 They all realize in the 1930s and 1940s that the age of laissez-faire or the age in which the state cannot be involved in the market is over. They realize that the state needs to be used and it's actually an attempt to use the state to change the market rather than remove the state from it. Now, we've seen many rich stories about how neoliberals are in favor of the state when it comes to questions such as antitrust, when it comes to questions such as competition, when it comes to questions such as democracy. But we've not actually had a proper story about how neoliberals thought about welfare. And this is the story we tried to tell where Hayek and Friedman, even some other neoliberals, have an idea of how you can still keep the welfare state but not make it as decommodifying or not make it as hostile to the market as it was in the mid-century and before. And the basic income or cash transfers are actually their solution to this problem, namely how can we have welfare without the welfare state? And welfare without the welfare state is actually a phrase that was coined by the economist Arthur Kemp, who was the head of the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1960s. He was a close affiliate of Friedman as well. And he asked himself the question, if we are to keep the welfare state, but we want to make it friendly to the market, what solution can we offer to it? Well, the idea is that we can just send people money and when they receive the money, they'll spend it on the market regardless. And in that sense, it keeps some essential aspects of the welfare state. It will still provide security, but it provides a very specific form of security that is distinct from the security people received before. So our conception of basic income has evolved over a very long and ancient period of time. So we can trace ideas of a basic income back to ancient Roman times. We can trace it back to the 16th century in England, and we can trace it back to the 18th century. But many of those ideas don't actually qualify as the basic income we know today. The basic income that is familiar to us today, that is defended by activists and by economists, actually was only born in the 20th century and is the product of a very specific moment in the 1930s and 1940s. Then it's still an idea that only exists in economics seminars. So if you look at people such as Milton Friedman or Jan Tinberg, a very famous economist, there are some of the first to actually come up with a fully fledged idea of a basic income as a cash grant that's paid continuously and that doesn't have a relationship to property most importantly. So if you look at the Roman examples or if you look at the American examples from the 18th century, they all relate to property in some way and that disappears in the 20th century. And an important part of the story is of course the changing conception of economic justice, changing conception of what the state does, a change in conception of how markets should relate to states, and that's really the story of which our basic income today is part. So Milton Friedman comes up with a version of a negative income tax in the 1930s and 1940s, but the idea is still born in a policy sense. It doesn't actually have any uptake either with political movements or with policymakers, but it's only in the 1950s and the 1960s mainly when in the U.S. you have deindustrialization, automation, a new form of unemployment, particularly in black communities that the basic income first acquires political plausibility, that it actually becomes an option. And in that sense we can see that it has an old history, but we also need to be attentive to how it's changed over time. Part of the argument we're making in the book is that it changes profoundly over time, that we need to locate its birth much, much later than we actually tend to do. So it's important to look at the forces that actually grant the basic income its attraction or its plausibility. So as we say in the book it's actually a latecomer in the history of ideas. It didn't exist for such a long period of time. It's only really in the 1950s and 1960s that it becomes a conceivable policy option. And there you can see it as a variety of dryers that give it strength. The first are just brute economic facts. So deindustrialization, the fact that there is neither agriculture or industry to absorb a labor force, so you have a form of unemployment which is quite different from the unemployment people knew before. Then there's the rise of the robots or the fact that more and more people are being replaced by machines, so it's not just deindustrialization but the fact that more and more industry is now automated. And finally it also has intellectual drivers in that there are changes in the economics profession. So the economics profession which usually talks about how a welfare state should function, how markets should function actually begins to conceive of an idea of welfare or how a welfare state should be organized which is much more friendly or much more open to let in markets into the welfare system as such. And once these drivers start to unite in the 50s and 60s, an idea which was confined to economic seminars before actually becomes the object of a mass political movement. And that is one of the most important developments first in the United States and then it migrates to Europe in the 1970s and 1980s when you have an inflationary crisis and unemployment crisis and then it actually goes global in the 1980s and 1990s, mainly in the global south which is experiencing the end of development as they call it and which is going through its own version of a debt crisis or structural adjustment as we call it. Then in the 2000s there's a short pause and it mainly becomes a subject for academics, so mainly academics write about the basic income and there's no mass political activity around it. Then of course after the credit crash of 2008, you again have the issue of unemployment and of debt that flares up. It again acquires an attraction that it didn't have for a couple of years and it mainly sees upstate for example in Silicon Valley or with tech CEOs and with loads of people in the NGO community. And there I think it's very important to keep in mind that it unites people from all across the spectrum in a way that can be quite surprising. So we know that Milton Friedman was one of the first people to invent the idea and then to propagate the idea in the public sphere. But what you have in the 60s already in the US is that you have both people on the new left and people on the new right who converge on the basic income as a way of replacing the older welfare state with a cash version or with a market friendly version. And it's not just to say that it's a sort of neoliberal device that's meant to trick the left. I think all kinds of political movements have their own reason to arrive at the basic income as a solution to the problems they face. And there I think the main distinction that needs to be made is that the basic income as a cash transfer is very different from the classical welfare state we knew from the 20th century which is based on what we call decommodification. So removing certain areas of human life completely from the market. So providing schooling or housing or transport or even work for free without letting the market determine how those sectors function. The basic income differs from that approach to welfare in that it says we leave the market intact so the market and the price system will continue to function. What we want to do is give people a modicum of security and provide welfare for markets rather than welfare outside of markets and thereby accept the necessity of a market as such. And there it is attractive to neoliberals but as I said also to people on the new left who