Five Interconnections of Race and Class

This paper proposes a five-part empirical typology of interconnections of race and class. We describe the mechanisms whereby (1) race is a form of class relation; (2) race relations and class relations reciprocally affect each other; (3) race acts as a sorting mechanism into class locations; (4) race acts as a mediating linkage to class locations; and (5) race interacts with class in determining other outcomes. Rather than insisting on one or another mechanism as the overarching framework for conceptualising the interconnections between race and class, we propose a theoretical integration of all five within a functionalist model. The model reconciles the empirical effects of race variables with a class-functionalist explanation of race. Our typology of interconnections is useful for situating concrete empirical phenomena, and our theoretical integration of those interconnections offers a coherent explanatory system that captures the recursive causality of race and class

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in the Family

This paper investigates how a basic income could transform families and gender power relations within them. We draw on Hirschman’s exit, voice, and loyalty framework to argue that a basic income can offer a structural foundation for a radical shift towards more equitable family relations. This is because a basic income can support couples through economic uncertainty and reduce women’s structural vulnerability to economic dependency within marriages that strips them of exit and voice. We build our case on novel data from an understudied social experiment from the late 1970s called the Manitoba Basic Income Experiment, or Mincome. Using difference-in-difference regression with individual fixed-effects, we analyze three types of family outcomes: separation, bargaining power, and marital conflict. We find that during Mincome unhappy couples became more likely to consider separation, but that separation overall did not increase. We also find that Mincome reduced marital conflict associated with financial stressors and that some measures of wives’ bargaining power increased. Taken together, our results speak in favor of the view that a basic income has the potential to foster more equitable family lives

The Impact of an Experimental Guaranteed Income on Crime and Violence

Would unconditional cash payments reduce crime and violence? This paper examines data on crime and violence in the context of an understudied social experiment from the late 1970s called the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment, or Mincome. We combine town-level crime statistics for all medium-sized Canadian Prairie towns with town-level socio-demographic data from the census to study how an experimental guaranteed income impacted both violent crime and total crime. We find a significant negative relationship between Mincome and both outcomes. We also decompose total crime and analyze its main components, property crime and “other” crime, and find a significant negative relationship between Mincome and property crime. While the impact on property crime is theoretically straightforward, we close by speculating on the mechanisms that might link the availability of guaranteed annual income payments with a decline in violence, focusing in on the mechanisms that impact patterns of domestic violence

Life after Work : The Impact of Basic Income on Nonemployment Activities

Basic income experiments tend to show some decline in work hours, but less is known about how that nonwork time is spent. This article uses data from a randomized controlled trial of a guaranteed annual income to examine the activities of recipients who left the labor force for some amount of time. In particular, we analyze the reasons respondents gave for not working. We find that the intervention led to growth in care work activities and education, especially among women, moderate growth in self-employment, relatively strong growth in the portion of men and women simply reporting that they did not want to work, and the strongest growth in nonemployment connected to dissatisfaction with work/job conditions. Finally, the sole nonemployment category that declines as a result of the experiment is health-related reasons for not working

The economic consequences of homo economicus: neoclassical economic theory and the fallacy of market optimality

This essay presents a critique of the standard ascension from the rational agent to the optimal market in economic theory. Critiques of homo economicus are found unsatisfactory on grounds that its employment allows for the prediction of essential features of actual markets. using this same criterion we introduce Gary Becker’s essay, ‘irrational Behavior and economic Theory,’which demonstrated that the same features of markets could be derived from non-rational behaviour. Thus, non-rationality is equally predictive but is less restrictive than rationality. Once the assumption of rationality is relaxed, the concept of market optimality (though not market order) must also be sacrificed