Social Policy in Ontario

Basic income: social assistance without the stigma

Posted on May 31, 2016 in Social Security Debates

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TheStar.com – Opinion/Commentary – The routine humiliation of the poor, a feature of conditional social assistance systems, melts away with universal basic income
May 30, 2016.   By DAVID CALNITSKY

By now the Mincome experiment is well known. In the 1970s, every resident of Dauphin, a small Manitoba town, was given the option to collect substantial cash payments without work requirements. Economist Evelyn Forget’s findings about Mincome’s positive effects on health and education helped to resuscitate the concept of a basic income in Canada. With basic income pilots on the horizon, it is worth considering new lessons from an old experiment.

One of the most important, but overlooked, virtues of basic income is the absence of social stigma. The routine humiliation of the poor, an enduring feature of highly conditional social assistance systems, melts away in a universally available basic income regime. As one Dauphin participant wrote midway through the experiment, “It trusts the Canadian people and leaves a man or woman, their pride.”

Mincome collected data on an extraordinary range of issues, most of which sat in boxes for decades. I have been digitizing a number of those lost surveys, and I recently reported on findings related to social stigma during the Mincome years.

When you compare people’s views of Mincome to welfare what stands out is that people took ardent, moralistic positions about welfare, but were pragmatic when asked about Mincome.

In fact, the social meaning of Mincome was powerful enough that even participants who opposed welfare on moral grounds and believed strongly in the principle of earning one’s own living felt able to collect government payments without a sense of contradiction.

One person refused welfare, writing, “I feel that [welfare] is more for disabled or people which are too lazy to work. It doesn’t include us, we’re both able and willing to work but can’t get a job due to the low employment rate.” They joined Mincome for pragmatic reasons: they were “short of money.”

The design of our social policies has an important but under-appreciated effect: To increase rather than decrease social cleavages among the country’s poor and working people. If you’re older and need a steady income stream we have one set of policies for you. If you can’t find work, and meet certain criteria, we have another policy. And if you can’t find work, but don’t meet that criteria, we have another still. Together, the policies place recipients on a gradient of deservingness.

There are two main reasons why basic income undercuts social stigma. First, it is automatic: instead of the often degrading and invasive caseworker discretion that characterizes social assistance, a basic income is not unlike the unstigmatizing benefits that come at tax time. To participate you need not stand up and self-identify as poor.

Second, basic income treats typically separated people in a similar manner. It blurs the lines of demarcation between low-wage workers, the disabled, unemployed workers, and social assistance recipients. It blurs the lines between those who cannot find paid employment and those who choose to commit to other activities, education, care-work, or even leisure.

Basic income designs vary, but as a rule, the wider a program’s reach, the less stigmatizing it will be. At the limit, it is impossible to imagine a social program that is both stigmatizing and fully universal.

As more people are folded into a program, quality improves and austerity becomes harder to pull off. Medicare, a program that is both well liked and near-impossible to dismantle, illustrates the case. Social assistance is the opposite: without a powerful political constituency, unfriendly politicians have been able to make eligibility increasingly difficult. This is the logic behind the maxim, “programs for the poor become poor programs.”

Swedish sociologist Walter Korpi called this the paradox of redistribution. Targeting appears to leave more room for generous redistribution, but it in fact makes for frail, and ultimately less redistributive programs. Conversely, the more universal a program, the more resilient it becomes.

This is one of the difficulties with a pilot, as is being proposed in Canada. It won’t benefit from the popularity effect. If we managed to implement a generous basic income its popularity could lock it in place.

All the pilot will have on its side is mere scientific evidence. Had we experimented with Medicare before implementing it, it might have never developed the base of political support that made it robust.

A social policy that destigmatizes, one that erases the bright lines between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor is an end in its own right. The added benefit is that erasing those lines makes for popular and robust programs.

David Calnitsky is a PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

< https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/05/30/basic-income-social-assistance-without-the-stigma.html >

Tags: economy, featured, ideology, participation, poverty, standard of living

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