“When [Evelyn] Forget looks at politics and culture and the economy now, she sees forces converging to create a more hospitable climate for minimum income experiments on a grander scale than before.” – W Mallett
The motto of Dauphin, Manitoba, a small farming town in the middle of Canada, is “everything you deserve.” What a citizen deserves, and what effects those deserts have, was a question at the heart of a 40-year-old experiment that has lately become a focal point in a debate over social welfare that’s raging from Switzerland to Silicon Valley.
Between 1974 and 1979, the Canadian government tested the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) across an entire town, giving people enough money to survive in a way that no other place in North America has before or since. For those four years—until the project was cancelled and its findings packed away—the town’s poorest residents were given monthly checks that supplemented what modest earnings they had and rewarded them for working more. And for that time, it seemed that the effects of poverty began to melt away. Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school.
“Do we have to behave in particular ways to justify compassion and support?” Evelyn Forget, a Canadian social scientist who unearthed some of the findings of the Dauphin experiment, asked me rhetorically when I reached her by phone. “Or is simply human dignity enough?”
Critics of basic income guarantees have insisted that giving the poor money would disincentivize them to work, and point to studies that show a drop in peoples’ willingness to work under pilot programs. But in Dauphin—thought to be the largest such experiment conducted in North America—the experimenters found that the primary breadwinner in the families who received stipends were in fact not less motivated to work than before. Though there was some reduction in work effort from mothers of young children and teenagers still in high school—mothers wanted to stay at home longer with their newborns and teenagers weren’t under as much pressure to support their families—the reduction was not anywhere close to disastrous, as skeptics had predicted.
“People work hard and it’s still not enough,” Doreen Henderson, who is now 70 and was a participant in the experiment, told the Winnipeg Free Press in 2009. Her husband Hugh, now 73, worked as a janitor while she stayed at home with their two kids. Together they raised chickens and grew a lot of their own food. “They should have kept it,” she said of the minimum income program. “It made a real difference.”
The recovered data from “Mincome,” as the Dauphin experiment was known, has given more impetus to a growing call for some sort of guaranteed income. This year, the Swiss Parliament will vote on whether to extend a monthly stipend to all residents, and the Indian government has already begun replacing aid programs with direct cash transfers. Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich has called a BIG “almost inevitable.” In the US, Canada, and much of Western Europe, where the conversation around radically adapting social security remains mostly hypothetical, the lessons of Dauphin might be especially relevant in helping these ideas materialize sooner rather than later.
There are other compelling arguments for a guaranteed income now. Despite record corporate earnings, most people are not benefitting. Wages are stagnant, unemployment is high, student debt and health care costs are soaring, and the job market is not rewarding those who are already employed with enough money for a decent way of life. The so-called Uberization of the workforce, in which workers are paid by the task rather than on a salary or under an established hourly rate—is increasing the precariousness of work. (And that’s not to mention robots and artificial intelligence taking away jobs.) As the concept of universal healthcare spreads and minimum wage is debated, conversations around reconsidering or expanding social security are growing.
“Originally the interest was primarily prompted by the concern that the welfare system was discouraging people from working,” Ron Hikel, who coordinated the Mincome program, told Dutch television last year. Today, he says, the motivation for guaranteed income is an increase in inequality. “At some point, the income inequality begins to interfere with people’s ability to have education, and also to take care of their own health. To the extent that that effects the relations in society, it begins to accentuate divisions and differences, and you get an increase in social pathologies, alcohol addiction, the use of drugs, an increase in mental illness, a decrease in provision of educational courses and an increase in the crime rate.”
In the US, support for basic income has come not just from the left but, perhaps surprisingly, from the right, and especially from libertarians.
“There has always been some support for [a BIG] from the political right because the scheme is less intrusive than most ways of delivering social programs,” explained Forget (pronounced for-zhay). Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr. called for something like a basic income, but so too did the seminal libertarian economists F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman (Friedman called it a “negative income tax”). Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan has proposed combining various forms of federal anti-poverty assistance into a single funding stream, acknowledging that the effects of the rich getting richer are getting harder to ignore.
Dr. Forget documented a decline in doctor visits, an 8.5 percent reduction in the hospitalization rate, and more adolescents continuing into grade 12
Advocates have argued that a single coordinated program providing a base income is more efficient than the current panoply of welfare and social security programs and the bureaucracy required to maintain them (in the U.S. there are currently 79 means-tested social welfare programs, not including Medicare or Medicaid). Continue reading . . .