The world's largest basic income experiment

sidents of a Kenyan village learn they will receive UBI payments from GiveDirectly.

 Oliver Ochanda/Vox

From Vox

Large sections of my brain that could contain useful knowledge are instead filled up with dumb tweets I saw years ago. One of my absolute favorites was someone identifying himself only as “Side Hustle King,” who would ask his followers, “Would you rather get paid $1,000,000 right now or $50 every month for the rest of your life? I’ll take Option B. That’s what passive income is.”

To save you some arithmetic: Unless you plan to live at least another 1,667 years (which is what it would take to make $1 million in $50 monthly increments) and do not care about inflation, Side Hustle King is mistaken. Option A is far better. It’s a case in point that, sometimes, you should take the lump sum, not regular payments.

GiveDirectly, a charitable nonprofit that sends cash directly to low-income households, has identified another such case, one where the answer was a little less obvious. For years now, GiveDirectly has been conducting the world’s largest test of basic income: It is giving around 6,000 people in rural Kenya a little more than $20 a month, every month, starting in 2016 and going until 2028. Tens of thousands more people are getting shorter-term or differently structured payments.

One of the big questions GiveDirectly is trying to answer is how to direct cash to low-income households. “Just give cash” is a fun thing to say, but it elides some important operational details. It matters whether someone gets $20 a month for two years or $480 all at once. Those add up to the same amount of money; this isn’t a Side Hustle King situation. But how you get the money still matters. A certain $20 every month can help you budget and take care of regular expenses, while $480 all at once can give you enough capital to start a business or another big project.

The case for giving all the money upfront

The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group. Suri and Banerjee shared some results on a call with reporters this week.

By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. “You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues” — or profits from small businesses — in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group.

The explanation they arrived at was that the big $500 all at once provided valuable startup capital for new businesses and farms, which the $20 a month group would need to very conscientiously save over time to replicate. “The lump sum group doesn’t have to save,” Suri explains. “They just have the money upfront and can invest it.”

Intriguingly, the results for the long-term monthly group, which will receive about $20 a month for 12 years rather than two, had results that looked more like the lump sum group. The reason, Suri and Banerjee find, is that they used rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). These are institutions that sprout up in small communities, especially in the developing world, where members pay small amounts regularly into a common fund in exchange for the right to withdraw a larger amount every so often.

“It converts the small streams into lump sums,” Suri summarizes. “We see that the long-term arm is actually using ROSCAs. A lot of their UBI is going into ROSCAs to generate these lump sums they can use to invest.”

I visited one of the villages receiving the 12-year UBI back in October 2016, and even then I observed people putting together ROSCAs and making plans to accumulate cash to invest. Edwine Odongo Anyango, a father of two and handyman who was 29 at the time, told me he had formed a ROSCA with 10 friends. “The monthly thing is not bad, but I think a lump sum payment would be better,” he told me. “That way you can do a big project at once.”

But I was surprised by just how often this attitude was reflected in Suri and Banerjee’s data. They found that the smallest increase in consumption — in actual regular spending on things like food and clothing — was in the long-term UBI group, which you might think is the group most able to spend a bit more every month. For the most part, they don’t do that: They invest the money instead.

The advantages of monthly

As you might expect, given how entrepreneurially minded the recipients are, the researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol — two common criticisms of direct cash giving. In fact, so many people who used to work for wages instead started businesses that there was less competition for wage work, and overall wages in villages rose as a result.

And they found one major advantage for monthly payments over lump sum ones, despite the big benefits of lump sum payments for business formation. People who got monthly checks were generally happier and reported better mental health than lump sum recipients. “The lump sum group gets a huge amount of money and has to invest it, and this might cause them some stress,” Suri speculates. In any case, the long-term monthly recipients are happiest of all, and “some of that is because they know it’s going to be there for 12 years ... It provides mental health benefits in a stability sense.”

I think this points to the takeaway from this research not being “just give people a lump sum no matter what.” Ideally, you could ask specific people how they would prefer to get money. For instance, if you were a Kenya politician designing a basic income policy on a permanent basis, you could design it such that a recipient could opt into a $500 payment every two years or a $20 payment every month.

But barring that, long-term monthly payments seem to offer the best of all worlds because they enable people to use ROSCAs to generate lump sum payments when they want them. That enables flexibility: People who want monthly payments can get them, and people who need cash upfront can organize with their peers to get that.

