Proposals for “guaranteed annual income” (GAI) were a crucial episode in welfare reform in America. In the 1940s and 1950s, economists on both left and right proposed that conventional aid programs for the needy, including Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), be replaced by a minimum income that everyone would get simply on the basis of need. The defeat of this idea in the 1960s and 1970s set the stage for the much more conservative reform, centered on work tests, that transformed welfare in the 1980s and 1990s.

Brian Steensland, a sociologist, has written a fine account of GAI, coupled with interpretations that are much more questionable. He describes the intellectual origins of the idea, its advocacy by government planners during the war on poverty, and then the battles over GAI proposals within the Nixon and Carter administrations. He goes on to discuss the debates in Congress, where the House twice passed the Nixon Family Assistance Plan (FAP) only to see it defeated in the Senate. The Carter Program for Better Jobs and Income (PBJI) suffered a similar fate.

Steensland has drawn on existing secondary works as well as archival sources and the press. His story is comprehensive, concise, and unusually well written. He also covers the conservative reform approaches that succeeded GAI and the new proposals for guaranteed income that have appeared recently. Simply as history, this is easily the best account of GAI I have read. (I was an opponent of GAI who—as Steensland discusses—helped develop the case for work requirements.)

The author's interpretation of events raises far more questions. He says that GAI failed because it would have aided not only the “deserving” or helpless poor but also the “undeserving”—those who seemed to have made themselves poor, above all by not working. That is true, but also conventional. He reproves earlier analysts of welfare for neglecting these “cultural” factors, but no study of welfare reform that I can recall ever did so.

The real problem with most prior studies—and Steensland's—is that they interpret social attitudes too negatively. The prejudice against the “undeserving” is seen as arbitrary or “constructed” (p. 223), as if society could have supported the unworthy poor without question had it chosen to do so. Attitudes are also seen as rejecting. In Steensland's words, “American antipoverty policy is designed to stigmatize the poor who are deemed ‘undeserving’ and mark them off as morally different from the rest of the society” (p. x). This idea has become so embedded in the academic literature on welfare, with each book citing the others, that it cannot easily be questioned.

The development of a sizable welfare class linked to other social problems in the 1960s and 1970s did pose a real danger that no society could have ignored, however. And if attitudes were as hostile as the author says, reformers would simply have abolished family aid rather than, as they did, attempt to couple benefits with work requirements, something much more difficult. A more realistic view is that the voters did reject traditional welfare because it tolerated nonwork and other dysfunctions by its recipients, but they also affirmed public responsibility for the poor. So reform never attempted to abolish welfare or condemn the undeserving. Rather, it set out to overcome unworthiness by promoting work. The goal was to integrate the poor through employment, not exclude them. Reform did succeed in raising work levels among poor single mothers substantially, although the work problem among low-income Americans remains far from solved.

More specifically, Steensland thinks that GAI failed because extending aid to the working poor was rejected. Allegedly, lawmakers refused to help workers lest they become tarred with the brush of “welfare.” “The stigma associated with AFDC benefits threatened to contaminate the social status of other ‘deserving’ recipients contained in the same program,” he writes (p. 240). To my eye, however, the opponents of GAI were less concerned about the working poor than the nonworking. They demanded that adults living on welfare take jobs. Their objection to FAP and PBJI was that the plans relied entirely on economic incentives to achieve that goal. They demanded that work effort not be left as a choice, that it be made a condition of aid. This is just what the recent work reforms require.

Steensland's view cannot be squared with the many forms of support that working people claim from government—precisely because they are working. Social insurance programs—which are barely mentioned—are but one example. As the author notes, the same conservatives who defeated FAP enacted the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which subsidizes the earnings of low-income workers—the very thing that Congress supposedly rejected. EITC, however, is popular because it aids only the working poor, not the nonworking. It has today become vastly our largest and costliest welfare program, supporting more than 20 million people, more than AFDC ever did.

Like other academic critics of welfare, Steensland simply assumes that guaranteed income was desirable. He makes no serious argument for that position. The inventers of GAI justified their idea by the claim that many nonworking poor could not work due to lack of jobs for the unskilled or racial discrimination. He thinks that GAI could have been sold politically on this basis and is disappointed that neither Richard Nixon nor other advocates attempted to do so. But the reason was that nobody except the economists believed that jobs were lacking. Since the 1960s, employment has soared while the Civil Rights movement expanded opportunities for minorities. Lack of jobs posed no significant problem for welfare reform in the 1990s. Today, millions of nonwhite immigrants stream into America to take unskilled jobs that, for whatever reason, poor citizens do not do.

Steensland has written a valuable policy history, but he is remarkably unwilling to draw the lessons of that experience for social policy today. The truth is that GAI was simply a mistake. Its architects, for all their expertise, misconstrued the causes and cures of poverty in America.