#1228 David Calnitsky: Basic Income, Poverty, and Socialism

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lobsson. Today I'm joined by Doctor David Kolnitsky. He's an associate professor in the department of sociology at the University of Western Ontario. His research interests include sociological theory, social policy, and poverty, and his empirical work has a. Examine the impact of basic income on the range of outcomes from wages and work to social stigma and gender dynamics, and today we're going to focus mostly on basic income, the impact of poverty on society, socialism, and some other related topics. So Doctor Kalnitsky, welcome to the show. It's a huge pleasure to everyone. Thanks very much. So, let's start with basic income. First of all, what is basic income and is there one single understanding of what basic income is, or do different people have different proposals of what basic income should be like?

01:03 David Calnitsky: Yeah. Uh, SO basic income comes in different guises, um, but generally I like the description that says it's a public policy saying that we should not have a society where people start out with a 0, in their bank account, right? So in a good society, the starting place, uh, ought to be that everyone gets some amount of cash that allows for your basic needs to be met, that shouldn't just be available to Uh, the, the children of the rich, right? You should have it by virtue of your membership, um, in society. Sometimes that, uh, sometimes it refers to a demo grant, uh, that goes to everyone, or a universal basic income, basically a cash transfer at some above poverty level that goes to all citizens, or sometimes it's called a guaranteed annual income or a negative income tax. Uh, DOING it that way, it goes to people as soon as your income falls below some threshold, um, you know, so, but it's, I think, kind of different depending on who's talking, the devil's in the details, right? So, uh, people like Charles Murray want to introduce it, and then get rid of the welfare state, right? He, he, he wants to more effectively blame people for their suffering, right? That's kind of the idea. And so perhaps you can do that if you've already done something. For them. Um, I like the idea as part of a broader socialist package of institutions. I like the idea that it gives, um, people power in labor markets, in particular, um, it gives you a kind of exit option from various sites of domination in your life. Um, IT gives people more substantive freedom, some autonomy to do the things that they want to do.

02:54 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, you touched on, uh, a few things there that I actually also want to address because I mean when it comes to basic income, since, I mean this is something that I, I guess for the most part we haven't had in our societies yet, at least in a more generalized way, uh, many people are a bit skeptical of it and uh there are certain very, I mean, I guess legitimate questions that people. Less so in terms of how it would work, uh, you said there that at least in your mind or in your opinion it should be part of a broader, uh, package of uh socialist measures and so we would still have a welfare state so it wouldn't replace, it wouldn't exist to replace other kinds of help that people and benefits that people could get from the state, right.

03:54 David Calnitsky: Yeah, I mean, so I think it, it works in different ways. I think it might replace some of the cash benefits and consolidate some of the cash benefits, but yeah, you know, my conception of a basic income doesn't have it replacing uh the large parts of the welfare state, but it's a kind of additional piece of the welfare state. Um, THERE are different ways that it works, sort of on, on technical grounds that The demo grant version works in one way, the guaranteed annual income, the negative income tax approach, it works in a slightly different way, you know, there are symbolic differences, I think, in like how it is organized, and, and that is important. Um, BUT I could elaborate on that a bit, but um, yeah.

04:45 Ricardo Lopes: I mean, but how would it be calculated? I mean, the amount that everyone would get, what kinds of needs would it need to fulfill that X amount of money?

04:59 David Calnitsky: So, I mean, the, the actual calculation of the benefit is going to vary, and it varies a lot. There are a bunch of different proposals which with different kinds of numbers. You have a very small version in Alaska that gives people 1000 or 2000 a month, and people will call that a a kind of demo grant. The way a negative income tax, if, if you're interested in the way a negative income tax works is you have some amount that basically everybody gets. Um, AND then if the negative income tax is, say 50%, if the, if the, if the guaranteed income is $20,000 and the negative income tax is 50%, if you earn, say, $6000 on the labor market, you keep that, and then your guaranteed income falls by half, so like by $3000. That leaves you with like the $600 that you earn, um, and then the The, you know, the plus the 170 that's left, and then as your income goes up in the labor market, that that guarantee slowly phases out. That's the kind of guaranteed income version. Um, THE, the Democrat, the, the demo grant version of the universal basic income version, um, gives you the full amount, and then it's kind of collected all, it's all collected back at tax time.

06:17 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Yes, the reason why I asked you earlier if uh we would keep or we should keep the welfare state is that I've heard um very interesting critiques actually from people on the left, even socialists and Marxists. Uh, SAYING that they are skeptical of, uh, basic income because they think it would be, uh, sort of a maneuver for people to sort of get rid of at least some of the social services, the benefits, and the welfare provided by the state itself, and, uh, also they. Also say that uh and and that's a very interesting point I guess that different people have different needs and so I mean if we were to use imagining of course I'm assuming here that we would be using basic income to uh fulfill some of those needs. I mean the same amount wouldn't be enough for everyone. I mean what do you make of those critics?

07:27 David Calnitsky: Yeah, I mean, so I have a separate book that basically says it's pretty hard to get rid of the big pieces of the welfare state, right? Even if you, even if you have some advocates that might want to, I don't see a good mechanism. For actually doing that, right? We haven't really seen social spending. Um, MAYBE I'll talk, we'll talk about this later, but we haven't seen social spending go down over the 150 years of evidence that we've seen. Um, AND so the idea that this program in particular will Lead to a dismantling of the welfare state. I don't, I don't entirely know what the actual argument is, right? You could say any introduction of any welfare, any new program could be, ah, you're just introducing that to get rid of something else, right? I just think empirically, it's kind of hard. Uh, TO get rid of most of the big features of the welfare state, and you, you know, you like it's, it's certainly not the version that I advocate, right? It might be a kind of thing that some people do advocate. Um, ON the needs point, yeah, it is true that people have different kinds of needs, and that's why you probably do want to retain a lot of specialized, uh, welfare services, uh, in particular, and disability, and so on. But it's also true that basic income is specifically geared to the idea that people have different needs, right? Income is useful because you know what your needs are in specific, and they might not be the same as, you know, as other people, which will be kind of true with respect to these big broad, um, public services that are somewhat more homogeneous in terms of how they interpret your interests.

