Commentary on the book The Failed Welfare Revolution: America’s Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy Tenth USBIG Congress – New York City

Let me first take this opportunity to thank Karl Widerquist for bringing The Failed Welfare Revolution to my attention and for the invitation to participate in the panel. The book has much merit, so I also thank Brian Steensland for writing it. The Failed Revolution is a fine social science case study of policy development that gets a lot of things correct, theoretically and empirically, and about which I’ll have more to say, as well as some quibbles, in a formal review that I will submit later this year to the Eastern Economic Journal. For purposes of today’s discussion, I have a narrower two-fold focus, both stemming from Chapter Seven, Lost Opportunities. The first focus concerns the issue of whether passage of a basic income scheme would have mitigated the rise of conservative welfare retrenchment in the 1980s and the second issue concerns what implications Brian Steensland’s analyses, conclusions, and self-admitted speculations in The Failed Welfare Revolution have for prospects of adopting basic income guarantee in the US in the foreseeable future. In addition to these two foci, I’ll conclude with one quibble in regard to the theoretical reach of the book