Again and again, actual UBI (universal basic income) recipients have shown that they don't squander their gains on drink and frivolity.  Note how effective even tiny payments are in making a difference: $20/month, as they would be in South Africa.

Traditionally, a UBI in developed countries has been proposed as an alternative to unemployment benefit, the old age pension, child benefit, etc.  The traditional response is that it would be "too expensive", though if it were subject to income tax, which the poor do not pay, I personally don't think it would cost more than a couple of percent of GDP (I did my thesis on the negative income tax in South Africa).  

So perhaps, if we want to fight poverty, just give everybody $100 a month, even if they are already receiving the old age pension or unemployment benefits.  If old age pensions are already high in a country, perhaps they could be partially reduced to offset this.  In this case, a UBI, even of just $100 a month, would benefit the working poor.  And there are too many of those, thanks to neo-liberalism.  The best thing about it is that they wouldn't have to explain to some grumpy bureaucrat with her rule-book why they deserve it.

The Tesla Optimus 1 humanoid robot

 From Tesmanian

Tesla is developing a bipedal humanoid robot called Optimus that will eventually be able to perform a wide range of tasks. According to Elon Musk, the prototype could be completed by the end of 2022, and version 1 could go into production in 2023.

In August 2021, at AI Day, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled a humanoid robot, saying that it would be a general-purpose machine that would perform a wide range of tasks. Ultimately, the robot, named Optimus, will be able to do everything that people do not want to do.

On April 7, during the Giga Texas launch event, Musk said that Tesla could start production of the first version of the robot in 2023. “We have a shot of being in production for version one of Optimus hopefully next year,” he said.

During the 2021 Earnings Call, Tesla Musk tried to explain the importance of the company's new development. He said that in terms of the priority of products, the humanoid robot is the most important product development that Tesla is doing this year. In addition, Musk explained that Optimus has the potential to become more significant than the vehicle business over time.

“So, in terms of priority of products, I think actually the most important product development we're doing this year is actually the Optimus humanoid robot. This, I think, has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time.”

The head of the company also explained the true importance of the new development. According to him, Tesla Bot will become a universal replacement for human labor, since labor is the basis of any economy. The robot will also alleviate the labor shortage due to the significant decline in the birth rate, which will create a problem in the future. In December 2021, at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) board summit, Musk said:

“[Tesla Bot] has the potential to be a generalized substitute for human labor over time. The foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is essentially distilled labor...The fundamental constraint is labor. There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough. There are not enough people. I think one of the biggest risks for civilizations is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate.”

The head of Tesla said that initially, the Tesla bot will likely be used at the company's own facilities. “The first use of the Tesla Bots, Optimus, the Optimus name seems to be sticking at least internally, Optimus Subprime. Like if we can't find a use for it, then we shouldn't expect that others would. So, the first use of the Optimus robots would be, at Tesla, like moving parts around the factory or something like that,” he said.

Musk believes that AI is a potential threat to humanity. With this in mind, the head of Tesla is one of the strictest observers who will control the process of its creation. At the same time, all of us will also be watching this process to make sure it is safe. “As you see Optimus develop, everyone’s going to make sure it’s safe,” Musk said. “No Terminator stuff or that kind of thing.”

This development means that a universal basic income (UBI)/social wage is likely to become even more essential.

A living wage

Populism and anti-vaxxing

From ZME Science:

In recent years, the world has witnessed a string of populist politicians rising to power. Archpopulist Donald Trump served as a lightning rod for most of the discussions but elsewhere in the world, other politicians have used similar approaches to climb into power. Jay Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines are two striking examples, but Europe has had its fair share of populists in recent times.

Perhaps uncoincidentally, Europe is also experiencing its biggest measles outbreaks in over a decade, largely fueled by vaccine reluctance. Researchers suspected a correlation between the two. Populism relies on fueling hate towards experts and the perceived elite, and antivaxxing relies on a similar approach. Lead author Dr. Jonathan Kennedy from Queen Mary University of London, study author, explained:

“It seems likely that scientific populism is driven by similar feelings to political populism, for example, a profound distrust of elites and experts by disenfranchised and marginalised parts of the population.”

“Even where programmes objectively improve the health of targeted populations, they can be viewed with suspicion by communities that do not trust elites and experts. In the case of vaccine hesitancy, distrust is focused on public health experts and pharmaceutical companies that advocate vaccines.”

