Gendered assumptions of what “participation” look like makes it impossible for conditional models to solve inequality.

To be sure, simply removing the participation requirement and moving from a modest PI to a modest UBI might not on its own have much effect on the distribution of care work, although any relative increase in the economic resources of carers compared to workers should increase carers’ bargaining power in negotiations over the division of labour within the family or household. But in addition to implementing a selective reciprocity, the PI implements a selective conditionality as well. The ‘participation’ requirement disadvantages those with comparatively little income or wealth, for whom declining to ‘participate’ has much more serious consequences than it does for those with comparatively more: those with sufficient capital are free from the need to document the social utility of their daily activities while those without capital must do so in order to survive. This selective conditionality implicitly endorses the basic legitimacy of the status quo distribution of income and wealth as being based on merit.

In contrast, the principle of unconditionality recognises that many of us are free-riding ‘surfers’ in any number of ways: as direct or indirect beneficiaries of the unpaid care and other voluntary work that sustains and reproduces our families and communities, or as individual beneficiaries of our collectively enforced rights to private property ownership and inheritance, or as recipients of unearned ‘rents’ we collect through protected first-tier employment, luck-driven endowments at birth, or our places in economic and political power structures. Because our relative incomes and wealth are due at least in part to these forms of free-riding, a ‘participation’ requirement that is not universal, but selectively imposed on those who require cash assistance to meet their basic needs, improperly implies that high income and wealth is a proxy for ‘participation’ that obviates the need for any further monitoring.13 Once again, a gender perspective makes this problem clear: women are disproportionately represented at the lower end of the income and wealth distributions,14 and thus disproportionately subject to the conditionality of the PI. Can it really be the case that women as a class contribute less to society than men do and thus require more monitoring of their social contributions than men?

Twentieth century social policy in the twenty-first century economy

The impulse to condition the citizen's income on a work or ‘participation requirement’ is a lingering artefact of a brief period of economic history in advanced industrial economies—a period in which industrialisation and limits on capital mobility meant that economic growth was shared between workers and capitalists, and social norms limited the market's tendency toward income inequality. It is ironic that Atkinson maintained his insistence on a participation requirement despite his work on rising income inequality in the post-1970s era. In the 1970s and 1980s there was still little understanding that postwar trends in GDP and wage growth had changed decisively. It had been possible to believe that the wage stagnation of the 1970s, the oil price shocks, the pressures to reduce public spending, and the flow of capital and growth in manufacturing jobs outside Europe and the US were reversible anomalies. Beginning in the late 1990s, and certainly by 2015 when Atkinson published Inequality: What Can Be Done?, there was growing evidence that the broadly shared economic growth and expansion of the welfare state in the thirty-year postwar period was the anomaly. Atkinson and economists like him provided that evidence in their empirical work on income inequality. By now it is clear as well that advanced capitalist economies have settled into a two-tier system, with one group of workers enjoying stable employment, income, and employment-based benefits, and another group more precariously employed in work without fixed hours, holding short-term contracts with little job security, and less access to employer-provided or social insurance benefits. The data on increasing inequality of wealth is, if anything, even clearer.

As just one example of the challenges of changing social norms to reducing inequality that Atkinson himself notes, the postwar period was a time in which the constrained earnings opportunities for women limited household income dispersion: women's artificially compressed wages meant that working women contributed proportionately more to household income when married to low-wage men than to affluent men. Now, women's wage (and wealth) dispersion has increased, and assortative mating means that working women contribute to inequality among households.15 Atkinson suggests that changes like these are outside the realm of what can be affected by policy—but that is true only if our policies remain those that were designed for a different economy.

Unconditionality makes little sense in an economy in which all have equal pay and capital wealth, equal responsibility for care work, and equal opportunities to tailor the mix of care, work, and leisure they prefer. It only makes sense in an economy which even when it functions well leaves some groups with disproportionate responsibility for unpaid labour, and with widely dispersed levels of income and assets due more to institutional economic structures and global economic forces than to different levels of ingenuity or effort. Atkinson is right to say that ‘the differentiation involved in the typical social insurance scheme is not arbitrary’,16 but not for the reason he implied: categories of social insurance inclusion and exclusion are not arbitrary because they encode gendered, classist, and racist notions of dependence, independence, contribution, and participation, not because they are determined by different levels of desert.

Conclusion

Unconditionality is superior to conditionality for the citizen's income not just because it is more efficient and effective (although it is), but because it is more just, asserting our universal entitlement to an unconditional share of common resources and reminding us that inequalities in access to those resources are tolerated only because, and insofar as, they lead to the common good. The belief in a common good beyond our individual status is one reason women, or caregivers of any gender, often seem to act against their own self-interest by foregoing opportunities to maximise income and wealth. Divisions of labour, including the gender division of labour, help us to achieve more than we could if individually responsible for our own needs and wants. But any division of labour between carers and earners needs to be in the interest of both groups. Otherwise, as Nancy Fraser points out, it is the earners who are the free-riders, not the other way around.17 By requiring recipients of the citizen's income to qualify for the PI, but not those with enough economic resources to do without it, the PI reinforces and endorses the legitimacy of contemporary inequalities, rather than fighting against them.