From James Meade’s ‘Social Dividend’ to ‘State Bonus’: An Intriguing Chapter in the History of a Concept

Abstract

An important feature of the institutional framework of James Meade’s Agathotopia is a ‘social dividend’, i.e. the unconditional and equal cash payment made as of right to each and every one. Some years prior to the publication in 1989, similar proposals had been widely discussed in Great-Britain and Continental Europe under the name of ‘basic income’. Yet, in Meade’s writings the idea of a social dividend was not new. In fact, throughout his life, it regularly resurfaces in many books and articles at least since 1935. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it documents the appearance of ‘social dividend’ in the early writings of James Meade. It also discusses different discursive communities Meade was involved in and which might have been possible origins for the term as well as for the idea of an unconditional equal payment to all. Secondly, it shows that in Meade’s writings a ‘social dividend’ plays different roles, prefiguring in a sense different approaches to ‘basic income’ in the present-day literature. The last part of the paper tells a little story about a remarkable ‘rendez-vous manque’ between James Meade and the authors of the first recorded modern British proposal for a basic income, dating from 1918.