If persistence and commendable intentions were the only criteria for deciding on good public policies then a basic income grant proposal would have won the day by now. A fair number of individuals as well as groups like the BIG Coalition subscribe to the view that an income grant will assist the South African poor more than will any other policy instrument of equivalent cost that might be devised.
This paper argues that such a conclusion is wholly premature. It is not supported by research that poses the questions outstanding, and therefore universal grant advocacy presents few answers that bear unambiguously one way or another. At this stage in policy formation we are in the realm of tentative judgement and not evidence-based conclusion. Many people are in favour of redistribution on grounds of social justice, including adherence to the moral basis of human rights for all citizens. But that does not entail commitment to any specific policy action. The basic income grant proposal is an example of “misplaced
concreteness”, in that it opts for one mode of transfer to the poor to the exclusion of all alternative modes. As members of a moral community, what we owe one another is not simply money, “not the means to generic freedom but the social conditions…the rights, institutions, social norms, public goods and private resources that people need to avoid oppression (social exclusion, violence, exploitation, and so forth) and to exercise the capabilities necessary for functioning as equal citizens” (Anderson 2000: 1, italics added).
In accordance with this conception of the poverty problem, a major theme of this paper has been that an investment perspective is essential for clarity of thought about policies of escape by poor individuals. That it is missing from the majority of writings that urge the institution of a basic grant in South Africa is regrettable. We speculated earlier that it might be a consequence of the single- minded concern with the universality of access deemed to be an absolute precondition for any and every increase in resource transfers to the poor. That contrasts markedly with the set of conditionalities that characterised poverty programmes under the old regime, and provided scope for discrimination as the essence of apartheid. Because of black political subordination, a great deal of arbitrariness, inefficiency and personal humiliation accompanied many transfer payments. But this suggestion of an exaggerated reaction against past practice by grant protagonists is a conjecture and no more at this stage of the research.
Whatever the true reason, one consequence is that advocacy arguments blur the distinction between transfers aimed at the relief of poverty and transfers intended to facilitate escape from poverty. Commonplace though it may be, this distinction is the key to clarity of thought about choices between anti-poverty policies. As a thought experiment, if a basic income grant were put in place now, and twenty years down the line the same proportion of the population were judged in relative and absolute terms to be in poverty, would the programme be assessed as having been successful? Consistent with BIG arguments the answer would have to be yes, because there was less deprivation and suffering in the interim period. Yet many other people concerned with poverty would be inclined to say no, because the magnitude of the problem remains just as large as at the commencement of the policy.
A final remark is that untapped altruism amongst the rich is presumed by many basic grant proponents in South Africa. Yet for consistency they need to make the even stronger presumption that the existing solidarity is so robust – there are such surplus reserves of altruism amongst tax-payers – that an income grant policy that raises the tax burden will not erode solidarity. So it is deemed politically feasible in South Africa.
One searches in vain for evidence-based arguments in support of either these premises. They go entirely in the opposite direction to what is judged to be realistic in international discussion of redistribution actions, and thus what is deemed to be feasible in shoring up the welfare state in industrial countries.
There the reciprocity principle is alive and well on both sides of the transfer relationship between payers and receivers. That alone should make us pause when faced with the demand for a universal, unconditional and indefinite payment institution.
We have argued that a move to a grant paid to all citizens – or to the wider class of all inhabitants in line with a recent Constitutional Court ruling confirming access to rights for legally resident foreigners in South Africa – will require a major transformation in social attitudes and economic structure. There is no sign of that likely to come about without social tensions and economic disruption.
But no protagonist of the grant appears to be pursuing the research outlined in this paper to make informed decisions on the range of issues that inhere in the policy they propagate. On the contrary that seems to us an essential pre-requisite for rational decision-making.