So along with colleagues, Kennedy analyzed national-level data from 14 European countries, looking at the percentage of people who voted for populist leaders and comparing it to the percentage of people who think vaccines are not important and/or effective.

They found a strong correlation between the two: wherever people would support populists, they would also start to question the effectiveness of vaccines. In this sense, vaccination can serve as a “canary in the coal mine” for future populism. When elected, populist leaders also always tend to push an anti-vaccine agenda. In Italy, the newly elected Five Star Movement (5SM) repeatedly spoke against vaccines — with important results. The Italian Parliament recently passed a law to repeal legislation that makes vaccines compulsory for children enrolling in state schools. Meanwhile, in Italy, MMR vaccination coverage fell from 90% in 2013 to 85% in 2016, a seemingly harmless drop, which resulted in an increase in measles cases from 840 in 2016 to 5000 in 2017.

It seems that the more extreme a party is, the more likely they are to support antivaxxing — regardless of whether they are left or right wing. In Greece, the left-wing SYRIZA government proposed that parents should be able to opt out of vaccinating their children. However, their efforts haven’t been particularly fruitful, as Greek confidence in vaccines has recently been increasing. In France, where several childhood vaccinations have been made mandatory by law, the right-wing Front National have also raised concerns about vaccine safety.

Researchers also note just how much damage a single, blatantly flawed paper can cause. Much of the distrust in vaccinations comes from a paper published by Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield reported that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine can cause autism. This has not only been repeatedly disproved, but it has since been shown that Wakefield knowingly tampered with the data and subjected children to inhumane treatment — and yet, his echo still lives on.

In the US, Donald Trump has also spoken against vaccines. Although his own experts have disproved his claims, a recent survey has found that 1 in 3 Trump supporters believe vaccines and autism are related. Meanwhile, on the plus side, countries like Portugal, Finland, and Belgium seem to have no affinity towards either populist leaders or antivaxxing.

[Read more here]

Neo-liberalism has increased inequality within countries even as it had decreased inequality between countries.  China and India and Brazil and Turkey have go richer, but working class people in developed countries have been left behind.  Neo-liberalism has benefitted the already rich in developed countries, but incomes for the lowest one or two deciles of income have barely risen in real terms, while job security has declined.   But neo-liberalism hasn't just made our societies more unequal.  It has also made them nastier.  I doubt Trump would have won the election if working class per capita incomes hadn't stagnated for 30 years.  And if the working class hadn't come to believe that the Democrats had stopped caring about them.

What can be done about it?  Well, a universal basic income in developed countries would be a huge step to alleviating poverty.  Just as a universal old age pension helped reduce poverty among the old, so a UBI would reduce poverty among the poorest of our society, including the working poor.  A universal free healthcare system makes illness a health problem not a financial disaster like it is in the USA.  There are other steps our societies could take, for example, by making zero hours contracts illegal, but perhaps the biggest step would be the UBI, because it would give the jobless the option not to work for exploitative employers.   Things don't have to be like this.  We can change them.

48% of Americans support a UBI

A UBI is a "universal basic income" (also called  "the social wage" or "negative income tax").  The various proposals differ slightly, but essentially all schemes involve a fortnightly or monthly income from the government, which is given to everybody, but which is "clawed back" for each dollar or pound or euro you earn after that.  The claw back rate suggested is somewhere between 25 and 33.3 percent.  A slightly different proposal is that all income except the UBI be subject to income tax, which amounts to much the same thing as an explicit claw back rate, but is administratively simpler. The UBI would replace unemployment benefit, the old age pension, disability pensions, family income support and other tax credits.  The advantages in switching to a UBI are several:

1. The impact of the "poverty trap" is reduced.  This occurs when any income supplement (for example, the dole) is withdrawn when the recipient earns some income.  It is a powerful disincentive to getting work, especially where the only available work is part time.  In Australia, for example, the effective claw back rate for people on unemployment benefit can reach 80%.
2. A UBI raises income for the working poor, not just the unemployed or old age pensioners.
3. The rules are dramatically simplified, making them easy to understand and administer
4. The large bureaucracy required to administer the dole, the old age pension, etc., can be eliminated.

About half of Americans would support a Universal Basic Income for workers who lose their jobs to artificial intelligence, according to a new survey from Northeastern University and Gallup.

