considered poor have to be identified out of the total target population. Secondly, the different characteristics of the identified groups must be aggregated to quantify the society’s level of poverty (Foster and Sen 2010, p. 165). Relying on income poverty, the group of poor can be identified by the determination of a certain poverty line so that everyone below this threshold is considered poor. The issue of aggregation then is simplified to the question how to rank different income distributions and “of choosing a functional form that maps different income vectors (and poverty lines) into a numerical index of aggregated poverty” (Foster and Sen 2010, p. 165). The poverty line selected in this work concentrates on relative instead of absolute poverty. Relative poverty lines have the advantages of including costs of social inclusion (Garroway and de Laiglesia 2012, p. 15). The extent of relative income poverty always depends on the income distribution of the population. Similar to the general usage in the European Union, poverty is defined here as having less than 60 % of the median equivalent income of all households at one’s disposal.169 This indicates the risk-of-poverty line (Antuofermo and Di Meglio 2012, p. 7). The equivalent (or equivalised) income of a household is the total disposable income of this household divided by a weighting factor related to the household size. This factor is determined by the modified scale of the OECD. This weighting scale states that the main receiver of income has a value of 1 while every other member of the household of at least 14 years of age accounts for only 0.5. Furthermore, every child up to the age of 13 is ascribed to a weighting factor of 0.3.170 For example, the income of a couple with a 5-year old and a 16-year old child is divided by 2.3 to calculate the household’s equivalent income.171 To measure the impact of the basic income reform on poverty, this work relies on the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) family of poverty measures (see Foster et al. 1984).172 The FGT measure of poverty is given as (6.11) with z being the poverty line.173 While n represents the number of observations, q indicates the number of households whose income is below the poverty line. Furthermore, yi is the i-th household’s equivalent income. The term zyi z is then the normalized shortfall with regard to the poverty line. Parameter ˛ represents a weighting factor accounting for the severance of income poverty. It can be interpreted – similar to the inequality aversion that will be discussed in the following section – as a weighting of inequality among the poor and how strong this inequality effects general statements on poverty (Foster and Sen 2010, p. 179). Thus, the higher ˛ the more weight is given to households far below the poverty threshold. Both the poverty line z and the weighting factor ˛ are exogenously given. Certain values of ˛ – 0, 1, and 2 – are of specific importance because the FGT-index is able to include different poverty measures so that they become special cases within the FGT-index. Setting ˛ D 0, the FGT-index yields the headcount ratio H so that FGT˛D0 D q n D H (6.12) which measures the incidence of poverty. It is the proportion of those who are poor with respect to the total population. This means H is independent of the income distribution among the poor. ˛ D 1 represents the per capita poverty gap index which accounts for the severance of poverty. It is defined as with q D 1 q Pq iD1 yi being the arithmetic mean of all income below the poverty line. In this case FGT˛D1 is equal to the headcount ratio multiplied by the poverty gap index I (1 q z ) (Faik 1995, p. 321). It shows the mean shortfall from the poverty line expressed as a percentage of this poverty threshold. Any ˛>1 puts more weight on those income far below the poverty line. From all those, ˛ D 2 is a special case because FGT˛D2 weights the normalized shortfall just by itself (Foster and Sen 2010, p. 179). It can further be expressed as where CV is the coefficient of variation. It is defined as CV2 P D 1 q Pq iD1 .qyi/ 2 2 q (Celidoni 2011, p. 4). This class of poverty measures has been widely used in applied work on income poverty due to its convenient properties (see e.g. Anand (1983), Huppi and Ravallion (1991), Ravallion (1994), and Bourguignon and Fields (1997)).174 Table 6.19 shows the pre- and post-reform poverty rates. While the poverty line is calculated using the overall income distribution, the values in Table 6.19 reflect the fraction of a specific household type that lies below this line. The estimated overall poverty rate is about 21.97 % which is slightly higher than official figures. This discrepancy is due to the sample restriction since the analysis is confined to the population able to work. Additionally, the data base differs as official figures are based on either the German Microcensus or the EVS. However, the structure of poverty reflects the overall situation rather well. One-adult households and especially lone parents show a higher incidence of poverty, whereas poverty rates of married couples are significantly lower than the average. Families with many children are disproportionately affected from poverty as well. It should be noted, however, that the severity of poverty is not too pronounced; thus, the income distribution below the poverty line is rather flat. This gets obvious especially by looking at ˛ D 2 where the normalized difference is weighted by itself. The low values of the poverty gap are generated by the fact that even in the status quo the socio-cultural subsistence level is secured by the public transfers mainly unemployment pay II. The second part of Table 6.19 (columns 5–7) shows that substituting the meanstested benefits by a comprehensive basic income scheme lowers poverty rates significantly. The overall poverty rate drops about 5 % points from 21.97 % to 16.3 % . The decline in poverty is most distinctive for families with an overall decrease of almost one half (from 22.36 % to 13.17 %). This sharp decline is due to the installation of a child-related basic income that surmounts existing child benefits. As the table indicates, beneficiaries of the reform are mainly families with many children, married and lone parents alike. The reduction in poverty rates for childless households is less distinct, but perceptible as well. Again, married couples benefit more than one-adult households. The severance of poverty declines for all types of households as they are moved closed to the poverty line due to the higher transfer payments. This is especially true for lone parents. However, the basic income scheme reduces the heterogeneity related to income among the poor as very low-income households are supported in a better way.

