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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

Preface and acknowledgments Introduction 1. Explanation and dialectics Part I. Philosophy and Economics: 2. Philosophical anthropology 3. Economics 4. Exploitation, freedom and justice Part II. Theory of History: 5. Modes of production 6. Classes 7. Politics and the state 8. Ideologies 9. Capitalism, communism and revolution Conclusion references Index of names index of subjects.

Making Sense of Marx

Buying time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism

Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables is one of several texts that addresses the complex and proliferating humanitarian infrastructure that is increasingly prevalent in regions of the world besieged by violence and displacement, but his work stands out as particularly important and innovative. Agier addresses some of the central questions facing our world today: belonging, personhood, and the ability of those most cut off from political power to speak for themselves and shape their own lives, and he does so in a way that combines passion and keen observation. In doing so, his work should be of interest to a broad range of sociologists who study social inequality and the structures (even those built from the best of intentions) that perpetuate it. In this volume, Agier explores the concept of humanitarian government, the political apparatus set up during emergency situations that takes responsibility for the life and death of individuals no longer protected adequately by a state. For as Agier shows, a refugee camp is far more than a place of shelters and emergency food aid. They are places in which someone decides who gets plastic sheeting and who does not, who receives food rations and for how long, what social programs should be put into place and who should be in charge of them, and what barriers need to be constructed (barbed wired, armed guards, cinderblock walls) to ostensibly protect those inside but also to protect the local population from incursions of these displaced ‘‘undesirables.’’ Further, these ‘‘camps’’ are hardly temporary shelters; many have existed for decades, taking on the appearance of towns and cities with entrepreneurs setting up small businesses and political elites emerging from the post-flight chaos. And yet, the camp is a hybrid social form, taking the shape of something entirely new from what existed before in the lives of its inhabitants, and as Agier convincingly argues, it exists in a state of exception, outside the bounds of the political and social life that humanitarian law and human rights ostensibly guarantee. Agier uses his ethnologist’s eye for culture to analyze observations he made during fieldwork in refugee camps in Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea between 2000-2007, accessing the camps through Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; in English, Doctors Without Borders). His affiliation with MSF gave him a level of flexibility and independence (particularly from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees) that allowed him sufficient time in the camps to not only observe humanitarian government at work but also the response of the refugees under its purview. He combines his observations with detailed histories of different migrations, explaining the historical and geographic paths that led different groups of refugees to the camps that he studied. Agier demonstrates the discursive power that humanitarian organizations have over defining and categorizing the displaced individuals in the camps; defining a person’s status as a refugee leads to acceptance into the camp and the security that brings, but the denial of such status leads to rejection and often deportation back to life-threatening circumstances. Once determined as a refugee, a person’s suffering and vulnerability come to define their place in the camp and the world, with moral hierarchies created around different definitions of vulnerability with different access to resources provided by the humanitarian organization. This process, Agier argues, de-socializes refugees; they lose their individual personhood and either become ahistorical, pitiable masses that the charitable-at-heart seek to keep alive, or potential threats to order and the safety of the non-displaced that must be managed or

Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance

Moral sentiments and material interests: The foundations of cooperation in economic life

This paper examines the impact of a social experiment from the 1970s called the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment (Mincome). I examine Mincome's "saturation" site located in Dauphin, Manitoba, where all town residents were eligible for guaranteed annual income payments for three years. Drawing on archived qualitative participant accounts I show that the design and framing of Mincome led participants to view payments through a pragmatic lens, rather than the moralistic lens through which welfare is viewed. Consistent with prior theory, this paper finds that Mincome participation did not produce social stigma. More broadly, this paper bears on the feasibility of alternative forms of socioeconomic organization through a consideration of the moral aspects of economic policy. The social meaning of Mincome was sufficiently powerful that even participants with particularly negative attitudes toward government assistance felt able to collect Mincome payments without a sense of contradiction. By obscuring the distinctions between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, universalistic income maintenance programs may weaken social stigmatization and strengthen program sustainability.

