Minimum Income Standards in Israel: A Recent History in Economic and Humanistic Discourses
In: Social policy and administration, Band 45, Heft 5, S. 525-538
ISSN: 1467-9515
AbstractRecent years have seen a growing interest in the creation of Minimum Income Standards (MIS). The impetus for this is the belief that governments that do not employ MIS to set income support can ultimately be persuaded to do so. Even as scholars recognize the many hurdles in the way of an MIS's acceptance, they nonetheless hope, and seem to expect, that the hurdles can be overcome and the political will be created to adopt empirical MIS that would allow a decent standard of living. This article, a case study analyzing the setting of income support levels in Israel over more than seven decades, questions this assumption. The analyses, anchored in Veit‐Wilson's notion of discourses, show that the absence of governmental MIS in Israel has not been incidental, but the outcome of repeated conscious decisions, anchored in the primacy of the asocial economistic discourse. This discourse, it shows, served as a strong disincentive to the adoption of governmental MIS, which would have required the government to justify its choice to set income support below that which was needed for a minimum standard of living.