An interview with Frances Fox Piven

Few theorists of social movements have shaped the events that they analyze. Frances Fox Piven, Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York and one of these few, has studied and agitated within American social movements since the 1960s.

In 1966, Piven and Richard Cloward published "The Weight of the Poor" in the Nation magazine. The essay elaborates what has since been dubbed the "Cloward-Piven Strategy": the mass enrollment of the poor onto welfare rolls. If all who were entitled to government benefits claimed them, they argued, the system would buckle, exposing the magnitude of American poverty and the inadequacy of its safety net. The ensuing political crisis would provide an opening in which to enact broad and lasting anti-poverty policy. Cloward and Piven published the article in the midst of an intense period of grassroots activity among welfare recipients. That same year, anti-poverty groups around the country formed a broad coalition that became the National Welfare Rights Organization, of which Piven was a founding member. The rank-and-file membership of the NWRO grew dramatically through the late-60s, reaching over 20,000 dues paying members and 540 grassroots groups by the end of the decade, and gaining influence over national welfare politics.

An interview with John Roemer

Throughout his career, John Roemer's work has been uniquely situated between the fields of microeconomics, game theory, philosophy, and political science. His research makes use of the tools of classical economics to analyze dynamics typically thought to be outside the scope of economics: from notions of fairness and morality, to the possibility of overcoming capitalist social relations. In doing so, it defends those tools against charges that they can’t describe the behaviors we see, at the same time as it renders vital social questions digestible for disciplines that rarely engage them.

Roemer is perhaps best known for his contributions to theories of distributive justice. Within the field of moral philosophy, he is one of a handful of scholars who have sought to formalize distributive theories in order to compare their merits. To moral philosophers, he argues that outright dismissal of consequentialist theories of justice, and their replacement by complicated deontological models, is a mistake. And to the world of economics, he posits that economic theory cannot be divorced from moral philosophy—that the emphasis on reaching equilibrium itself necessarily carries moral assumptions.

An interview with Adam Przeworski

Throughout the 20th century, radical social movements were plagued by their relationship to existing state institutions. Across Western Europe, labor movements found political expression in parties like the Swedish Social Democrats, the German SPD, and the French Socialist Party. In their pursuit of the democratization of wealth and political power, these organizations were criticized for moderating popular demands in favor of cross-party compromise. And while social democratic governments did make significant gains in the postwar period, today's landscape seems to testify against the durability of their reforms.

I met with Adam Przeworski—Professor of Politics at NYU, former member of the September Group of analytical Marxists, and a leading theorist of political economy—to discuss the role of elections in effecting social change, and the political transformations underway today. Over the course of a career spanning thirteen books and over 150 published articles, Przeworski's foremost contributions have been in the study of democratic transitions, distributional politics, and the determinants of economic growth.

What happens when you give people cash? How do they use the money, and how does it change their lives? Every cash study on this list is different: the studies vary in intervention type, research design, location, size, disbursement amount, and effects measured. The interventions listed here include basic income and proxies--earned income tax credits, negative income tax credits, conditional cash transfers, and unconditional cash transfers. The variety present here prevents us from being able to make broad claims about the effects of universal basic income. But because of its variety, this review provides a sense of the scope of research in the field, capturing what kinds of research designs have been used, and what effects have been estimated, measured, and reported. The review also allows us to draw some revealing distinctions across experimental designs.

If you’re interested in creating a UBI policy, there are roughly three levels of effects (after ODI) that you can examine.