The Means Test

I spent much of the past weekend reading Walter Greenwood's classic working-class novel Love on the Dole—a portrait of proletarian life in England's industrial north during the trough of the Great Depression. The novel depicts the aspirations of young people starting their lives at a time when there is no stable work to be had, and public sympathy is drying up. 

The novel's protagonist, Harry Hardcastle, is lured into life as a factor engineer's apprentice on the assurance that he just needs to complete a seven-year indenture with the firm, then he will be qualified to seek employment as a full-fledged engineer on good wages. Throughout his time as an apprentice, however, he sees warning signs that this promise may be a trap. 

He watches as other apprentices graduate only to take up life on the street corner among the full-time unemployed, cadging for cigarette butts. But he tells himself that the newspapers and conservative politicians must be right: there are jobs out there for such fellows as these; they just prefer the easy life of loafing and collecting handouts from the dole office. 

The day finally arrives when Harry's seven years of toiling in the vineyard are up; he must now take his own chances knocking on doors and looking for work. Crushingly, but unsurprisingly, he has no more luck than all the others whom he watched graduate into umemployment. He has no choice but to go to the dole office as well and ask for his pittance in public charity. 

These vicissitudes keep Harry from fulfilling his dreams of marrying and moving away; they force him and his immediate family members to fall back on the smaller wages his sister can earn at the mill. As if this weren't bad enough, however, they then start to hear rumblings that the new National Government has run on a campaign promise to tighten the belt of public expenses. 

First, the dole payments are reduced; then, there's talk of dreaded "means-testing." The government is going to assess each family's case and determine whether their current means are "sufficient" to keep the family in the absence of unemployment checks, and to cut them off the payroll if so. 

Harry and his mates discount the rumors, however. "There'd be a revolution if they tried it," they keep saying. "They wouldn't dare."

But lo and behold, the terrible day arrives. Harry goes to the dole office to collect his check, and he is inexplicably denied. When he asks to see the manager, he is told that his family failed the means test. The government assessed their case file, and determined that his sister's miserable pay at the mill was sufficient to keep her, his aged parents, and himself alive. 

Confronted with this news, Harry and a few other of the unlucky ones stage an impromptu demonstration; but there is no broader revolt, such as they had foretold. Why? Because in one blow, the means test not only cut millions of people off from a much-needed income support, but also drove a wedge through the heart of any potential broader labor movement. 

When they were all in line together at the unemployment office, after all, there had been no distinction between them. The dole then was no respecter of persons. But as soon as some got their checks and others did not, it created a divergence of interests and a new hierarchy of status and desert, in which no one thought of themselves among the outcast, until it was too late. As Greenwood depicts it: 

"[N]obody had believed that they themselves would fall victim [to the Means Test]. To them all it had concerned others than themselves; each had found adequate excuse and reason why his benefit should be continued, though each had selected somebody else who, in his opinion, would suffer no hardship in having his unemployment pay stopped."

I was reminded of this passage in listening to this last week's episode of The Weeds podcast. In an episode titled "Means Testing Our Patience," the hosts of this semi-weekly policy discussion were trying to figure out why Joe Manchin, the conservative Democratic Senator from West Virginia, has emerged as an advocate for adding means testing to Democrats' proposed extension of the child tax credit. 

The usual theory of the case, one of the hosts observed, is that Manchin is simply in the pocket of corporate lobbyists and rich people. And while this is no doubt true to some extent, it's hard to understand why this would be more true of Manchin than nearly all other members of his caucus, and even many Republicans, who oppose or at least do not feel the same need to means test the benefit. 

Instead, the host offered a different explanation. He pointed to some recent ethnographic work on the politics of Appalachia—the region Manchin represents in Congress more than just about any other individual. What this research found was not only that many working-class people in the region use public benefits, such as disability, but also that they oppose extending these benefits to others. 

Perhaps, therefore, the host posited, Manchin was simply reflecting the policy preferences of his own constituents more than people think. Much like the people in Greenwood's novel, the individuals described in this ethnography—who were themselves receiving benefits—each had some neighbor or other case to cite who were also getting payments from the program, but whom they thought were unworthy. 

As soon as means testing is proposed, therefore, people are evidently able to find reasons why they themselves would never be disadvantaged by it, but why their less deserving neighbors would and should be cut off. 

And so we see that once again, as in the England of the Great Depression, the prospect of means testing, and the chance it provides to distinguish oneself from those just slightly worse off or seen as less deserving, not only threatens many people with the loss of a critically-needed income stream, but also poses a psychological barrier to the broader political cohesiveness of a working class movement. 

All of which is an old socialist line of complaint that can easily take on a note of condescension and hectoring. Greenwood himself offers this kind of scolding from the mouth of a heroic author-insert character in the novel, Larry Meath, who repeatedly and futilely tells the other working-class characters that, for their own sake, they must get politically organized and work together. 

Old and condescending or not, however, it has a ring of truth in times like the present. The coronavirus pandemic tipped our economy almost instantaneously into levels of mass unemployment we hadn't seen since Greenwood's own era. The effects of this catastrophe have been cushioned only by robust public interventions, and still workforce participation is far from pre-pandemic levels. 

If those supports are cut out from people now, or extended only on pain of means testing, our government will be doing little better than the National Government as depicted in Greenwood's novel. And then, as now, the fact that some of the working class themselves will support the means test does not make it any more rational or humane a policy choice for those left behind. 

This all might seem to fly in the face of a recent tongue-in-cheek broadside on this blog against Universal Basic Income (UBI). What I really meant to satirize in those passages was not the policy itself, so much as the techno-dystopian future than many of UBI's backers seem to favor; fortunately, I do not think this is actually the future UBI would bring about. 

The idea than benefits should be means-tested rather than universal seems to be premised on the thought that people would give up work if they could fall back on a bare-minimum income support. And indeed, to my point last week, many of the starry-eyed defenders of UBI do the policy no favors by seeming to agree with this: "we wouldn't have to work anymore!" they crow.

But neither is correct. Universal benefits may establish a new floor below which people cannot fall, but they in no way change the other economic incentives that otherwise operate in society. As Harry Hardcastle's case proves, it's not just that he wants to live with minimal food and dignity. His sister's income and his dole check allow for that. He also wants to marry, start a new life, and flourish. 

All a UBI program would really do, therefore, is to provide workers with more bargaining power, and to ensure that no one can fall into sheer destitution in our society. The other usual incentives of employment and advancement would continue to work as normal. 

Still more to the point here, having the benefit be universal sets up a political community of interest that cannot so easily be torn apart. If we all receive these checks together, we have a stake in seeing them continue. But if they are used to divide us into the deserving and the undeserving, then the constituency for them vanishes—to the terrible effect that Greenwood so vividly portrays.