Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas — Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income
25 published claims from this book.
- Absolute poverty lines replaced relative measures because they avoid confronting inequality.
- Affluent automation anxiety, not scarcity, created the market for basic income.
- Alaskans voted overwhelmingly against funding public goods over citizen dividends
- Basic income is uniquely defined by being monetary rather than in-kind
- Cash transfer strategy shifted blame for poverty from government to individuals
- Decomposition of planning-state coalitions drove welfare’s cashification
- Erosion of agrarian and producerist political languages enabled modern cash transfers
- Foucault held that people love work yet work is not their essence
- Freedom and measured welfare failure are two sides of one policy dial.
- Friedman redefined economics’ goal from welfare maximization to freedom maximization.
- Friedman treated markets as proportional representation for consumer preferences.
- Friedman’s poverty floor was political, not economic, necessity.
- Guaranteed income historically implied work duties tied to citizenship.
- In-kind welfare was favored because it improved worker efficiency and incentives.
- Market liberalization grew Pakistan’s economy yet worsened regional income shares.
- More’s guaranteed provision was paid in kind, not in money
- Most basic income histories anachronistically assume past thinkers shared present questions
- Negotiation is not the goal of morality for the framers
- New Deal Keynesians favored services and full employment over direct cash transfers
- Nixon’s EITC implemented Friedman’s NIT only for workers
- Paine’s grant was a one-off to enable land purchase, not recurring income
- Redefining poverty as a distinct culture justified cash floors over redistributive policy
- Robbins built value-free economics on the irrefutability of interpersonal utility claims.
- Structural adjustment reframed African poverty as a domestic, not global-trade, problem.
- The dollar-a-day standard reduced poverty to market consumption capacity.