Basic Income and the Two Dilemmas of the Welfare State’, in The Welfare State. A Reader, by Philippe Van Parijs

(Christopher Pierson & Francis G. Castles eds.), Cambridge: Polity Press & Malden (MA): Blackwell, 2000, pp.355-59.
Now included in a major new anthology on social policy, this is a reprint of a brief plea for basic income as a response to the two central dilemmas that face welfare states in Europe and beyond as we enter the XXIst century: fighting unemployment versus fighting poverty as productivity varies ever more widely across individuals; securing the economic feasibility of solidarity versus its political feasibility as human capital becomes more mobile across national boundaries.

 

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