“More Normal Than Welfare”: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience

This paper examines the impact of a guaranteed annual income experiment from the 1970s called the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment (Mincome). We examine Mincome’s “saturation” site located in Dauphin, Manitoba, where all town residents were eligible for payments. Would people work less if their basic needs were guaranteed outside the market? Never before or since the Dauphin experiment has a rich country tested a guaranteed annual income at the level of an entire town. A community-level experiment accounts for the fact that people make decisions in a social context, not in isolation. Using hitherto unanalyzed data we find an 11.3 percentage point reduction in labor market participation, and nearly 30 percent of that fall can be attributed to “community context” effects. Additionally, we show that withdrawals were driven disproportionately by young and single-headed households. Participants who provide qualitative explanations for work withdrawals typically cite care work, disability and illness, uneven employment opportunities, or educational investment. K E Y W O R D S : Guaranteed Annual Income; Basic Income; Work; Economic Sociology; Poverty; Social Policy. The problem of poverty persists in the world’s wealthiest societies. While its persistence is often attributed to insufficient human capital or weak labor markets, a simpler view was expressed by Paul Samuelson: “The curse of the poor is literally their poverty. Give them more money” (Coyle and This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation [1333623, Calnitsky] and the Institute for Research on Poverty [Calnitsky]. The authors would like to thank David Cuthbert for assistance navigating the Mincome accession at the Library and Archives Canada. Documents referenced are held at Library and Archives Canada (Winnipeg, MB), Department of Health fonds, including the former Department of National Health and Welfare fonds, RG 29, Policy, Planning and Information Branch sous-fonds, Branch Accession Number 2004-01167-X, “Operational Files of Manitoba Basic Annual Income Project (Mincome).” Thanks are also due to Stewart Deyell, Sabrina Kinsella and the production team at Statistics Canada for assistance in data construction, and Erik Olin Wright, Evelyn Forget, Tim Smeeding, Robert Freeland, Christine Schwartz, Jennifer Jarman, Toni Pickard, Roberta Hamilton, Bob Haveman, Wayne Simpson, Harvey Stevens, John Myles, Asher Spencer Dupuy, Edo Navot, Matias Coci~na, Adam Slez, Jeffrey Malecki, Francesco Bova, Muhammad Azim, Barry Eidlin, Markus Gangl, and four anonymous Social Problems reviewers for helpful comments on various drafts. We are grateful for having presented this work at the American Sociological Association, Canadian Sociological Association, Historical Materialism, The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and Social Science History Association conferences, as well as the International Congress of the Basic Income Earth Network. Direct correspondence to: David Calnitsky, Department of Sociology & Community Health Sciences, University of Manitoba, 750 Bannatyne Ave., Winnipeg, MB Canada R3T2N2. E-mail: david.calnitsky@umanitoba.ca. VC The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com 1 Social Problems, 2017, 00, 1–25 doi: 10.1093/socpro/spw040 Article Wildavsky 1986:169). The spirit of Samuelson’s comment is captured by an ambitious and much discussed policy proposal called basic income (BI). The goal of the proposal is to guarantee a basic standard of living to all in the form of cash payments without compulsory work requirements. Basic income, alternately termed guaranteed annual income (GAI), or negative income tax (NIT), partially decouples standards of living from labor market earnings. According to a leading proponent, Philippe Van Parijs, the objective of basic income is to transform the deprivations linked to non-employment and poorly remunerated employment into “real freedom” (1995). Real freedom requires that individuals have not just the abstract liberal right to freedom, but the financial resources to make freedom a lived reality. Furthermore, by securing individuals’ “power to say no” (Widerquist 2013), basic income reduces the vulnerability of poor and working people to exploitative relations in labor markets. While there is a vibrant theoretical literature on the desirability of basic income (see debates in Van Parijs 1992 and Wright 2006), the question of its viability once implemented has not been extensively explored. In particular, the effects of basic income on work are not well understood. In our view, the best way to understand the transformation of a system as complex as the work–income relationship is to observe it directly. Would people work less if their basic needs were guaranteed outside the market? What would happen if a community could achieve genuine economic security in the form of universalistic cash payments? For some (Van Parijs 1995; Widerquist 2013; Wright 2006) the central rationale for basic income—the “power to say no”—is for others, the central concern. That power, critics worry, would facilitate lower labor market participation (Anderson 1978; Kenworthy 2014; Moffitt 1981). Reducing work incentives and weakening economic activity would ultimately undermine the funding of a basic income. These expectations are based typically on economic theory (i.e. Conlisk 1968; Pigou 1948) or individual behavior in micro-experiments (Burtless 1986; Greenberg and Robins 1986; Keeley 1981; Robins 1985; Widerquist 2005) that delink participants from community-wide consequences and social contexts. We analyze the effect of a universally available basic income on labor market participation using never-before-analyzed data from a basic income experiment that took place in a rural town called Dauphin in the Canadian province of Manitoba. The Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment, or Mincome, operated in Dauphin for three years between 1975 and 1977. The exceptional feature of the experiment is its universal availability or “saturation” treatment in Dauphin, though Mincome also included randomized control trial portions with treatment and control participants dispersed across Winnipeg and various Manitoba towns. Both rural dispersed treatments and controls provide useful comparison points for Dauphin. It was the saturation site, however, that was unprecedented. Never before or since the Dauphin experiment has a rich country tested a guaranteed annual income at the level of an entire town. Never before or since has a rich country conducted an experiment in a setting intended to mirror the community-level experience and future administration of a program where the abolition of one family’s poverty coincides with its abolition as such. 1 While GAI was the term of art used in the 1970s, BI is currently in fashion; we use them interchangeably depending on the context. However, key administrative and symbolic differences should not be ignored: while both ensure a minimum income to all, BI is paid to everyone and then partially collected back through taxation, where the GAI/NIT is paid to anyone whose income falls below some threshold. Put differently, the NIT variant functions ex post, after incomes are assessed, where basic income operates ex ante, without prior assessment of incomes. Still, many scholars (Van Parijs 2006; Widerquist 2005) view the NIT variant as nearly equivalent to the BI model for two reasons: 1) the new incentives individuals face are effectively identical in both systems (Harvey 2006); and 2) both systems can achieve the identical post-tax-and-transfer income distribution (Groot 2004). It is also worth noting that although Mincome used the NIT mechanism, it self-identified as a “basic income” experiment. This is consistent with the view that the NIT is one variant of the umbrella category called basic income. 2 Widerquist’s (2013) expression “freedom as the power to say no” requires freedom from certain kinds of “force.” He appeals to G.A. Cohen’s definition of force: “When a person is forced to do something, he has no reasonable or acceptable alternative. He need not have no alternative at all” (Cohen 1988:245). 3 The other objection is normative: It is simply unfair to allow the able-bodied to exploit the labor effort of others (Elster 1986). 2 Calnitsky and Latner

