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The Basic Income Grant: Poverty, Politics and Policy-making
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5. Some of the politics of the BIG debate
There are three challenges facing the BIG.
BIG as part of the 'Developmental State':
The Developmental State must address issues of assets, services and incomes. In this sense, the BIG is not a panacea that is an alternative to assets and services, but rather an essential income strategy of a Developmental State.
However, some have attempted to distinguish a Developmental State from a so-called Welfare State. In this view the Developmental State is about things and the Welfare State is about giving people money. Part of this misunderstanding of a Developmental State is recent, and is a wilful misunderstanding aimed at undermining the BIG proposal.
However, another part of the misunderstanding stems from past approaches, such as the Social Security White Paper of 1997, which sought to promote the trendy concept of 'Developmental Social Welfare', which has failed miserably. This concept was built around a deep-seated notion of an 'undeserving poor' and promoted ways for the 'able-bodied' to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. This notion bears no relation to the human development policies followed by Developmental States that have actually been successful.
Challenge to existing policy approach:
Consistent with the mistitled Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR), there is a desire to find 'a market strategy', i.e. investor-friendly, to reduce poverty. The experience since 1996 has been that no such strategy can be found.
Nonetheless, what we have seen, and are seeing, is a process of company tax reduction coupled with increased appeals for corporate social responsibility. This is, in a sense, a reversion to the policy approach of the 19th century, altruism of the rich rather than rights administered by the state (and paid for through compulsory taxes). Thus, there has recently been much interaction between the government and business on poverty reduction focused on leveraging corporate social responsibility. Such approaches will probably amount to little more than opportunities for corporate branding.
Challenge to economic policy makers' authority:
Policy approaches do not develop in a vacuum. These approaches are developed by important people (at a political and bureaucratic level), whose careers are heavily invested in them. Thus, by promoting a very different approach to poverty, the BIG challenges the position of these policy-makers as the decisive influence in policy formulation in South Africa.
As a result, we can look forward to two responses. Firstly, a much higher burden of proof will be required for the BIG proposal. BIG will be buried under a mountain of apparently legitimate technical queries - and some blatantly ridiculous, like that of one government economist who opposed BIG because the Committee hadn't studied the effect that BIG may have in increasing domestic violence. The sole purpose of this higher burden of proof would be to act as a veritable barrier to taking the policy further. These would be policy barriers that would not be raised in regard to other policy approaches that serve prevailing interests (such as the recent announcement to expand public works).
Secondly, as happens everywhere else in the world, there will be a natural herd effect on those intellectuals who want to stay on the right side of officialdom. Thus these 'respectable' intellectuals will be lining up to create the required levels of technical noise. And as Joseph Stiglitz said of his former World Bank research teams, if you try hard enough and manipulate the data, you can always find ways to get your research to reflect the official concerns.
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