“What exactly do David Graeber, Milton Friedman, Charles Murray, Yannis Varoufakis, and Mark Zuckerberg have in common?” It sounds like the setup to a bad joke. The punch line may not be funny exactly, but it is revealing. Although they share practically nothing when it comes to their political commitments, they have all supported the establishment of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) — cash transfers, or a state-provided wage regardless of employment status. In other words, free money.

In Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora seek to explain how such an ideologically diverse crew could come to share this particular vision of the welfare state. Providing an intellectual history of the origins and ascendence of the idea of a universal basic income — which in recent years has become a major plank in progressive reform platforms — they show that its broad appeal is evidence of a tectonic shift in the ways thinkers both left and right have come to understand both the welfare state and the market.

It turns out that the history of the idea of a universal basic income is, in fact, about much more than welfare. Through a careful study of UBI’s strange career, Jäger and Zamora demonstrate how the basic premises of the market fundamentalism usually associated with the neoliberal turn of the last quarter of the twentieth century run far deeper, and extend much more broadly, than most historians usually credit. Instead of the standard “schools” explanation for the rise of neoliberalism — in which prophets of doom climb down from the peaks of Mont Pèlerin to spread a philosophy of market fundamentalism — by following the development of UBI as an idea, Jäger and Zamora reveal how that ideological victory was spurred by something of a grassroots reaction to the overlapping crises of mid-century liberalism.