Abstract
In this article, we respond to a critical review of Covering all the Basics: Reforms for a More Just Society, published in this journal (Smith-Carrier, T., Forget, E., Power, E. and Halpenny, C. [2024] ‘Covering all the [welfare] basics’: a critical policy study of the Expert Panel on Basic Income report in British Columbia, Canada, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, XX(XX): 1–27, DOI: 10.1332/17598273Y2024D000000016), by providing what we view as a more accurate description of the findings and arguments in that report. The result, we hope, is an alternative depiction of how a basic income would relate to the search for a more just society.
In the February 2024 issue of this journal, a set of authors presented a critical review of a report for the government of the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, on the feasibility of making a basic income a central plank of the redistributive system in that province (Smith-Carrier et al, 2024). That report, entitled, Covering All the Basics: Reforms for a More Just Society (a title purposefully misreported by the authors by adding in the word ‘welfare’ before our word ‘Basics’) was presented to the BC government in December of 2020 (Green et al, 2020b). We (along with J. Rhys Kesselman, who has sadly passed away since that time, and Daniel Perrin) are the main authors of that report. We strongly believe that the review misrepresents our report, and we are grateful to the journal for the opportunity to present our own summary of the report in this article.
Why, you might reasonably ask, should you be interested in a report generated for one sub-national jurisdiction in Canada? We believe the answer stems from two unique factors. The first is the resources to which we were given access. Our mandate in the report was twofold: to consider the viability of a basic income in BC; and to ‘look at BC’s existing income and social support system and how elements and principles of a basic income could be used to transform and enhance it’ (Green et al, 2020b: 4). In addition, the panel was mandated to use this information to ‘outline any areas that could be explored further through a basic income pilot’ (Green et al, 2020b: 4) That is, our mandate was very broad and included a fulsome examination of the entire income and support system and consideration of a basic income pilot.
To pursue that mandate, we were given two years, considerable financial resources, and access to rich administrative data. Based on these advantages, we were able to recruit teams of Canadian and international researchers both to examine elements of the existing transfer and support systems in Canada and to assess claims that have been made about the beneficial effects of a basic income (BI). The result is over 40 research papers related to a BI. We also made use of public consultation gathered as part of the BC government’s Poverty Reduction Initiative (see Hertz et al, 2020 for a detailed discussion), had extensive discussions with affected groups, implemented a unique opinion survey (see Johnston et al, 2020 for more details), and carried out simulations of over 1,600 variants of BI policies to assess their combined effects on reducing income poverty and on government finances (Green et al, 2020b). We have made all of this (along with the report itself) available on the BC Basic Income Panel website in the hopes that the research can help in supporting a better understanding of a basic income for both supporters and opponents.1 So, the first answer to why this work might be of interest is that we believe it is one of the most extensive analyses of the impacts of a BI ever assembled.
The second defining feature of our work is its practical nature. Because the work was done to advise a government on reforming an existing system, we framed our analysis in terms of the impact of a BI (or alternative reforms) as they would be implemented in the context of an existing transfer and support system (described in detail in Petit and Tedds, 2020). A key part of our work, for example, was a set of extensive discussions with civil servants in a wide set of BC government ministries that would be affected by a BI and the reforms we set out as alternatives. Those discussions led us to reform our conclusions and recommendations in the light of real implementation issues raised by the civil servants. We also carried out an assessment not just of what a BI in isolation might do, but exactly which parts of the current system it could replace and what complexities would arise from trying to integrate it with the systems that would remain. We believe this feature of our report is also quite unique since most BI proposals and experiments do not address how to get there from where we are now. This is important because one of the main appeals of a BI is its apparent simplicity – what, after all, could be simpler, less invasive, and more respectful than just sending people a cheque through the tax system? But we found that a BI would have to be integrated with existing systems (not because those systems are too hard to change but because a careful assessment reveals that they remain necessary in the presence of a BI) and that doing so is actually a complex endeavour that retains many of the less appealing elements of other types of cash transfers. We should note that the transfer and support system in BC has many elements in common with systems in the UK and Europe (though less so with the US), implying that the practical lessons we drew can potentially resonate in other countries.
