The idea of guaranteeing everyone a living is older than modern economics. For most of history the poor relied on family, charity and the church. The question early reformers asked was whether a community owed its members a living, and if so, on what terms.
More and Vives
In Thomas More's Utopia (1516), a traveler named Raphael Hythloday describes a dinner in England where a lawyer praises the hanging of thieves. Hythloday answers that harsh punishment will never stop theft when people have no other way to eat. More's character argued that providing everyone a livelihood would prevent theft better than hanging. It was a moral point about desperation, not a policy design, but it planted the idea that public provision could do what punishment could not.
Ten years later the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives wrote On Assistance to the Poor (1526) for the city council of Bruges. Vives proposed that the city, rather than the church, organize relief for the poor, while requiring the able-bodied to work. Many towns adopted versions of his plan. The pairing of support with a work duty became the default for centuries.
Land as a common inheritance
The first arguments for an unconditional payment to everyone came in the 1790s and rested on land. Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice (1797) argued that since the earth was the common property of humankind, landowners owed everyone a ground rent, to be paid out as a lump sum at 21 and a pension later in life.
The English radical Thomas Spence thought Paine had not gone far enough. In The Rights of Infants (1797), Spence proposed that each parish collect the rents on its land and share the surplus equally among all residents, every quarter, men, women and children alike. Historians often call this the first proposal for a true periodic basic income. Half a century later, in 1848, the Belgian writer Joseph Charlier proposed a "territorial dividend" on similar grounds.
The Speenhamland system
Meanwhile England tried something closer to a wage subsidy. In May 1795, during a harvest failure and soaring bread prices, magistrates in Berkshire met at the Pelican Inn in the village of Speenhamland. The Speenhamland system topped up low wages according to the price of bread and the size of a worker's family. If a gallon loaf cost a shilling, a laborer was to be guaranteed three shillings a week for himself and more for each dependent, with the parish paying the difference between his wage and that level. Similar scales spread through much of southern England.
The system became notorious. In 1834 a Royal Commission, whose report was written largely by Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick, blamed it for low wages, idleness, large families and rising local taxes. Its report led to the New Poor Law of 1834, which made relief for the able-bodied depend on entering a workhouse. The principle of "less eligibility" held that life in the workhouse must be worse than the life of the poorest independent laborer, so that only the truly desperate would apply.
A myth reconsidered
For more than a century the Speenhamland story served as a warning against guaranteed incomes. The economic historian Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation (1944), argued that the scales had kept wages low and degraded rural workers, even as he condemned the harshness that replaced them. But in 1963 the economist Mark Blaug argued that the Royal Commission's case was weak and its conclusions poorly supported. Later historians found that parishes using allowances did not have clearly higher birth rates or lower wages than others, and that rural distress owed much to the end of the wars with France, falling grain prices and enclosure. The commission had sent out questionnaires, quoted the answers that fit its view and reached several conclusions before its evidence was in.
Two lessons survive the debate. First, a wage top up paid to employed workers can let employers pay lower wages, a worry still raised about wage subsidies today. Second, a policy's reputation can be shaped by how its critics gather evidence. Speenhamland was a means-tested wage supplement, not a universal payment, yet it was still cited against basic income proposals in the 1970s.
Worked example: two parishes
Imagine two parishes in 1800. In the first, the overseer pays every laborer's family enough to reach the bread scale, so a farmer who pays seven shillings knows the parish will add the rest. In the second, Spence's plan has been adopted: the parish collects land rents and gives every resident an equal share, worker or not.
In the first parish a farmer can cut wages and the parish will cover the gap, so local ratepayers end up subsidizing his payroll. In the second, the share does not depend on wages at all, so a cut in pay is not refilled by the parish, and a laborer with a guaranteed share may even refuse a poor offer. Both plans put money in poor hands, and from a distance they look alike. Up close they create opposite incentives for employers, which is why designers of any income floor now ask first whether it rises when wages fall.