all see a reason that the market now is the best arena or the best place for human freedom to flourish. It's very important to see what makes cash transfers or basic income as a subspecies of cash transfers precisely so attractive and plausible today. The first story is just one of state incapacity. So not state capacity, what can the state do but rather what can't the state do. And a state which has progressively given more and more power to the private sector which doesn't file the same taxes anymore, which doesn't have the same resources which doesn't employ the same number of people but outsources more and more duties and more and more capacities to the private sector actually finds it very difficult to also organize a welfare system. And in that sense cash transfers work because they appeal to a state which has shrunk which has become weaker but which still needs to provide for its population and for example if you have a central bank that still functions and people sometimes today call the US a central bank with a country attached then of course it becomes very attractive to just send out checks to everyone rather than for example building public schools or building public housing which requires an effort on behalf of the state which is much more ambitious. The second part is of course about the growing power of the private sector so if the private sector realizes that if people receive the basic income that they will still have to spend that money on the market they will still have to spend it on private goods that obviously appeals to parts in the business community who think that this is a way of doing welfare that doesn't threaten for example their prerogative over investment and that doesn't menace the idea that they will continue to be in charge. Those are the more economic factors. I think there's also a political I'd say cultural factor is that we live in a society in which so-called individualization or the idea that we can collectively deliberate and talk about needs has become much much more difficult. So we live in a very technologically proficient society we have all kinds of gadgets at our disposal but we have gotten much much worse at politics so we've gotten much worse at collectively talking about what it is that we need, what are the needs we have and if we're not able to articulate and render those needs concrete it becomes very plausible to simply give everyone a sum of money and let them spend it as they like and this is why choice is again the future in that sense. So there are economic factors involved but also cultural factors in that the state has become weaker business has become stronger and people have become more atomized or more disorganized they're not part of the same civil society institutions that they used to be and the welfare system simply changes with it and cash transfers are the complement to that. Our story about basic income as part of a broader story about poverty mainly relates to the question of how the crisis of the welfare state in 1970s so when stagnation and inflation actually start to kick off is characterized by a paradox. So on the one hand people are talking about the crisis of the welfare state but if you look at the actual statistics of welfare expansion and welfare expenditure there's a continuing expansion or a continuing growth in how much the state actually spends on welfare. You see it is not just the United States but also in Europe the welfare state actually grows rather than shrinks in the period of the crisis of the welfare state and there are a lot of really good books on it the argument we want to make is it's not just a question of quantitative growth but it's also a story of qualitative change so the welfare state might become more expensive but the way the welfare state is financed and the way people or states spend on welfare also changes. The basic income shows that even if you spend more money you can spend that money in a very specific way namely not by investing in public works or not by building schools or not by building roads or not by giving people jobs but by simply sending out more and more money individually and letting people use that in the private sector and in that sense it's not a story of the decline of social policy it's not a story of the decline of the welfare state but it's a story of what we call the commercialization of the welfare state so the welfare state becomes progressively more friendly to the market becomes more private than public than it was before and in that sense the welfare state doesn't disappear but simply change and this is also a story about poverty or how we conceive of poverty so in the 19th and in the 20th century poverty was often seen as a lack of access to concrete goods so the poor are people who don't have access to housing who don't have access to jobs who don't have access to healthcare what happens in economics in the 50s and 60s certainly with the neoclassical revolution and also with certain neoliberal strands is that poverty is increasingly conceptualized as what we call exclusively monetary so poverty is not a lack of access to concrete goods but is simply a lack of money the poor lack money if you give them money they're no longer poor but of course a much more abstract conception of poverty than the one that was there before and this of course also changes how poverty activism happens because the poor now can't organize in the sort of thick civil society institutions that were still there in the 20th century and are mainly represented by NGOs or by wealthy philanthropists who have also become increasingly powerful in the last 40 years and it's obvious why they would support something like the basic income because they think that poverty is just a lack of cash just give people money and then the problem will be solved so the reason we call basic income a variant of welfare without the welfare state is that it is not an attempt again to shrink or to deconstruct the welfare state it tries to take the welfare state for granted so if you look at people such as Milton Friedman but even Friedrich Hayek who are part of that neoliberal thought collective they all realize in the 1930s and 1940s that the age of laissez-faire the age in which the state cannot be involved in the market is over they realize that the state needs to be used and it's actually an attempt to use the state to change the market rather than remove the state from it now we've seen many rich stories about how neoliberals are in favor of the state when it comes to questions such as antitrust when it comes to questions such as competition when it comes to questions such as democracy but we've not actually had a proper story about how neoliberals thought about welfare and this is the story we tried to tell where Hayek and Friedman even some other neoliberals have an idea of how you can still keep the welfare state but not make it as decommodifying or not make it as hostile to the market as it was in the mid-century and before and the basic income or cash transfers are actually their solution to this problem namely how can we have welfare without the welfare state and welfare without the welfare state is actually a phrase that was coined by the economist Arthur Kemp of the Montelerin Society in the 1960s it was a close affiliate of Friedman as well and he asked himself the question if we are to keep the welfare state but we want to make it friendly to the market what solution can we offer to it well the idea is that we can just send people money and when they receive the money they'll spend it on the market regardless and in that sense it keeps some essential aspects of the welfare state it will still provide security but it provides a very specific form of security that is distinct from the security people receive before