Framing
While our mandate explicitly referenced the principle of a BI as a standard of assessment, it also asked us to consider 14 other principles (Government of British Columbia, 2018: 1–2). The result, in our opinion, was not entirely coherent, so we started by establishing an overarching goal which we believe was broad enough not to pre-judge whether a BI or other policies were preferable: the goal of moving Canada toward being a more just society.
We view framing policy discussions in terms of this goal as an important shift relative to what is emphasised in the standard policy analysis framework. In that framework, efficiency and justice are treated as separate entities, allowing for the possibility that policies like BI can be assessed purely on efficiency grounds. But we argue, as do many others, that no such separation is possible – that any tax- or transfer-related policy involves an endorsement of a particular perspective on justice (for example, Bowles and Carlin, 2021; Allen, 2023). Transparent and complete policy making requires being explicit about impacts on justice. Setting the overarching policy evaluation goal as moving toward being a more just society goes further – making it clear that justice is the primary standard of judgement.
Making justice the overarching goal, of course, immediately raises the question of what notion of justice should be used in making that goal concrete. In a diverse, democratic society, choosing one specific definition of justice could generate a feeling of exclusion and, potentially, backlash from people who hold to a different definition. For that reason, we sought a core principle of justice that could both appeal to people with different specific definitions and still have enough content to provide a meaningful basis for evaluating policies. We argue in the report that providing the basis of social and self-respect to everyone in society is such a principle. That principle can be found in liberal theories of justice, including John Rawls’ theory (in which the basis of self-respect is presented as a particularly important social primary good; Rawls, 1971) and the capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen,1999) – with Nussbaum locating it in the notion of affiliation, which implies not only ‘having the social bases of self-respect and nonhumiliation; [and] being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others’, but also ‘being able to live with and toward others’ (Nussbaum, 2011: 34). It is also a central element of the work of Elizabeth Anderson’s goal of democratic equality (Anderson, 1999). But it goes beyond these broadly liberal theories of justice to feminist and communitarian perspectives such as Eva Kittay’s discussions of our social nature inherent in our mutual dependence (Kittay, 2005). It is also found in Indigenous perspectives such as Daniel Turner’s description of the Iroquois Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace as being built around the concepts of respect, reciprocity and renewal (Turner, 2006). Importantly, in all of these accounts, self-respect has an inherently social basis.
To convert this principle into something practical for discussing policies, we derived an analytic framework based around ten goals: adequacy, access, security, responsiveness, opportunity, social connection, public trust, policy stability, reciprocity, and community-building. The first five of these are more directly related to self-respect and the basis of autonomy. But while effective autonomy is certainly based in adequate individual resources, a feeling of both security and opportunity, and support systems that are respectful – it requires something broader. Since humans are inherently social creatures, true autonomy is based in a supportive community and social arrangements that allow us to give and receive social respect. Thus, the second part of the list of goals focuses on elements of policy that support the creation of communities and a basis for supportive social interactions.
Is a BI really less complex?
With these principles and goals in mind, we turn to the question of whether a BI-centred system is an effective way to move towards being a more just society. We interpret a BI as a cash transfer that is universally available to everyone in a society (though, not necessarily universally delivered since there are many negative income tax and refundable tax versions of a BI) and unconditional (especially in the sense of not including work-related requirements such as job search). Every BI proposal violates these conditions in some way (for example, virtually all include some age conditioning and most require income reporting through tax filing) but all involve the spirit of these elements and all are cash transfers – an element that is viewed as important for supporting individual autonomy. We focus on proposals in which most other support systems are replaced with a BI to the extent possible, as opposed to calling every cash transfer, however small, a BI.