09:16 Ricardo Lopes: So another, uh yeah, another question that people commonly ask about basic income is how would it be funded? I mean, what is your suggestion when it comes to that?

09:30 David Calnitsky: I mean, there are a bunch of different funding models. Blane Kenworthy has um one proposal to increase social spending by something like 10% of GDP, and he gets there through a bunch of different ways. A value added tax can be one way. Um, THERE are different kinds of uh tax instruments, and there, you know, it's gonna depend on how expensive the program is, right? So, you're gonna need to get to a really high number if you have a universal basic income. And then you'll, you'll, you'll pay for it through clawbacks in the income tax, and through a bunch of different tax mechanisms. If you have a negative income tax, or if you have a guaranteed income tax, the amount is going to be a lot less. It's not, it's not going to be that, so in some of the estimates, the amount will be closer to 3% of GDP, and how you get there, I think there are a few different, um. There are a few different possible ways to, to, to get there, but they're all, I think, kind of standard tax system methods.

10:37 Ricardo Lopes: But are there in calculating the amount, are there any specific aspects of people's lives that, uh, should be covered by it? Like, for example, I know housing, food, basic hygiene, uh. Electricity, or I, I mean, how do you arrive at the amount? What should it cover

11:01 David Calnitsky: exactly? I think it's, I think it's hard to, for me, it's hard to come to a specific number. I don't think it should replace, you know, public housing programs and so on. Um, I think the way that it actually gets implemented is it starts at some small level. And people like it, and it slowly ratchets up from there, as long as it is popular, which I suspect these kinds of programs will be, rather than having some criteria, aha, we need it to cover X, Y, Z, um, things in in advance.

11:38 Ricardo Lopes: And so, uh, in this case a basic income, uh, would be given to everyone regardless of their employment status and whether they are actively seeking a job. Or not, how, or how would it work exactly? Yeah, so

11:58 David Calnitsky: that depends on the system. I think, you know, that I do think that the somewhat more viable version is a kind of guaranteed annual income, and that goes down as your labor market income goes up. Um, THE, but the other version is you start with a relatively small demo grant that's closer to the kind of, uh, Alaska version, um, and that slowly ticks up.

12:25 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, WHAT would happen if, uh, we guarantee the decent standard of living to all citizens? I mean, what, what should we expect from that?

12:38 David Calnitsky: Yeah, so I think this is generally a tough question to answer. Uh, THERE'S been a number of small, medium sized randomized control trials that try to give us a, a kind of sense of the answer. There have been some similar programs, uh, or similar-ish programs that get instituted in a non-experimental setting. So in the experiments, usually you have a treatment and a control group. The treatment gets the income, it's a person or it's a family. The controls do not, where there's a participation fee. And then you look at the treatments and control before and after, or before and during the income. Um AND then, you know, in terms of what would happen, there's just a bunch of different possible questions to ask. Uh THE classic question that they started asking in the 70s is just, you know, Will people goof off or not, right? Will they stop working? Other people don't really care about this behavioral question, um, because they mainly just want to mechanically reduce poverty. Um, SO there's this interesting debate recently in the argument where Kelsey Piper is summarizing. Um, SOME of these causal effects, what happens to stress, what happens to mental health, physical health, child development. Um, AND she notes that like you don't see a significant results, um, on, on, on those particular variables, and Matt Brunig has a response where he basically says, forget about these causal effects. Um, YOU should just look mechanically at how much poverty falls, um, when you give people. You don't have to worry that this or that variable ticks up or down by 10%, you know, who cares if there's like an improvement in physical health? That's not what it's supposed to do. We're just trying to get income to people. Um, AND in defense of Piper, I would say that, you know, the basic income debate in recent years has just been all about these causal effects. Um, YOU know, proponents will describe it as a panacea. It generates all these amazing things when you give, uh, people money, um. In the 1970s, the original sort of debate about basic income, it was a bit of both, right? The, the, they were basically like, OK, we want to reduce poverty mechanically. That's the goal. We just have to check some behavioral effects. We just have to check that, you know, uh, not that we're going to get these incredible effects on a bunch of different variables, we just want to make sure the labor market doesn't collapse. Um, AND so on. So what would happen, I think, just kind of I think it, so I think it maybe to elaborate a bit more, I, I, I think it depends um on the question, and I would also just say, I think that there's a limited amount that we can learn from these randomized control trials. Um, I've written a lot about how they don't quite ask the question that we're interested in, I think, right? They give cash transfers to like a handful of people in a context where most other people. GET nothing at all, um, which is very different from a, a real world of basic income, right? Where everyone potentially could get it. That's how it would be implemented, right? And in the real world, for example, employers would notice if the whole workforce, you know, got a basic income, right? So workers might Work a bit less. Firms might pull wages back up in response, that could then bring people back in, right? Or people might work less at at higher wages. None of that, you can't see any of that in the randomized controlled trial set up, um. You have a bunch of other real world effects that that I think are ignored too, so people might copy each other, right? If your friend drops out of the labor market, you might too, um, dropping out might be more appealing if others are doing it, right? Those are, those are different kinds of effects that are that are ignored. I mean, the, the question of the macro questions are sort of ignored the impact of on collective action, if it, if there is an impact. It is, it's ignored, right? You can potentially use basic income as a strike fund, right? That's not going to be included, or you could have like things, you know, if, if some people work less, the underemployed might work more. Um, ALL of these changes or social norm changes, you know, insofar as you think society and social interaction matters, um. Then, you know, that stuff I think is worth studying. There's an idea that the, the randomized control trial, you know, because it's the gold standard in medicine, it, it must be the gold standard in general, um, but I think that there are some drawbacks, um, if you're, if you're looking at social systems.

