Affluent automation anxiety, not scarcity, created the market for basic income.

Evidence

Only by the early 1960s, with the spectacular outbreak of the “poverty-issue” following the publication Michael Harrington’s The Other America, would the proposal be seriously considered. Along with rising concerns about the effects of automation, Friedman’s proposal captured the country’s anxious imagination. The very contexts that had led him to drop the idea in the early 1940s were now radically different: to his surprise, his monograph defending the proposal would sell more than a million copies—and nearly every economist of his generation would come to back it in an “age of affluence.” — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets, 138

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Basic income is uniquely defined by being monetary rather than in-kind — Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History…, 52