Evaluating competitive policies is necessary to vet an effective UBI

At present there is a great variety of relatively novel policy instruments, amongst them forms of basic income, which may conceivably be put to use in counteracting the emergence of a dual economy, under the more restrictive conditions outlined above. But it should be noted that at present also, the proponents of basic income may have more of a rough ride to stay in the race, for two connected reasons. First, since basic income has to prove itself in an economically and politically more constrained envi- ronment, the tax cost of guaranteeing the ‘firm unconditional floor’ – if pitched at the level of subsistence needs – is now even more likely to be perceived as prohibitive than it was a decade ago. As a consequence, only partial and piecemeal movements toward unconditional entitlements of benefit are the ones that are going to figure seriously in the comparative exercise of optimal policy instruments for solving the new social ques- tion. Secondly, unlike before the early 1990s, basic income can no longer be presented as the only alternative to the status quo of work- and means-tested conditional bene- fits, with its large unemployment and poverty traps. For in the policy debate on the new social question, competing instruments have entered the field, such as Earned Income Tax Credit, and various kinds of wage subsidies to employees. These instru- ments, it is now claimed, are able to remove inactivity traps just as efficiently as a basic income would be able to, and moreover, in ways that avoid the controversial feature of basic income: its loosening of the links between transfer income and the obligation to perform paid work.

These changes in the terms of the debate imply that forms of partial basic income and forms of work-oriented benefit and labour-market policies slide into a broad con- tinuum of alternatives, each of which can claim to tackle the new social question in terms of its effects on promoting access to employment at the low end of the labour market, preventing poverty, and fighting social exclusion. The advantages and draw- backs of each of these alternatives thus have to be sorted out by a very careful compar- ative analysis, and in the course of such analysis, as the contributions of Paul de Beer and of Philippe Van Parijs, Laurence Jacquet and Claudio Salinas clearly show, it is dif- ficult to claim a knock-down superiority for any particular policy alternative.Thus it is perhaps fair to say that basic income, after having won a certain kind of respectability as a normatively unorthodox way of addressing the deficiencies of existing welfare state arrangements, is now taken seriously enough to be put to the test under rather harsher conditions than its proponents may have anticipated. One object of this volume is to see if basic income can survive this test.