17:51 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, I, I mean this is, uh, I guess not as much, uh, an economics argument. I mean, perhaps it, it also is, uh, I'm not sure, but. Um, WE hear very commonly for, from people in general, I mean, sometimes there's

18:09 David Calnitsky: news about,

18:10 Ricardo Lopes: there's a piece of news on basic income that got tested here or there, and, uh, sometimes people react to that news saying something like, oh yeah, but uh, I don't like the idea of basic income because if we implemented basic income, there would be many people that would. Just drop out of work and then it would be people who would be working, paying their taxes to support people who would be, I mean, perennially unemployed and so it's basically an argument, it's more of a philosophical argument I guess based on the fairness or something like that. So I mean, what do you reply to that kind of argument that people make?

19:02 David Calnitsky: I mean, I think this is a problem with how the experiments get set up. Uh, YOU just don't see shot calling in advance, right? You don't see, um, people say, ahead of the experiment, this is, this we think would be a fine outcome. And this we think would be uh considered good enough, right? So people don't say, you know, if work falls by labor supply, or even labor force participation, if it falls by 5%, that's fine, that's a success, right? We want to give people freedom, and that's not such a bad thing if work falls a little bit. Instead, what happens is after there's an experiment, uh, it just gets Interpreted in a bunch of different ways. So one camp will see some small fall in work, and they'll call it a success, and another will see the same evidence, and they'll call it a failure. Um, THE same, this, the same is true for some of the experiments in the 70s that I'm more familiar with, um, especially with respect to separation and divorce. Uh, SO, in those, uh, in those experiments, I mean, you had, I think it's a somewhat different context, but you will often have a kind of baseline of some potentially bad relationships, and then you might have had some separation. After, um, after you introduce the, the basic income, right, you can potentially move out and collect a basic income as a single person household. Um, SO I don't think that those splits are inherently bad, but others might. So Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, who is, um, was a, was a well known advocate in the 70s of um basic income, he saw some uh effects of Uh, of divorce and separation, and he read that as, you know, this decisive blow, um, against the idea, and then, um, became an opponent. Um, I just, I think a lot is going to depend on what you value, um,

21:12 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, mhm. Yeah, because in that case, I mean, if we're talking about divorce, one way of looking at it is that people who would be in, uh, bad relationships and bad marriages would have a better economic opportunity to just live, right? I mean, that, that's a, that's a positive way of looking at it,

21:36 David Calnitsky: right? Yeah, I work on that topic, yeah.

21:39 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so, but look, what have we learned from uh experiments done in recent years across the world on basic income?

21:51 David Calnitsky: Yeah, so, I mean, despite what I've said about These randomized control trials, I do think that some are, you know, I think that they have been very high quality, these, these recent experiments. There's a recent experiment in Compton, California, and RCT, uh, and found very few significant effects on a range of outcomes. I think that should be taken seriously, um, and at least the basic income advocates that really care about a lot of those specific effects might be. I'm worried. Um, ON the other hand, I, I do think that we, um, should consider the limits of randomized control trials. I think what I would like to see more of is a kind of, is the sort of saturation site experiment that that I studied in um my PhD. So my PhD work is on this experiment where a whole town, Dauphin, Manitoba has access to a basic income. It's not just the kind of The way that they do it now, um, and the way that they did it did it then, um, it's not just you a handful of people scattered in an ordinary labor market. When the whole town has access to a basic income, it's a bit closer. You can capture the direct and the indirect, um, effects, and I think you can learn a bit more. It's a bit closer to the kind of general equilibrium. Um, EFFECTS. It's, I think the Dauphin, Manitoba case, the Mincom case is still the only example of a saturation experiment, at least in a, in a rich country. Um, THAT is, you know, that comes a bit closer to how it might look. In, in that case, the Mincom case, you have about 10,000 people, um, who in principle could, um, access basic income. My own papers look at a bunch of different Things, labor force participation, wages, crime, violence, um, some other topics, yeah.

23:49 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I'm going to ask you about the outcomes, but I mean, have we ever had um any government uh trying or doing an experiment on basic income on the level of the entire country? Has that ever happened?

24:07 David Calnitsky: No, not really. You don't, you don't quite have that. You've got. Uh, YOU'VE got A case like Dauphin, where you have a whole town, you have programs that are similar-ish in some ways, you know, programs directed to older people, for example, programs that are income transfers, but have some conditionality associated with them. But no, you don't have a uh a full throated basic income implemented in certainly in in a in a rich country. Um, AND so, You know, I think advocates have to be humble with respect to what you can know.

24:48 Ricardo Lopes: And and do you think that it would be harder to move from the local to the country level in terms of implementing basic income?

25:00 David Calnitsky: In terms of generalizing, do you mean in terms of,

25:03 Ricardo Lopes: yes, yes.

25:04 David Calnitsky: Yeah, I mean, I, I do, that's a problem too. I mean this is a standard problem with any kind of experiments. Can you generalize? Do you have external validity, right? In my case, there's, there's tons of problems. It's a Town in the 1970s. It's a rural town. There's lots of differences, um, obviously, but I do think that those kinds of experiments that attempt to capture social interaction effects are the ones that are going to be closer to the kind of national level effects.

25:36 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. And what have been the outcomes of a recent experiments on basic income?

