Studying history is important, in part because it reveals the contingency of present arrangements. Seeing how things used to be expands the possibility of changing things as they currently are. Furthermore, different people can draw very different lessons from looking into the past, which has profound implications for policymaking. A compelling example is President Richard Nixon’s interest in a universal basic income. Nixon was an unlikely champion of such a policy, as a conservative Republican at a time when the War on Poverty was a distinctly Democratic policy. Just as Nixon was about to publicly announce a plan for subsidizing poor families, however, an advisor handed him a brief report on a similar experiment in 19th-century England, alleging that it had a ruinous effect on the people it was meant to help. Nixon shifted to emphasizing the necessity of employment as a precondition for assistance, linking a progressive policy to a conservative sensibility, and the work requirement reinforced the idea that the poor were lazy and unwilling to work, so Nixon’s policy proposal collapsed.

Because the example of a 19th-century England experiment helped defeat a welfare proposal in the modern US, Bregman reexamines that earlier case.