Cash transfers are hardly the only instrument in the toolbox of crisis-fighters, of course. Quantitative easing operations and targeted interventions in healthcare markets have also been deployed, now coupled with large-scale vaccination campaigns. UBI is also not without rivals, from Universal Basic Services to the growing movement for a job guarantee. In an increasingly digital world and an economy reeling from extended lockdowns, however, the idea of a basic income – paid to everyone, continuously and unconditionally – seems built for durability.
The primary drivers of this popularity remain economic. With millions of people under- and unemployed in an increasingly informal economy, a “quantitative easing for the people” appears as a cheap, easy way of providing welfare. Central banks have been furnishing liquidity to their banking sectors for over ten years though quantitative easing programmes. Why could the same generosity not be extended to individuals, too? The US's new treasury secretary Janet Yellen has already announced tax credit payments with central bank assistance.
The Global South arrived at this cash consensus earlier than others. In the aftermath of the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 1990s – which forced countries to repay their IMF loans by pushing through punishing labour market reforms and privatisations – many former developing nations found themselves without adequate state capacity to support their populations. Whether in Brazil, South Africa or India, cash transfers became an attractively simple way of doing welfare in an age of declining institutional capacity. In the 2010s, when Europe seemed to undergo its own structural adjustment process with the austerity packages imposed by the EU after the euro crisis, basic income steadily found its way back to the Old World.
Economics hardly explains everything, however. More than economic necessity, the “new politics of distribution” exemplified by cash transfers – as the anthropologist James Ferguson has termed it – also arises from deeper, structural changes in our democracy. When mass unemployment and recession forced millions into destitution in the 1930s, instead of fighting for free cash, unions and communist parties pushed for the removal of whole areas of our social life from the tyranny of the market, to be handed over to the state or run by workers themselves. The results were visible in public health care, social housing projects, public works programmes and free education across the Western world, later extended by coalitions in the Third World. All of these stipulated a set of concrete human needs, which capitalist economies had failed to provide for.