25:45 David Calnitsky: So, you know, I, I, as I've said, with basic income, you can study anything, um, and people do, and I have too, the sort of causal or behavioral effects, they just run the gamut. Basic income is said to improve a whole slew of, uh, things, you know, or you could just look, does it mechanically reduce poverty? Does it, um, um, impact inequality, and so on. Um, I have papers on wages and work, for example, um,

26:17 Ricardo Lopes: so I, so, so tell us about that then.

26:20 David Calnitsky: So I have a paper with, uh, John Latner. We find in the Dauphin case a labor force participation decline. Um, IN the treatment town, um, but I also have a couple papers that ask about what people were up to when they dropped out of work. Um, SOME people suggest that they drop out for reasons related to education. Others for care work, others say they dropped out because of work conditions. Um, SOME people do seem to say they just did not want to work. Um, IN one paper we find that, and then I have a separate paper on wages, uh, which comes from a business survey, a survey of businesses, um. In the town, and in then in control towns before and then during the experiment, and there, um I find that wages were pulled up. So, uh, there's this whole literature that asks whether basic income is really just an employer subsidy. Does it just let firms lower wages, um, but at least here it looks like it's not the case. Firms did not like it. They thought it made workers too choosy. It, uh, forced wages up, um, on new hires. So, um, that's the, that's at least the, the outcome in, in this specific context.

27:47 Ricardo Lopes: And when it comes to the aspect you also mentioned about just mechanically reducing poverty and inequality, do we have good enough data on that?

28:01 David Calnitsky: Well, it, it, it depends on the study that you look at. I don't, I don't have any. Um, I don't have, uh, any analysis in mind that looks at the impact on inequality in the Minum case, but you see a virtual decline, like decline of poverty to zero, almost mechanically happening. I, I think to some extent there's no analysis, uh, needed, right? You, in the, in the case of, um, in the case of, uh, Dauphin, you do have this sort of automatic effect, where anyone who falls below some kind of threshold um is able to access income, so income poverty will decline, um.

28:54 Ricardo Lopes: So, um, do you think that basic income can contribute to building social solidarity in any way?

29:04 David Calnitsky: Yeah, so this is, I think this is controversial, and again, I don't know how it would go. Um, I don't think people should be confident on this question, but I did find that in the Mincom case, people saw it as non-stigmatizing, right? You just don't have the same bright line between people getting some support, some government support, and then everyone else, right? People in so this paper is more qualitative, and people would talk about welfare. As something for the poor, for lazy people. But then they would, these are people who are on Min income, they would say, you know, they would see Minum as practical, right? They would say they would never ask for welfare because they're not lazy, but they joined Mincom because it was helpful. Um, AND so, that's just part of the way that universal programs can potentially blur lines between Uh, people where categorical problem, where, where categorical programs can make differences more salient, um, but on the, on the other hand, I think there are worries legitimate in my view, that basic income could undermine, uh, solidarity, um, because people just might be able to get by on their own, right? Or they might be able to bargain with a, with an employer on their own, so they might not need unions as much. That's a worry. Um, YOU could reply to that, um, by saying that, well, basic income might also make you less likely to defect from collective action. You're less desperate, you're less likely to, you know, be a scab, and so on. Um, AND then another position is that basic income could operate as, you know, as a strike fund, could foster solidarity in that way, and some business groups in the 70s did notice that effect. Um, THIS is, this was the complaint from the National Association of Manufacturers, when they were debating, uh, Nixon's family assistance plan. So I think there are arguments, um, running in both directions, um, but I would say even if you do get somewhat less solidarity, or if you get less cooperation, I'm not sure that's an argument in favor of reducing people's resources, um. I say in one of my papers that, you know, it's possible that the net effect um makes people somewhat less solidaristic. We don't know. It could also be true if we discovered the Garden of Eden one day that people would become less solidaristic, but that's not, you know, a good argument in favor of destroying it, I think, um.

31:42 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, I think you've also done work on the potential impact that basic income can have on gender dynamics. Uh, Tell us about that.

31:54 David Calnitsky: Yeah, um, so there are a few different ways I think basic income can impact, um, gender dynamics. In the Dauphin case, I found declines in violent crime, much of which is domestic violence. I have a couple papers on this with Pilar Gelon's ponds, um. Of course, there's also totally separate topic. There's this worry just that um basic income could cut against gender equality if women work disproportionately less. In my own data, we can't really tell if that happened, but it looks like in the 70s experiments, um women did work. Or reduce work more than uh men, so the effect is possible. I think it would be less likely to be true today, and there's gonna obviously be an interaction with child care um policy, but, you know, I think, again, there's a similar kind of question to ask from before. Even if it is true that some people, that some women work less, um, you have to ask, is that a good reason to take The money away from them, right? So if you give people more freedom, sometimes you won't like their choices, um, but is that a good, uh, reason to impose more restrictions on them, right? Is, is it bad if a female, uh, Walmart worker who wants to quit is able to? I'm not so sure. Um, I could talk a bit more about the domestic violence, um, stuff too, but I'll, I'll let you.

33:31 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, NO, yeah, tell us also about that, about the domestic impact, the impact on domestic violence, if any, yeah.