The aim of this paper was to assess tax policy reforms that can sustain universal basic income programs and foster long-term growth and welfare in an African currency union that faces fiscal constraint and inequality. Theoretically, the relationship between tax policy and universal basic income remains unsettled. The proponents of a universal basic income program advocate four fundamental development principles. By contrast, the opponents of the universal basic income program challenge those four development principles. To address this ongoing debate, we developed a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Model of universal basic income enriched with three fiscal policy strategies. We model the fact that, to alleviate inequality and raise long-term growth and welfare, government members adopt a universal basic income program, which is financed by three fiscal policy strategies. The first fiscal policy strategy is the increase in taxes on realized capital gains. The second is the expansion of corporation income tax. The third is the total phasing-out of the oil subsidy program within the currency union.

The findings show that the effectiveness of universal basic income on productivity growth, inequality, and welfare is dependent on the type of fiscal policy used to fund it, specifically the trade-off between tax policy and transfer policy. While universal basic income funded by tax policies is effective in reducing inequality and increasing growth and welfare, universal basic income funded by completely eliminating oil subsidies appears to be the best policy in terms of growth, welfare, and inequality reduction. Hence, to influence long-term productivity growth, welfare, and inequality via universal basic income within the monetary union, the government will face a trade-off between expanding the tax base and reducing public spending. Second, when the currency union faces an oil crisis, a universal basic income funded by tax policy is more effective in combating stagflation and inequality than a universal basic income funded by oil subsidy elimination. So, oil subsidies appear fundamental in supporting economic activity and welfare when the currency union is in a crisis situation. This is because, by raising taxes on corporates and higher-income households, the government uses those fiscal revenues to fund subsidies and policies that directly target low-income households and reduce inequality between low-income households and high-income households. Third, the normalization of monetary policy following the inflation crisis leads to two opposite effects. On the one hand, universal basic income is more effective in reducing consumption inequality since lower-income households consume more and save less due to monetary policy normalization, more so under the third fiscal policy, rather than the second and first fiscal policies. On the other hand, universal basic income is unable to circumvent income inequality due to lower growth and lower employment induced by the normalization of monetary policy, more so under the third policy rather than the second and first fiscal policies.

First, universal basic income funded by an increase in capital gains raises the consumption of non-oil goods, which are mostly demanded by low-income households, and decreases oil consumption, which is primarily demanded by higher-income households. As the share of lower-income households is greater within the monetary union, their consumption demand offsets the consumption demand of higher-income households and leads to an increase in total consumption and a reduction in consumption inequality.

Second, universal basic income funded by an increase in corporate income tax contravenes the operation of less competitive corporations, which enhance the profitability of investment within the union, both in the short and the long term, and hence the total factor productivity growth. As a result, investment opportunity costs fall, and competitive corporations find it optimal to invest more, while less competitive corporations find it optimal to invest less. This substitution effect intensifies the increase in investment and labor demand. Labor demand expansion puts upward pressure on labor income and induces a reduction in income inequality.

The earned income tax credit (EITC) is a large federal aid program administered through the tax system. Benefits are available to households with earnings from employment. In 2021, the program provided $71 billion in benefits to 27 million recipients. The EITC is mainly a spending program, not a tax‐​cutting program. The credit is “refundable,” meaning that individuals who pay no income taxes receive payments from the government. About $69 billion of the benefits in 2021 were refundable.

The EITC has a high error and fraud rate, and for many recipients it creates a disincentive to increase earnings. Also, the refundable or spending part of the EITC imposes a cost on the people who pay the taxes that fund the benefits.

