Karl Widerquist

How the Sufficiency Minimum Becomes a Social Maximum

This article argues that, under likely empirical conditions, sufficientarianism leads not to an easily achievable duty to maintain a social minimum but to the onerous duty of maintaining a social maximum at the sufficiency level. This happens because sufficientarians ask us to give no weight at all to small benefits for people above the sufficiency level if the alternative is to relieve the suffering of people below it. If we apply this judgment in a world where there are rare diseases and hard-to-prevent accidents that cause people to fall below the sufficiency threshold, all of our discretionary spending will have to be devoted to bringing harder and harder cases up to sufficiency. Nothing will be left for anyone to consume above the sufficiency level.

The Bottom Line in a Basic Income Experiment

A basic income (BI) experiment is worth doing if it focuses on the right question. Some of the problems with the US negative income tax (NIT) experiments of the 1970s stemmed from a focus on the wrong question – focusing on the side effects rather the effects of the policy in question. A European BI experiment should focus on the question of policy effectiveness. The question of policy effectiveness should be formulated as follows: what policy (BI, the current system, or any other alternatives to be tested) produces the greatest increase in welfare for the poor (or the greatest decrease in poverty) per Euro of cost (both in terms of tax cost and efficiency loss)? Effectiveness is not the only important concern in assessing policy alternatives, but it is a critically important concern that anyone who is interested in the issue should consider. BI supporters argue – from theory – that BI is the most efficient and effective way to improve the welfare of the poor. A BI experiment can shed light on whether that theory is correct, and supporters and opponents alike agree that policy effectiveness is an important factor in determining the relative merits of policy alternatives. The US experiments tested NIT, which is no longer the focus of the guaranteed income debate. However, BI does not lend itself to easy testing as

A Dilemma for Libertarianism

Many libertarians make a moral argument that liberty requires the freedom to exercise strong property rights. From this, they argue that no more than a minimal state with sharply limited powers of taxation can be justified. A larger state would supposedly interfere with private property rights and thereby reduce liberty. In response, this article shows how natural rights to property do not entail any particular vision of the state. It demonstrates that the principles of natural property rights support monarchy just as well as they support a capitalist aristocracy. Nothing in the theory of natural property rights rules out government ownership of property or government ownership of the right to tax. Therefore, the natural rights argument does not necessarily imply libertarian limits on the state, but rather the acceptance of whatever state powers and property rights have been in place for a sufficient amount of time. For example, historical property rights in Britain do not imply that private titleholders possess rights that have been subject to interference from the state, as libertarians claim. Instead, they imply that the Queen and her ministers in parliament have a strong claim to at least partial ownership of the whole island of Britain and the property within it. If this argument holds, it poses a serious dilemma for libertarians, forcing them to choose between their account of liberty as the exercise of property rights and their belief that only a minimal state is justifiable.

A Permanent Endowment for the United States

In the opening chapter of this book, Michael W. Howard and I defined the “Alaska model” as a (1) resourced-based (2) permanent endowment (3) used—at least partially—to fund unconditional cash dividends to all citizens or all residents. This chapter focuses on the second feature: the permanent endowment. Extrapolating from Gary Flomenhoft’s estimates for Vermont,1 this chapter argues that the United States can create a permanent resource-based endowment that could finance both a substantial dividend and a significant portion of government spending, perhaps nearly all government spending. Of course, a major jurisdictional issue would appear if the state and the federal governments of the United States were to attempt to create an endowment out of the same resource revenue at the same time. This chapter does not address that issue, but readers should be aware of it.