33:39 David Calnitsky: Right, so we find this effect, and then we're, we're trying to sort of theorize about it and look for evidence in, in a separate paper. 11 theory about why domestic violence might decline, says it's financial stress. Um, SO insofar as financial stress increases the likelihood of conflict and violence. And insofar as income reduces financial stress, you might have a reduction in domestic violence. Um, A second possible mechanism suggests that basic income might mean that women who are in bad or potentially abusive relationships, they have more of an opportunity to leave, potentially just reducing actual exposure. Uh, TO, to violence, you know, you could move out and collect payments on your own. Um, AND third, it could be that women don't actually have to move out. But basic income could impact the balance of power inside of a relationship. It could make the threat of exit more credible, um, and I think that reflects a kind of, uh, feminist intuition that domestic violence is rooted in these power inequalities. Um, AND so we have this survey data, and mainly we find support for the first mechanism, um. That, you know, it appears to be that income reduces some financial stress, and then reduces um conflict. Um, BUT there is also a, maybe I should say there's a separate finding in that paper where we compare couples. At the baseline who were high disagreement couples, and then those at the baseline who were low disagreement, um, and when you're asking everybody on average about sort of talk of divorce and talk of separation, you, you see no effect. But then when you just look at the bad relationships, you do see that um there's more talk of divorce once that group gets um income. And then when you look just at the good relationships, The good relationship couples, the sort of low disagreement couples, there's somewhat less talk about divorce. So it could be that there's an interaction. It could be that basic income strengthens uh decent couples, but sort of undermines bad couples, perhaps.

36:05 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, SINCE we're talking about gender dynamics, it, it just came to my mind that, uh, even, uh, we have data for, for, for this, uh, that even in the most gender equal countries like the Scandinavian countries, it's still true that women do most of the house. Work and many times people on the left talk about how we should um value this kind of non-remunerated work that people do at home particularly do you think that a basic income could also help with that?

36:41 David Calnitsky: Yeah, I mean the sort of old version of this argument is wages for housework, which seems to my mind to be a kind of bad idea. You, you are sort of like making the assumption and insisting by making the program categorical that Women are doing domestic work. I think it could be the case that people make the choices, uh, that they make, um, but I, I wouldn't, I think I wouldn't be in favor of that kind of a categorical. Program. I would also say that it's true that you see those, uh, those gaps in domestic labor, but from the data that I've seen, you also see a closing of those gaps on most, certainly on childcare. Um, ON a range of domestic, uh, labor fronts, there's some things like laundry, I feel like have been, um, have moved the least, but a lot of other, uh, gender gaps in terms of domestic labor have closed to, to some extent, um. Over the, you know, over the past 40 years.

37:52 Ricardo Lopes: So because basic income, as you said, there's a lot to do with trying to reduce poverty, what effects does poverty have on people's lives?

38:06 David Calnitsky: Right, so I mean, this is, uh, I feel like there, this is such a, that's a very big question, and I, I kind of don't know how to Begin to answer uh a question about the effect of, of poverty on people's lives. Like I, I have a paper on structural and individualist views, and we do talk about some behavioral effects of poverty, um, so we can think about the effects of poverty on work. There's a book called Scarcity that specifically focuses on the causal effects of poverty. I like this book by Charles Creli, um, who talks a lot about the impact of poverty on work, um, the, the ways in which poverty makes it rational to work somewhat. Uh, LESS, which is sort of runs contrary to the expectation that you get from standard, you know, diminishing marginal utility from neoclassical economics, which suggests that, you know, the first, uh, dollar is the most valuable dollar, so the, the poorest among us should work the most, and so on, and Creli has this interesting, um, Argument why that why why that might not be the case, um, but yeah, I'm, I'm sort of focused in that paper more on how to think about, um, Poverty from an individualist versus a structural point of view.

39:32 Ricardo Lopes: Oh, OK, so then tell us about that. What, what are individualist and structural explanations of poverty, and what are the differences between them?

39:44 David Calnitsky: Right, so I should say that most the way that I set up this paper is, I emphasize that basically most poverty research um in the United States is highly individualist and it's kind of methodological strategy. So even when it's more liberal, uh, I think this is true, and in part this is because researchers, the way that they study the world, they American poverty researchers in particular, they typically study only the US and they do so at the micro level using micro level data of either individuals or households. So they'll find an American data set, they'll find attributes of individuals and households. You know, you'll be able to determine at the individual or at the household level, single motherhood or education level, or you'll find some variable that tells you something about grit or whatever it is. But even in this kind of program, you could think about class background that attaches to an individual parent's income and so on, um, and then they might discover. In regression analysis, that single motherhood, say, is linked to poverty status, and then they conclude, I think in that research, um, they conclude that single motherhood therefore causes poverty, and I'm in this in the paper, I'm trying to sort of emphasize how that ignores a structure, um, how, how structure can generate the causal link that you're completely ignoring. Um, THE way that I, I try to describe structure with a bunch of simple examples in that paper, I'm, I take an analogy from this philosopher Harold Kincaid. Um, WHICH I can elaborate. Um, HE, he basically says, OK, if you want to think about structure, this is an example. He says, imagine a bunch of dogs in a pen, some are big, some are small, some have grit, others have less grit, and so on. And then someone dumps a bag of bones into the pen, and then there's a fight. And after the fight, there's eventually you get dog poverty, right? Some have more, others end up with less, and that dog poverty can then be explained in the individualist mode by the attributes of the dog, right? We, we learn when if we have the data on them, we learned that some have grit. Others don't, and so on. And the structuralist says, no, what you're missing is an account of the bag, or the bones in the bag, right? If you have a bag with more bones than dogs, you're not going to end up with dog poverty. OK, so he says, and I, I think like the sort of structuralist says, well, what explains poverty? It could be, we could still use individual attributes in part to tell us who falls where, um. But those individual attributes do not add up to a separate account of the distribution itself, right, of the bones in the bag, um, and, and likewise, it could be true that single motherhood might explain poverty when you take for granted the structure of, of America, right? Uh, BUT in other countries that might not. Right? Perhaps that's just because you have less poverty, or no poverty at all, or the link is absent, given how the structure in that country organizes the allocation of income, um, and you just can't see that if you're only looking inside it at like, let's say American data, um, it's the kind of thing that starts to come into view when, for example, you look across national analysis, um. But just looking at the American uh context and micro level data takes structure for granted. That's the kind of arguments I'm trying to make.