The results, which came from 3,297 adults in the U.S. ages 18 and older, showed that:

• 48% of Americans support a universal basic income program

• 46% of supporters would pay higher personal taxes to support it

• 80% of supporters say companies should pay higher taxes to fund the program

“It represents an enormous increase in support,” Karl Widerquist, an associate professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and an advocate for a Universal Basic Income, told CNBC. “It’s really promising.”

[Read more here]

Support in Europe is also high.  (Interesting--support in countries with existing robust welfare systems is not high.  Presumably they believe that with existing systems, a UBI isn't needed, but in fact the UBI would replace many existing welfare programs.)

Source

The mixed economy

Dallas Freeway, early 1950s

After the war, in the UK, western Europe, Australia, Canada, and even in the USA (though less so) there was a political and economic consensus that a mixed economy was the way forward.  This meant an economy where some of the means of production (for example, natural monopolies such as the electrical grid or railways) was owned by the government, but the rest remained in private hands.  It also meant government intervention in the labour market and in industry.  It was recognised that free markets work well only where there is substantial competition.  In fiscal policy, it was the universal consensus that governments should increase spending and raise their deficits to keep economic growth going when there was a recession.  (They were also supposed to reduce deficits and spending when growth picked up again, but they often didn't.)  This fiscal philosophy was called Keynesian economics after the economist who advocated it, John Maynard Keynes, who studied the Great Depression in depth to see what could be done to avoid future depressions. Keynes demonstrated that slashing government spending to repay loans only worsened the deficit because it caused the economy to contract, which in turn reduced tax revenue.

At the end of previous wars, economic growth would collapse, as war spending stopped and government debts were repaid.  After the second world war, it was widely expected that this would happen again, especially as economies had only recovered from the Great Depression because of government spending on defence.  The allies came out of the war with government debt to GDP ratios of +-200%. But, with the understanding derived from Keynes's analysis, instead of trying to repay these debts by spending cuts and tax increases, they instead aimed to improve that ratio by increasing GDP. World growth boomed. Governments expanded the electricity grid, using borrowed money. They built social housing and schools and motorways. All with borrowed money. Despite all this borrowing, the ratios of debt to GDP fell steadily. Unemployment remained low, living standards rose, inequality diminished. Hundreds of millions of poor people shared in the prosperity that sustained growth brought, and growth was higher because they shared.  The Keynesian mixed economy worked.

At the end of this era there were problems, especially with rising inflation, and the philosophy of neo-liberalism gained popularity. And in the beginning it seemed to be a solution. But as governments shrank, privatisation expanded, and controls over the private sector (especially the finance sector) were eliminated, not only did inequality start to soar but the system itself became more unstable. Recessions became deeper, and recoveries from those recessions slower, culminating in the GFC (global financial crisis), from which the world has only just started to recover, 9 years later.  Since the GFC, trend growth in developed countries has been lower than before the GFC.  Unemployment has fallen only slowly.  Inequality has become stratospheric.

I think the public dimly senses that neo-liberalism isn't working, but doesn't know why. They vote for Trump/Brexit/AfD/One Neuron because the pollies promise that they "will do something". But politicians have no idea what to do either.

What can we do? For a start, we can start funding infrastructure using borrowed money.  Remember that it was a Republican president, Eisenhower, who built the US interstate highway network with borrowed money funded by a tax on petrol.  It added at least 1% per annum to the growth rate of GDP.  What could we do now?  High-speed rail, urban rail and trams; housing for the poorest; replace coal power stations with wind and solar; new schools and hospitals; a fibre optic broadband network; .... As Eisenhower's interstate highways showed, infrastructure spending adds to demand and employment at the same time as it raises the growth capacity of the economy.

We should start a move towards a UBI (universal basic income, or social wage) to increase the incentive to work and to make it possible for the unemployed to get some work, even part-time work, without impoverishing them.  We could make sure companies and the very wealthy pay their share of tax to fund the things that a civilised society needs, things which can't fairly be funded by private enterprise: hospitals, roads, police, schools and universities.

The Right describe this as "far left" and "radical". It seems to me it's centrist and not very different to what we enjoyed for 30 years after the war, when unemployment was low, inequality was low, and growth was high. And I think ordinary people will enthusiastically embrace these changes.

