Some Leaps Ahead
Reagan, Michael D.
Some Leaps Ahead The Guaranteed Income, edited by Robert Theobald. Doubleday. 233 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Michael D. Reagan TJeing late in writing a review gives one the advantage of knowing what...
...What happens to the structure of political power—or what will have to happen to it—to make the new system work for the benefit of the whole society...
...And this is unlikely for politico-ideological reasons: We still tell ourselves that the market is adequate (with some Keynesian support), and market institutions retain much power...
...One perspective, however, is lacking: the political perspective...
...Reviewed by Michael D. Reagan TJeing late in writing a review gives one the advantage of knowing what some other reviewers' reactions have been to the same book...
...Even if Keyserling is right in asserting that we could maintain full employment longer, we are unlikely (apart from war-induced expenditures) sufficiently to shuck off the bonds of what David Bazelon called "The Paper Economy" to make that possibility a reality...
...I think this quite likely —but the guaranteed income in fullblown form would demand an even greater reshuffling of the political base...
...Are the electoral and party systems we have now up to the larger burdens of democratic goal-setting and economic planning that will be thrust upon us...
...What new structures will be needed to relate individual preferences for different kinds of activity to socially-defined needed tasks...
...an acute "institution-alist" analysis by C. E. Ayres, who sees the guaranteed income as a property equivalent—that is, a form of economic security that will provide a base for individual risk-taking...
...It immediately follows that the politicization of our economy will take a leap forward with this separation of income from market-created jobs...
...What it treats as an economic and psychological problem, however, is at least as much a challenge to our politics and to our political scientists, a group to date not sufficiently involved in the discussions...
...Robert Heilbroner (in The New York Review of Books) accepts the Theobald premise that technological advance will progressively decrease the employable percentage of the population, although he thinks it will be some decades before this means most of us...
...What does not immediately follow are the answers to questions such as these: What kind of a politics is needed or possible if political allocation replaces the market and we retain a society characterized by democratic pluralism...
...The Theobald collection is provocative of thought and should help to acclimatize us to some aspects of the future...
...I agree with Heilbroner...
...Meno Lovenstein's critique of traditional economics...
...It is being widely said that the "maximum feasible participation" clause in the Economic Opportunity Act may produce a revolution in the political structure of the United States...
...Its reason for being is the inadequacy of the market in providing either jobs or income (it should never be forgotten that thirty per cent of those in the poverty category have jobs—at below-poverty wages...
...This, I think, is why the inherent radicalism of the concept is underplayed...
...The Guaranteed Income contains a number of articles that provide a variety of perspectives, including Ben Sel-igman's frightening picture of job losses already attributable to automation...
...Full employment remains the general goal...
...And I rather doubt that existing institutional forms, particularly those for linking the electorate to official policy makers, will prove appropriate for a much broadened base...
...and a good piece by Erich Fromm delineating the positive psychological values we may expect to flow from the provision of guaranteed incomes...
...His main point, however, is that the essayists supporting the guaranteed income fail to grapple with, or even to realize, the truly radical quality of the impact that automation and a guaranteed income will have upon the ability of the market system to distribute jobs and income...
...Do we not need new forms of participation in political decision-making if the new economy is not to become the base for a new elite-slave political system...
...Ironically, then, because we will be slow to accept such transitional steps as vastly and rapidly increased public sector expenditures that would shore up employment, we will instead be pushed into the greater radicalism of the guaranteed income...
...And as we move into that realm, we are simply going to have to find political and administrative solutions to job and income allocation problems, for the guaranteed income concept is fundamentally an anti-market device...
...To Keyserling, the guaranteed income concept makes sense only for those who really cannot be employed, and this he sees as continuing to be a small minority...
...Specifically, the Theobald collection, The Guaranteed Income, has elicited from Leon Keyserling (in The New York Times) a strong assertion that fulfillment of legitimate domestic needs, private and public, could maintain full employment for another fifty years— and that if we include other nations' needs "we have room and to spare" for full employment production "as far ahead as we can see...
Vol. 30 • May 1966 • No. 5
