Basic Needs and the Discovery of Global Poverty

The development of universal basic income schemes fit both chronologically and substantively with an epoch-making revolution in theories and practices of global development. In the 1960s, ‘global poverty’ was perceived for the first time as a phenomenon that divided north and south. In the 1970s, approaches to development centred around basic needs—rather than overall growth or other ends like the mitigation of inequality at national or global scales—were pioneered. As with universal basic income proposals in their origins and the present, there is every reason to worry that attacks on global poverty play multiple functions beyond their honourable official goal. The invention of basic needs was not solely a moral breakthrough to welcome, since it worked in tandem with calls for equality associated with the global south’s ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO) proposals calling for more equalization of states that were marginalized in the process. This chapter explores how the problem of ‘basic needs’ of fellow humans around the world emerged in competition with the global south’s own call for structural justice, and argues that the cause of addressing global poverty arose on the grave of demanding global fairness.