See also:

Neo-liberalism
What would Keynes do?
The basic income

The S-word

In a blog post on the basic income (or social wage), I showed this chart:

What has happened over the last 35 years in the USA is that the incomes of the poorest half of Americans have stagnated or fallen in real terms.  What happened in the 20s and 30s is happening again--hoi polloi are deserting mainstream parties and embracing non-centrist parties, in the US, Trump and his fascist hangers on on the right and Sanders and socialists on the left.

For the first time in decades ordinary people are questioning the whole neo-liberal consensus. In the past, you could assume that the rising tide of economic growth lifted all boats.  It was a simple equation: higher overall GDP growth was tantamount to raising living standards for everybody.  So we should all be in favour of measures which raise growth.  And for a long time we were.  We swallowed measures which added to growth even if they hurt some sectors of the economy because we accepted the underlying premise.  

The problem is that it can no longer be taken as given that growth will benefit everybody, or even more than half the population.  And if rising GDP all accrues to the richest, why should we as a society support all the apparently axiomatic tenets of neo-liberalism: free trade, tax cuts, reductions in government spending, breaking the unions, embracing multinational corporations, slashing unemployment benefit, etc, etc?  Worse: in the OECD, between 1980 and 2007, real GDP growth averaged 2.9% per annum.  Then came the GFC, during which OECD real GDP fell over 5%.  Since the low point in 2009, growth has not returned to its previous trend line.  Not only has there been no rebound, a typical response after previous downturns, but the new growth rate is only 1.8% per annum, not much better than half what it was before the GFC.  And the GFC itself can be blamed on neo-liberalism.  How can neo-liberalism be so great if (a) most of us are no better or actually worse off and (b) overall growth is pretty anaemic too?

One of the puzzles of the US, for outsiders, is why the poor in the USA do not embrace the Left.   Religion plays a part.  The naïve belief in the American dream, even though more than ever, children belong to the same class as their parents.  Plus, the left option they have, the Democrats, isn't particularly left-wing, in fact.  And the Left is now so identified with identity politics.

This interesting article in the Guardian discusses how for the first time in decades, socialism is gaining ground among young people.

At the heart of the ideas flooding into that space is a debate about the role of the state after decades of conservatives painting government as oppressive and a burden keeping good Americans down. 

The campaign over healthcare, the anger sparked by the rapaciousness of big banks bailed out by the taxpayer, and a belief that only the state has the strength to reverse deepening inequality is breathing new life into the old idea that the government is there to control capitalism, rather than capitalism controlling the government.

If that takes hold among a wider group of millennials, it will represent a seismic shift in the way many Americans think about the pre-eminent role of the state and capitalism in their lives.

To an older generation of leftwing activists, that sounds a lot like the New Deal – President Franklin Roosevelt’s bold attempt to remake the American economic system and rein in the forces of capitalism in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Works Progress Administration, which provided jobs to millions made unemployed by economic collapse, was at one time the single largest employer in the country. A raft of legislation addressed pay, working conditions and housing. Roosevelt also introduced banking regulation that stayed in place until the 1990s. Roosevelt saw the reforms as laying the foundations for the kind of social democratic society the US helped build in western Europe after the second world war.

“Young people who say that they’re socialists, or look favourably on socialism, they’re thinking about a kind of New Deal government or democracy against markets,” said Frances Fox Piven, coauthor of a widely debated radical plan in the 1960s to alleviate poverty and create a basic income, and more recently the target of a vilification campaign by Fox News.

“What the New Deal represented was government efforts to regulate an unbridled capitalism and to supplement the distribution of income under markets with government programs.”

Piven, a City University of New York professor, sees a shift in thinking among some younger Americans reflecting a time before politicians conflated democracy with the free market and government with private business.

“The New Deal is the clearest and boldest period in the wake of real collapse in capitalist markets. You could just call it economic democracy,” she said. “What they got right was the imperative of regulating the economy. That development was cut short by the second world war and the urgency with which the government turned to big business to cooperate in the war effort and gave a lot of licence to big business. It stopped the New Deal in its tracks.”

[Read more here]

If those who support neo-liberalism want hoi polloi (the 99%)  to vote for them, they will have to persuade us that neo-liberalism is good and that it will improve our standard of living, not theirs.  So far, they are failing.