The Evolution of Equality: Rethinking Variability and Egalitarianism Among Modern Forager Societies

Abstract Using hunter-gatherer societies as a focus, we argue for a heuristic continuum of egalitarian social systems ranging between relatively strong and weak forms. Weak egalitarianism is characterized by an absence of real political hierarchy, and limited differences between individuals in terms of rank, status, wealth, or power, while strongly egalitarian societies are characterized by these with some combination of powerful sharing and leveling norms, extensive formal networks of reciprocity spanning geographical regions, assertive social mechanisms of norm enforcement, and ritual practices designed to alleviate resulting social tensions. While weak forms of egalitarianism may result from some long-recognized properties of mobile foraging societies, such as group membership flexibility and universal access to both means of economic production and the means of coercion, we argue that strong egalitarianism emerged as a social strategy for coping with foraging risk at larger temporal and spatial scales. We conclude with a synthesis of ethnoarchaeological and archaeological approaches in the examination of the prehistory of egalitarianism, as well as a brief consideration of potential evolutionarily implications.

The Piketty Observation against the Institutional Background: How Natural is this Natural Tendency and What Can We Do about it?

Abstract Thomas Piketty’s recent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, provides a great deal of empirical support for the observation that the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the growth rate of the economy as a whole (g); i.e. “r > g”. From this observation, Piketty derives two important insights: entrepreneurs eventually become rentiers, and except during unusual circumstances, inequality tends to rise over time. This paper views Piketty’s observation against the institutional setting that has prevailed over the period of his study and makes two additional observations. First, whether Piketty’s two insights follow from his observation depends not simply on whether r is greater than g, but on whether the difference between the two is greater than the consumption of the capital-owning group. The relative size of capitalists’ consumption and capital income is not obvious, and therefore, more evidence is needed to confirm the connection between Piketty’s observation and his insights. Second, the statement r has been greater than g is more accurate than simply r is greater than g. Whether r continues to exceed g depends crucially on the political and institutional environment in question. Economists tend to view one specific institutional setting, a version of laissez faire, as natural. But there is no natural set of property institutions, and those that have prevailed over the two centuries of Piketty’s observations are extremely favorable to capital owners. Awareness of the flexibility of potential property institutions raises many ethical questions and makes many tools available to address inequality – one of the most obvious being the taxation of rent on capital distributed as a basic income.

Exporting the Alaska Model to Alaska: How Big Could the Permanent Fund Be if the State Really Tried? And Can a Larger Fund Insulate an Oil-Exporter from the End of the Boom?

If we think of the Alaska model as a resource-based or common-asset-based endowment capable of permanently funding a dividend and/or a significant portion of government spending, the combination of the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) and Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) embody this model, but only in a small way. Less than one-fifth of the state of Alaska’s oil revenue has gone into the APF; Alaska captures a much smaller portion of oil rents than many other oil-exporting nations; and Alaska has not attempted to build any kind of endowment out of most other common assets. Therefore, enormous potential exists to export the Alaska model not only abroad but also back to Alaska.

The United States: The Basic Income Guarantee — Past Experience, Current Proposals

The United States might not seem like fertile ground for the basic income guarantee (BIG). It is, after all, the place where “workfare” was born, where “welfare” became a bad word, and where “welfare mothers” became demonized. It might, therefore, be surprising that the world’s first basic income, if only a partial one, was introduced in Alaska in 1982 and has been the most popular programme in the state ever since, continuing to grow in size and in popularity. It might also be surprising that the United States was the first country to have a mainstream national political movement for the basic income guarantee. In the 1970s, the United States came closer than any other industrialized country has so far to introducing a nationwide basic income guarantee, and various incarnations of the proposal continue to be discussed.

Introduction: Success in Alaska

Every year, every Alaskan gets paid. Every man, woman, and child receives a dividend as a joint owner of Alaska’s oil reserves. In 1956, Alaska ratified a constitution recognizing joint ownership of unoccupied land and natural resources. In 1967, North America’s largest oil reserve was discovered in publicly owned areas on Alaska’s North Slope. In 1976, the state government voted to dedicate a small part of its yearly oil revenues to a state investment fund, called the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF). In 1982, the state government voted to distribute part of the returns from that fund as a yearly dividend, called the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), sometimes called “the Alaska Dividend,” to every Alaskan. In 2008, the dividend (plus a onetime supplement of

The Cost of Basic Income: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations

1,200 from that year’s state government budget surplus) reached a high of