Income Without Work

June 29, 1964

About three months ago (March 22), a group calling itself the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution (not a gag) came out with a manifesto, which made the front pages, declaring that:

“The traditional link between jobs and incomes is being broken. The economy of abundance can sustain all citizens in comfort and economic security whether or not they engage in what is commonly reckoned as work. . . . We urge, therefore, that society, through its appropriate legal and governmental institutions, undertake an unqualified commitment to provide every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right.”

The manifesto ran to 29 typewritten pages. It carried among its 26 signers such names as W.H. Ferry of the Fund for the Republic, Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist, and Linus Pauling, the ban-the-bomb scientist. It seemed too obviously crackpot, at the time, to be worth serious analysis. But lo! on June 7 the Sunday magazine section of The New York Times carried an article by Michael D. Reagan, one of the manifesto’s signers, seriously explaining why the government should provide, say, $3,000 a year “without question to any jobless applicant.”

So perhaps the proposal is worth a second look.

PERMANENT JOBLESS?

The first thing we may ask is whether there is any reason to accept the revolutionists’ statement of facts. According to them, there is a “cybernation revolution” going on, “brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor.” “A permanent impoverished and jobless class” is being established. “Fewer and fewer people are involved in production of goods and services.”

These statements are based mainly on the fact that “the official rate of unemployment has remained at or above 5.5 percent during the ’60s.” But the triple revolutionists never mention in their 29-page statement that the number of employed persons over the last twelve months, at around 69 million, is at the highest level in our history.

And they treat the unemployed as if they were a static army, though three-quarters of them are unemployed for less than fifteen weeks. Less than 1 percent of the total working force is unemployed for more than six months. This hardly suggests that the “permanent jobless class” is very large, or that “the underlying cause of excessive unemployment” is “cybernation,” or “machines taking over production from men.”

HOW MANY WOULD WORK?

Now about the remedy of a guaranteed income without work. Reagan makes the mistake of going into details that the Ad Hoc Revolutionists wisely slurred over. He would guarantee every family $3,000 a year, but doesn’t think it would cost much. For example, in 1962, 9.3 million families were earning less than $3,000 a year. They earned an average of $1,795. “If they are to be brought above the poverty level, they will need an additional $1,205 per family”—or a total of only $11.2 billion.

I suggest that there may be a few problems. This $1,795 income is an average figure. Many families earned less, others more. But as the $3,000 total is guaranteed anyhow, why still bother to work for their present income? And what about families earning, say, $3,100 a year? They would get nothing from the government. Why work all year for only $100? Wouldn’t they either quit, or demand a basic $3,000? Wouldn’t every family demand a basic $3,000 handout—just as old-age pensions are a flat amount regardless of one’s other income? How many of us would work to support the rest?

To cut the connection between work and income is to cut the connection between production and income. The scheme would lead to diminishing production and universal impoverishment. But it is no accident that the newspapers are beginning to be filled with such utopian schemes and dreams. When President Johnson tells us he can solve the immemorial problem of poverty in his Administration he is going to encourage others to tell us that they can do it overnight.