Basic Income in a Small Town: Understanding the Elusive Effects on Work

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"More Normal than Welfare": The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience.

How do firms react when the whole labor force has access to a guaranteed income? One view argues that the guaranteed income is an employer subsidy, facilitating low wages and a ‘low-road’ industrial strategy. The second view suggests that in providing an alternative to work, the guaranteed income tightens labor markets and pulls wages up. This article examines the impact of an understudied social experiment from the late 1970s called the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment, or Mincome. This research focuses on Mincome’s ‘saturation’ site, the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, where all residents were eligible for unconditional payments. Using an archived survey of local firms that inquires into wage rates, applications, hiring, and work hours, I find support for the second view. I close by examining the mechanisms behind the employer subsidy argument and considering the conditions under which a variety of income-support policies might increase or decrease wages, and more broadly, foster compromise or conflict in the labor market.

The employer response to the guaranteed annual income

Would unconditional cash payments reduce crime and violence? This paper examines data on crime and violence in the context of an understudied social experiment from the late 1970s called the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment, or Mincome. We combine town-level crime statistics for all mediumsized Canadian Prairie towns with town-level socio-demographic data from the census to study how an experimental guaranteed income impacted both violent crime and total crime. We find a significant negative relationship between Mincome and both outcomes. We also decompose total crime and analyze its main components, property crime and “other” crime, and find a significant negative relationship between Mincome and property crime. While the impact on property crime is theoretically straightforward, we close by speculating on the mechanisms that might link the availability of guaranteed annual income payments with a decline in violence, focusing in on the mechanisms that impact patterns of domestic violence.

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David Calnitsky

Papers

“More Normal Than Welfare”: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience

Basic Income in a Small Town: Understanding the Elusive Effects on Work

"More Normal than Welfare": The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experience.

The employer response to the guaranteed annual income

The Impact of an Experimental Guaranteed Income on Crime and Violence