43:40 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, AND even in the United States, I mean, because I know that these arguments surrounding single parent or single mother households is, uh, very, is used a lot, particularly by conservatives, people on the right who are particularly when they want to apply it to, um, black communities because. I, I mean, at least as far as I know, if I'm wrong, please correct me, but it seems that there are more, uh, single mothers raising kids among, uh, black communities than among white communities, but, uh, but then they use that to argue that to or to make a racist argument that it has to do with their culture, with, uh, black culture. Culture and not with anything related to structure. I mean, is there, um, is there good enough evidence to support such an argument?

44:44 David Calnitsky: Well, yeah, I mean that's kind of the argument that I'm trying to criticize. Um, YOU get to those conclusions that lead to aha, we can blame individuals for their action, for their culture, for their laziness, and so on. Um, WHATEVER, however, you sort of conclude the argument, the point by, by emphasizing sort of structure in, in this case is that you're, you're taking for granted your conclusions. You're, you're, you're rather assuming your conclusions, and that can be true even when you have a sort of strong, and I think, you know, and perfectly well designed uh study. A regression analysis that links one attribute to another attribute. It's just that you're ignoring, um, by fiat, by the design, um, sort of broader, uh, causal factors. Um, THAT'S kind of the, the, the point.

45:40 Ricardo Lopes: Right. So let's talk about socialism then. First of all, what is socialism? I guess that at least we, we here in Europe uh are at least a little bit more familiar with certain types of socialism, the like social democracy, but, uh, what is socialism? I mean, how would you define it?

46:05 David Calnitsky: Yeah, well, I mean the, so the traditional Marxist way. Of defining socialism is, you know, it's the mirror opposite of capitalism on all fronts. Um, I don't think that is, uh, the right way to think about it, but I do think you want to start with capitalism, um, and so I, I like a definition of Capitalism. I like to use the definition of capitalism and then see sort of how socialism violates some part of um the definition. So I like a definition of capitalism that gives you a system of three parts. You have capitalist class structures, a labor market, a goods market. The capitalist class structure basically says means of production, the physical inputs that generate value. Uh, YOU know, machinery, tools, offices, stores, and so on. These are privately owned and controlled, so you have owners and non-owners of productive assets. And then the labor market, a part of the definition that says those non-owners, they're forced to work for the owners, right? Not for any specific owner, not for any specific capitalist, but if you fail to find one, you have no decent alternative. And then the last piece is a goods market, so people are Largely not, um, self-sufficient. They obtain their means of subsistence, what they need to survive on a market for commodities, right? So they're market dependent. That's how Robert Brenner puts it. And so if that's true, in the, I think in the standard setup. Socialism is in the mirror opposite of all of those things, right? Instead of a class structure and private ownership of productive assets, socialism has no class structure and public ownership. Instead of selling your labor on the market and buying commodities on markets and socialism, goods and labor are coordinated through some kind of comprehensive planning process. So usually, um, in the definition, it's you're in one or the other world. You've, you've got no half measures, um. I, I don't disagree with um some of the parts of the definition, but I try to operationalize socialism at the kind of level of institutions, and at the level of specific mechanisms, rather than calling a whole system socialist or capitalist. My view is more to the degree that this or that institutional corner of the economy is designed to meet public needs, is subject to public. Democratic oversight and control, it ought to be seen as socialist. So I think it's reasonable to say that, you know, healthcare in most rich countries satisfies that criteria. Um, YOU know, if the overarching objective is designed in a kind of democratic context, if money is pulled out of private hands and geared to satisfy public needs, I think it It ought to count, and then the, the more pervasive the mechanisms are, the more we can consider, um, the economy broadly socialist. Um, SOME people want to say no, we should only think about public ownership, um, you know, the stock of socialism, but I think there are other forms of public organization of economic life, and need satisfaction that do capture what socialists are, are after, um. And so in in my book, I, I've, I've made this socialism index that includes a bunch of different variables, like social spending, public ownership, public employment, co-determination, demodification, um, I, i the how, how much income lets you, how, how public income can let you exit the market. Um, AND I think all of that kind of captures the, um, some of the core ideas in the definitions that I have of capitalism and socialism, but that's a more continuous variable, and so I can see what happens when we grow socialism here or there, what happens when it's high, um, and low, and so on.

50:00 Ricardo Lopes: So would you classify the sort of social democracy or at least certain social democratic policies that we have implemented here in several countries in Europe, would you classify that as a form of socialism?

50:20 David Calnitsky: Yeah, I mean, I basically, I just rank all of the countries um by on the socialism index. I rank by Decade by sort of country decade, so you can see where the highest levels of socialism are and where the lowest levels are. Um, AND then, you know, perhaps to kind of get more at the kind of core socialism index idea, I also look at the sort of change. So you're kind of holding the context constant, and I'm looking at sort of the change in socialism, um, over some particular over a period, let's say a decade, and I'll sort of rank. Um, PERIODS, country periods in the same way where we can see what were the periods where socialism increased the most versus decreased the most and, and so on.

51:11 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, I mean, what are the main critiques of capitalism that socialism puts forth, and I mean, uh, what is socialism actually supposed to remedy when it comes to those critics?