A key reason for considering a BI, as we said earlier, is its apparent simplicity. Delivering a cheque to everyone in need could be done through the tax system without requiring people to make what they might perceive as demeaning admissions or to deal with complex bureaucratic systems with conditions that are intrusive and hard to understand. We agree with BI advocates that the current system is problematic in its levels of support, complexity, and failure to treat those in need with sufficient respect. BC has over 190 separate support and transfer programmes delivered by all levels of government (Petit and Tedds, 2020). In our report, we document all of those programmes and ask, in each case, whether it could be replaced by a BI (Green et al, 2020b: 174–289). The answer in almost every case is no for reasons we will return to below. That means a BI would have to be integrated with virtually every existing system, creating new, complex interactions. And even the seemingly simple idea of delivering it through the tax system is not so simple. We estimate that 8 per cent of Canadians do not file taxes in a year (Green et al, 2020a) and, with taxes only assessed annually, people who experience a loss in income won’t be able to register their need for support through the tax system for between 4 and 16 months. Addressing these problems would require creating a system that finds non-filers and works at a sub-annual frequency.2 Thus, it would require creating a system that looks much like existing Income Assistance systems. And, as we show, the ‘welfare wall’ would be just as high or higher than under the current transfer and tax system. There is an iron law of cash transfers that says that if we want to deliver as much money as we can to the poorest among us, we have to reduce the transfers quickly as a person’s income increases – that is, create a welfare wall. A BI does not escape that law. In other words, an actual BI would not be a simpler system, it would be another complex system.
Assessing claims made for a BI
But would a BI, perhaps, be a better complex system? To answer that question, we commissioned studies on a long list of claims that have been made in favour of a BI: that it would reduce health care costs and improve health; increase entrepreneurial activity; allow workers to walk away from bad jobs; and so on. In each case, we found that a BI might have positive effects but there was an alternative, more targeted, policy that was better. A key example of this is found in the goal of helping single adults living in poverty. In Canada, as in some other countries, the group with the highest current levels of income poverty are adults without children (since there is a robust transfer system for families with children) below the retirement age (since the public pension system is also effective). On the surface, a BI seems to be the natural response to help this group. But a close look at who they actually are can alter that perception. About 20 per cent of these adults work more than 40 weeks a year and have earnings that place them just under the poverty line. They are disproportionately racialised women living in cities, working in low-wage jobs with poor conditions. For this group, the most direct help would come from higher minimum wages and more robust enforcement of labour market regulations. While BI proponents sometimes argue that a BI would allow them to walk away from bad jobs, forcing employers to provide better working conditions and wages, a more careful analysis reveals that this is not the case. Under some conditions, employers, knowing that workers have a BI to support them, can end up effectively capturing some of the BI through lowered wages (Green, 2023).
Another 40 per cent of adults living in poverty consist of people living with disabilities. Interestingly, virtually every BI proposal in Canada either explicitly leaves out this group, or just offers them the same benefit as for others and suggests that other reforms will need to be made for them. But this means that what is being proposed is a vague (and more complex) system. In our discussions with people from the community of people living with disabilities, one of their key desires was for a system that supported them in a desire to do market and other kinds of work without losing access to benefits. A negative income tax version of a BI would not fit that bill because it would include a welfare wall without providing effective supports for work. In our report, we provide a detailed discussion of how to reform the disability assistance system in order to make it at least adequate, more accessible, and more respectful – key principles in our list. Proponents of a BI need to address directly how to support this key group among adults living in poverty. Money alone will not do it, and acting as if income and other types of supports can be discussed separately does not realistically address how systems actually interact.
The final 40 per cent of adults living in poverty are people who are moving on and off of Income Assistance. The current system essentially punishes them for taking work because the jobs that are realistically available for them tend to be short-term and low-wage ones. If they take those jobs, they know they will likely to have to reapply for benefits, facing a period without income when they are being assessed. A transfer system that allows them to keep either some or all of their benefits, or that keeps their application open while they are working, would allow them the dignity of work if they want it without punishing them for taking it. This is similar to a BI in nature but it could be created through a relatively straightforward adjustment to the current system without having to create a whole new BI system.