The basic income

Although expanding free trade has been good for the world as a whole and for developing countries like China, India, Brazil, Mexico and so on, it has been bad for the working class in developed countries.  Real incomes for the already rich in rich countries have risen.  Real incomes in poor countries have risen too, by as much in percentage terms.  But the bottom half of the income pyramid in developed countries has had virtually no growth.  And these calcs were made before the GFC.  Since then, the real incomes of the bottom 2/3rds of the population in developed countries have stagnated, even as real GDP has risen, and the incomes of the top 3rd/quarter/one tenth have risen, extending the 1988 to 2008 trend.

You can see all this in the graphic  below.

Source

It is these people who voted for Trump, for Brexit, for Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party and will probably vote for right-wing populists in Europe's upcoming elections this year.

Opening up world trade has undoubtedly been good for world growth.  Higher growth in China, India, Brazil, Mexico etc., has lifted billions of people out of abject poverty, and that's a good thing.  But there have been losers, and they are angry.

So how do we make incomes more equal in developed countries, without tearing up trade agreements and without reducing growth rates?

One answer is the social wage or basic income.  I did my thesis on the negative income tax, which is pretty similar to the social wage.  How it works is simple.  The state pays everybody a monthly or fortnightly income.  This replaces the dole (unemployment benefit), the old age pension, disability pensions and family income supplements.  Everybody pays income tax, and income tax starts cutting in at zero income instead of having some tax-free minimum, so that for every dollar/pound/euro earned, the net payment (social wage less tax) declines.  Now in some developed countries, if you are receiving the dole (unemployment benefit)  this "clawback rate" is 100%.  In Australia it is 50%. In some cases, the cumulative loss of benefits can exceed 100% of earned income, and that's before you account for the cost of clothes to work in and transport fares to get to and from work.  This is a massive disincentive to work, especially when a lot of the work available these days is part-time.

Plus you need a whole department to administer the dole, the old age pension, disability benefits and family income support.  The rules of the negative income tax are simple, and most of the complex bureaucracy that is required to determine who is entitled to get support and how much they are entitled to can be eliminated.

How much would it cost?  In the analysis I did in my thesis 40 years ago, to lift all South Africans above the poverty line it would have cost 7% of GDP.  But in developed economies it would cost much less, because they already have a whole panoply of welfare measures, which it would replace.  And most of the analysts who have looked at the social wage reckon that its effect of incentives would actually increase output and incomes so that it paid for itself.

A basic income would be only one tool in the toolbox to reduce developed country inequality.  Others might be: a higher minimum wage, a wealth tax, greater educational equality, and in the USA, a decent public health system.  But a basic income would be a big first step on that road.

Some further reading (and watching)

Why we should give everybody a basic income:





Finland trials plans of basic income for the unemployed.

The basic income

Categorising the poor

An intriguing historical analysis:

The moral beliefs that drove both the harsh treatment of vagrants in the 16th century and the unintended cruelty of the Victorian workhouse system persist to this day.

The idea that “work must pay” encourages politicians to make claiming benefits extremely difficult for the unemployed and – more worryingly – for those who are unable to work due to illness or infirmity, just as in Victorian times, workhouse conditions were made deliberately harsh to discourage people from entering them.

Politicians castigate “generational worklessness”, promoting the idea that a tendency to worklessness is somehow inherited, passed on from parents to children. It was this idea that led to the brutal separation of families in the workhouses.

Above all, there remains a strong belief in the moral virtue of work. Work is indeed important for human dignity, so making it possible for people to work is important: but in what way mind-numbingly boring, pointless and demeaning work is dignifying and virtuous is hard to imagine. Nonetheless, the idea that people should be forced to do basic work to “earn” their benefits – even if their time might be better spent looking for a job that actually uses their skills - is electorally popular. Underlying this lies the unwarranted assumption that all jobs are intrinsically of value and therefore anyone who turns down work because it is poorly paid, socially useless and utterly boring is lazy. It was this idea that led to workhouse inmates being forced to work long hours in dreary, pointless jobs. Today, we impose benefit sanctions on people who turn down the dreary, pointless jobs we assign to them in the name of “work experience”. Giving it a different name doesn't change its nature. It's the workhouse work ethic all over again.

It is perhaps understandable that we feel angry when we see people we think should be working but aren't. And it is also understandable that when times are hard, we resent paying benefits to those we feel don't deserve them. I suppose the anger that we feel towards those we regard as “scroungers” and “shirkers” will never go away. But categorising the poor is not only difficult – it is harmful, not to the shirkers and scroungers, but to the genuinely deserving. And it is also economically damaging for society as a whole.

The Workhouse.  Image via Workhouses.org