51:28 David Calnitsky: Uh, YEAH, so in my book, I focus on, I mean, I think this is a question that's often taken for granted, um, and you have to sort of give a, a normative critique of capitalism that socialism then addresses. I feel like it's often the case that people don't want to do this, but I focus on Um, a few normative critiques, um, I emphasize sort of the ways that capitalism can undermine freedom, the ways it can undermine democracy, how it can generate unnecessary levels of inequality, poverty, suffering. It's not that capitalism is the worst of all possible worlds, but it's, uh, that it falls short of what could be in, in terms of standards of living, and there's no mechanism internal to it to close the gap between, you know, what is and what could be, um. And so you can look at some of the features of capitalism that we've described, sort of the, the definition, um, or the, the definitions of capitalism, and by contrast of socialism, um, and sort of see this where the normative critiques kind of fall. So the labor market criterion I, I mentioned above, you're forced to sell your labor on the labor market, um. That, I think in a lot of ways undermines freedom in this kind of standard way. Marx calls it a double freedom. You're free to sell your labor to whoever you want, failing that, you're free to starve, right? You're forced not to work for any specific capitalist, but to sell your labor to someone. Um, NOW you might say, OK, that's fine, um, but it does, I think, undermine your negative freedom, um, and it's at the core of, of capitalist economies, um, and socialism by decommodifying labor, by generating incomes for people irrespective of the market, through a range of mechanisms, pensions, unemployment, leave, etc. IT starts to address, I think, that unfreedom. Um, OR you could go to the class structure definition, right? So you have owners and non-owners of the means of production. I think that violates a pretty standard definition of democracy, the sort of 60s definition of democracy, which I like is that, you know, people should have an impact on decisions that affect their lives. Um, WELL, if you have a small group that controls investment. That just means that they more or less control the future, right? How green technologies are gonna be, how oppressive they are, what work looks like, and so on. These decisions, investment decisions have these big public ramifications, but they're made by a small group, um, which I think undermines democracy. Again, if you care about democracy, and then socialism. On this front is at least meant to bring uh democratic decision making into economic life through some means. Um, COULD just be public ownership, um, which varies in rich countries, um, and is a step towards having a part of the economy under a more sort of democratic. Purview. So, you know, if you care a lot more, if you care more about freedom, you'll often work more in the labor market parts, and if you care more about democracy, you'll often emphasize the sort of class structure parts, um, and in my book, I try to run through a range of more specific critiques of capitalism, explain why socialism is meant to remedy those critiques, and then I, I ask, um, are those claims actually true? So, uh, do they show up empirically? So I look, I look at my socialism, the socialism index, and I look to see the extent to which it empirically correlates or not with separate indicators of democracy, freedom, equality, well-being, and so on. Um, AND I think there's some evidence in favor of the claims.

55:21 Ricardo Lopes: Right. So let me ask you, because particularly when we hear from people who identify as Marxist and even the ones who go all the way to identifying as communists, um, they say that because I, I mean to put it in simple terms that because the system is rigged against the working class, the bourgeoisie controls the means of production. And they won't uh just give up power, uh, I mean that that the only way, the only possible route to socialism is through revolution. I mean, do you think that that's the only possible route?

56:07 David Calnitsky: So yeah, I'm trying to argue the exact opposite kind of line in in my book. Um I have a chapter on revolution, um, and I basically think that if that is your conclusion, if you conclude That revolution is the only path to socialism, then more or less you can't have socialism. Um, I have a lot of data on revolution across history and revolutionary moments. Um, AND one core finding, which goes back to Adam Shaworsky, one finding is that once societies reach some very minimal level of per person annual income, 5K, 10K per person, revolution just disappears, um, from the data. Right? So people have more to lose than their chains. They do have something to lose at that level of development, and I think it makes uh people risk averse, some reasonably risk averse, right? They're not confident that the revolution will bring gains. Um, I think this, you know, it's not false consciousness. This is a materialist analysis that explains why you just don't get revolutions once you have some modest level of development, um. And it's not just that revolutions um don't appear because the forces of repression are too high once you get moderate levels of development, although that's also true. Um, I think it's more that workers just don't want it, um, anymore, and so I have a lot of data from the World Values Survey, which looks at, um, there's one interesting question that looks at reform, revolution, and conservatism. Um, AROUND the world, and so I'm kind of restricting the group to low income people who self-identify in the bottom third, um, of the income ladder at the proletariat, arguably. Um, THEY'VE been running this survey for something like 45 years, and I think they include around 100 countries. Um, AND the revolutionaries, um, are just always this tiny minority in the group. Um, IT'S not what people want, and so this is true for rich countries where revolutionaries are always a tiny set, but it's basically true around the world. Uh, THE majority of, again, this is low income people in the OECD it's something like 80% who identify as reformists, um. A smaller group you can call conservative, um, they say, you know, the, the question asks whether the status quo should be defended, um, that captures something like 15%, it can get a bit higher too. Um, BUT then the people, um, who say they want to overthrow the system, um, the question is phrased something like, you know, the entire way society is organized must be radically changed through revolutionary action, that ends up being around 5% in the OECD. Um, IT'S, I think, I conclude that it's not a majoritarian project, and Um, revolutionaries just haven't really come close, uh, to the reformists anywhere in the data, apart from there are, there are a couple, um, examples of, of brief moments where it happens around the world, but never for a sustained period.

59:21 Ricardo Lopes: Is there evidence that revolutions can have spillover effects in terms of democracy and equality? I mean, can events in one nation influence social life in adjacent ones?