Another key example is found in youth ageing out of foster care. These are among the most vulnerable groups in our society. In BC, these youth make up 2 per cent of their age group but 15 per cent of deaths by age 30, and 20 per cent of Income Assistance receipts at age 20 (Green et al, 2020b). At the time of our report in BC (as in many other jurisdictions), when they reached the age of 19, they were simply sent on their way without supports. Cash supports may be part of what is needed for them but interviews with these youth and the people who work with them often argue that this is not the best approach (Shaffer et al, 2019). What they need is an integrated approach that involves cash support, but also housing and, importantly, the creation of a community that includes adults who will stay in their lives.
Implications for a BI
These examples highlight a few key points about policy making with the aim of providing the basis of self and social respect for all. The first is that poverty is not just about a lack of income. It is about a lack of respect, control of one’s life, and integration with the wider community. A cash-centred approach supports monetary autonomy but ignores the fact that true autonomy is built on a base of community, self-respect, health, and housing. BI proponents, of course, recognise this but leave those other elements for a discussion on another day. A second point is that a BI is a very individualistic and market-centred approach. Such an approach supports autonomy to the extent that competitive markets exist for everything that people need to pursue their goals. There may be no market for supports for a rare disability, for example, or, to the extent that there is, there may be one supplier who effectively has monopoly power. In trying to achieve autonomy from government programmes, this could deliver people to a dependent relationship with a firm.
More philosophically, a cash-centred approach puts the onus of fixing our existing systems, with their embedded structural inequities, on the shoulders of the vulnerable people themselves. That is evident in the example of proponents arguing that a BI allows workers to force employers to create better jobs. This both overestimates the effectiveness of markets and underestimates the impact of using market-based solutions on how our society functions. It purposefully chooses a more individualistic over a more community-oriented society. This may sound funny coming from a group of economists, but we do not believe that the path to the more just society we envision is so firmly through markets.
Thus, in our assessment a BI is an expensive approach that will provide inferior results in terms of moving us toward a more just society and has the very real risk of creating a more individualistic society than we think is compatible with greater justice. To be clear, we believe that we need to spend money to address the problems our society faces. We certainly agree those problems are real. The point is that there are much more effective ways to spend that money than a BI.
In our report, we move from this conclusion to a detailed set of policy proposals. That set includes some targeted cash transfers that one might refer to as forms of BI (including to disabled people, for example). But it emphasises a much broader set of reforms aimed at creating a respectful labour market, supporting communities, and generating broad-based political support. We argue that many of these can be done with (substantial) reforms to existing systems. And we are pleased to see that the government of BC has acted on a number of them and has a detailed plan to continue to move the income support system to be more respectful.
We believe that we share common goals with BI proponents, and we think that some substantial part of what we propose could seem reasonable to them. We view the difference as being that they think that one central cash transfer could address many of society’s problems and that the most effective approach is to get on with delivering that transfer, addressing other issues separately. We believe that those problems are inescapably heterogeneous, so the solutions too are inescapably heterogeneous. The cash element cannot be separated from the other elements and taking an approach in which it is would be a mistake.
Notes
Since the writing of our report, the government of Canada has been investigating mechanisms for automating tax filing and the delivery of benefits and services.
Funding
This article is a summary of work done by the authors as panel members for the British Columbia Expert Panel on Basic Income. The work was funded through a contract with the British Columbia government. Under that contract, the intellectual property rights over all analysis rested with the authors and no restrictions were placed on publication.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge our fellow panel member J. Rhys Kesselman, who has since passed away, Daniel Perrin (who was a major contributor to the analysis and writing in the report), the authors of all of the research reports underlying the panel report, and all the people from affected communities who generously contributed their time in talking with us.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
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