In this paper, we compare subsidies of low-wage work, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), to unconditional cash transfers—or what is commonly referred to as a universal basic income (UBI).2 The EITC helps families with low earnings but does not provide any support to those without earnings. It is an extremely popular policy because it redistributes income to low-earning families while encouraging work. In contrast, a UBI provides unconditional support to everyone and is often combined with a progressive tax on earnings. In this paper we argue that a UBI would be preferable to subsidies of low-wage work on economic, moral, and political grounds. The economic arguments for a UBI are twofold: • First, subsidies of low-wage work, such as an EITC, distort incentives; they cause people to work more than they otherwise would. A UBI would reduce the resulting inefficiency, so that there would be a bigger economic pie to distribute, and more money would go to those who need it. In this paper, we call this the “magic bucket”: the idea that by moving from a world in which we provide subsidies of low-wage work to one in which we provide universal transfers, we incur societal savings. As we reduce conditional (EITC) payments to support an unconditional (UBI) transfer system, individuals work less, which leads to government savings from fewer and smaller EITC transfers. As a result, you can reduce EITC payments by less than $1 to pay for $1 of UBI. Second, subsidies of low-wage work depress wages. By providing incentives for people to work, such subsidies allow employers to pay less, so they are, at least in part, a transfer to employers rather than workers. Replacing subsidies of lowwage work with a UBI would improve workers’ bargaining position and wages. We also argue that there are important moral and political considerations for unconditional transfers, such as a UBI, over conditional ones, such as an EITC: • First, a UBI would increase individual liberty and would improve fairness. This sort of benefit would allow people in abusive relationships with domestic partners, employers, or government administrators to leave the situation without fear of material destitution. Unconditional benefits would also improve fairness by remunerating unpaid care work (particularly by women), civic engagement, and cultural production. • Second, a UBI would be politically more sustainable and popular than narrowly targeted transfers. Universal benefits tend to have stronger democratic support than conditional benefits for the poor. In summary, these arguments suggest that a UBI would give more to those who need it, would promote liberty, and would be politically viable and stable. If one accepts these arguments, a political case needs to be made for a UBI. Any such case must grapple with and overcome distinctions drawn between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. Such distinctions underpin the popularity of conditional transfers among politicians, but that underpinning has historically often been based on racial discrimination. A case for a UBI also needs to provide alternative narratives of a shared fate and shared interests, of a common defense of liberty, and of the valuable contributions of those working outside paid labor.

A new  released by , which disseminates research by Harvard scholars on the topics of economic growth, employment, and inequality, argues that a universal basic income is superior to current low wage subsidies in several ways. The author, Associate Professor of Economics at Harvard, Dr.  contends that these subsidies, specifically the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the United States, comparatively carries several economic, moral, and political disadvantages.

The EITC is a subsidy to low income working families and increases with income to , depending on household size. The credit has been found to , reduce welfare dependency, improve child health and educational outcomes, and lifts roughly  above the official poverty line. Kasy argues that a basic income could produce similar outcomes while eliminating several important drawbacks. First, because the demand for labor is finite, especially in times of recession, incentivizing some workers to work more, which ultimately creates fewer jobs overall. In other words, if a service sector employee works overtime hours in order to maximize the EITC credit, her employer will not need to hire an additional employee to cover those hours. Further, multiple researchers have found that subsidizing low wage work via the EITC plus cuts to traditional welfare, in the 1990s, decreased pressure on employers to offer a living wage and ultimately contributed to the declining value of the minimum wage. In essence, Kasy argues, the EITC is a subsidy to employers. Conversely, a UBI would increase the bargaining power of workers and wages would thusly rise.

Most policy analysts believe that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) substantially reduces poverty and increases employment in an administratively efficient and well-targeted way. This is not true. In this paper, I show that simple mismeasurements have greatly overstated the efficiency and effectiveness of the EITC program. To determine how much the EITC reduces poverty, researchers run a couple of simple calculations using the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) of the Current Population Survey (CPS). In the first calculation, they determine how many individuals have a disposable income that puts them below the poverty line based on the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). In the second calculation, they do the same thing, but this time with the EITC subtracted from each person’s income. The difference between the two numbers, which was 5.6 million people in 2018, is then  to be the number of people pulled out of poverty by the EITC.

Unlike other benefit incomes, the EITC values in the ASEC are not based on survey questions. Instead, the Census imputes them by running a tax simulation on each unit’s reported earnings. This approach has three problems that cause the antipoverty impact of the EITC to be way overstated.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a major part of America's work-focused safety net. At the end of each tax year, parents who work but have low incomes can receive up to . Conservatives like it because it rewards work; liberals like it because it helps poor families. Some on both sides have suggested , especially for childless workers, who receive far smaller credits than those with children (just $529 this year).

An  from Princeton’s Henrik Kleven, however, argues that the pro-work impact of the EITC has been hugely overstated. Indeed, it implies that the credit has done essentially nothing to increase work. This doesn't mean we should repeal it. But it does mean we should give serious thought to reworking how it operates.