59:36 David Calnitsky: Yeah, so I have a paper on this topic that I wrote with Caitlin Wanamaker, and the conclusions a little bit are at odds, um, with my previous comments on revolution, but the the whole idea uh comes from a kind of offhanded remark, I think, in Piketty's first book about the, the threat of the Soviet, how the threat of the Soviet Union led European. Welfare states to be more redistributive. Um, THERE are other scholars who work on the topic, Magnus Rasmussen, Carl Knutzen, um, have done work on this question, but yeah, that's the, that's the core question that we're trying to ask in this paper. Revolutions might have effects not just, uh, in one country, in the country where it happens, but also, um, in neighboring countries, and this is, this kind of reflects an old debate. Um, IN Marxism, sort of between Trotsky and Stalin, you know, they're asking, does revolution in one country spark revolution in another, um, and we're, we're kind of asking does revolution in one country spark reform. Um, IN, in another, so we use this cross-national data set of revolutions over, you know, 200 years for they have something like 170 countries. Um, WE'RE also looking at not quite revolutions at coups, protest led ousters as they're called, um, and basically what what we're looking at is what happens to your country, um, following a revolution in a neighbor. So in the five years after that revolution, are there increases in, say, democracy or equality? Um, AND, you know, not all of the, um, measures that we look at see effects, but we do see significant increases in one of our two democracy measures and in both of our equality measures. Um, WE don't see changes in suffrage or Legal equality, um, but the effects that we do see, uh, to my mind, seem pretty robust. We use a bunch of methods to see if we can make the effect go away, um, but they're fairly stable. So it, it's possible that they're real, that revolution could foment reform. Um, TO a certain extent, this is the opposite of the old socialist intuition, right, that revolution in one country is, is actually weakening its prospects of spreading because revolution foments reform, right? It's, this is not the Trotsky argument, um. But, you know, on the other hand, the conclusions might be uncomfortable for reformists like myself, uh, to, you know, peaceful reformers might really benefit from the looming threat of revolution, you know, uh, you'll take Martin Luther King. Seriously, if Malcolm X is in the background, etc. um, YEAH, but you know, to some extent I think the, the discussion is moot because as I've argued, you really don't see revolution once you reach a certain level of development, um, but the general point perhaps, um. You know, it's maybe not that revolution, but, but militancy can be an important part of a reformist strategy. I, you know, I don't think this is the main channel. I have a different paper that looks at social change over the past 60, 70 years, and it finds You know, this is, it's left-wing political parties that have the biggest impact on, for example, social spending, but, you know, I do think you want to consider how serious threats can change the calculation, um, on the part of elites. That's kind of what the paper emphasizes.

1:03:10 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so one last question then, is there instead of a revolutionary road, a policy road toward socialism?

1:03:20 David Calnitsky: Right, um, so yeah, this is the topic of the book that I'm, that I'm finishing now. Basic question is, you know, is there a gradual policy driven uh road to socialism, or are reforms just always self defeating? Do they run out of steam? Do they hit a ceiling, and so on. A lot of people, I think on the far left want to say, sure, reforms can make life nicer, but They can't really change, it can't really change capitalism in, in a deep, in a qualitative way. And also, by the way, they're reversible. They're always reversible. Rosa Luxembourg says this, progressive socialization is a fantasy, um, and you know, the center left has a kind of version of this too for somewhat similar, somewhat different reasons, but yeah, you know, give up on socialism, it hits limits, it's not economically viable. Um, AND I think there are good reasons for that view, to support that view. Um, IT'S sometimes called the Marxist theory of the state, which sounds fancy, um, but the, the core, and there are different versions of that argument, but it, it basically says socialist reforms. ARE gonna either empower workers, or they're going to require taxes, that's going to reduce profitability, that's going to lead to capital flight, right? If capital exits, employment will fall. State revenue will then fall, and so even if you have this kind of perfect in this sort of like in in this scenario where you have a completely sincere socialist party in power, you still can't do the things that you were elected to do, gradualism fails, um. And so Marxists in, you know, the year 1900, if they're asked to predict the growth of things that you do see, you know, like public social spending, de modification, public ownership, you know, co-determination, all of that, they would say no, um, and they did say no, um, it's impossible, or If you do it, it will just be reversed. We can't have nice things, um, and I, you know, there's a similar set of predictions today, um, and so my starting point is the empirical record in rich countries, and when you zoom out, And look at the long term evidence, you do have moments of retrenchment over the past century and a half, we might be in one now, um, but, you know, in large part in rich capitalist democracies, you get more or less the opposite of those predictions. You get these world historic incremental reforms, they produce huge gains in living standards, giant declines in material deprivation and poverty, and they stick, right? So, Public health care, pensions, shorter working hours, these gains are basically unidirectional. Um, YOU see occasional tweaking of sort of public health care programs, but when they are introduced, they are never repealed, right? And, and public social expenditures, they've basically grown for 150 years. Again, occasionally they plateau, but they don't fall, I mean that's a big part of why standards of living have improved. Uh, DRAMATICALLY, yeah, I see that as, you know, knitting socialism into the fabric of capitalism, bit by bit. Um, WHAT was seen as impossible is later, um, taken for granted, that, you know, that's what I call the policy road to socialism. Um, SOCIALIST reforms are popular, popular reforms get defended by ordinary people, and that's why they're robust, um, over time. So, yeah, the book is framed as a kind of um you have the skeptics intuition that reforms always get reversed, um and then you have perhaps like the the populist um intuition. It it used to be called terrible language, but it used to be called the legitimation function. Um, ELITES will get in trouble, um, if they undermine the standards of living for the majority long enough. Beneficiaries push back, um, especially when programs are big and universal. So there's this ratchet effect, and I'm trying to test this idea, um, empirically in in the book,

1:07:27 Ricardo Lopes: um, right. So, uh, just before we go, would you like to tell people where they can find you and your work on the internet, and by the way, what should people be on the lookout for when it comes to your upcoming book?

1:07:43 David Calnitsky: Well, the book is going to be called The Road to Socialism or the Policy Road to Socialism. The latter isn't a particularly snappy title, so I might try to change it. Otherwise, you can Google my name. Um, I have some articles in Jacobin too that might be. Worth looking at, and you can find my website, which links to um most everything, um, as well. So

1:08:07 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, great, I'm leaving links to that in the description and thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a very interesting conversation.

1:08:17 David Calnitsky: Thank you very much.

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