evelyn forget
pronounced – for jee
[manitoba]
intro’d to Evelyn when Rutger posted this:
People have to ‘work for their money,’ we like to think. In recent decades, social welfare has become geared toward a labor market that does not create enough jobs. The trend from ‘welfare’ to ‘workfare’ is international, with obligatory job applications, reintegration trajectories, mandatory participation in ‘voluntary’ work. The underlying message: Free money makes people lazy.
Except that it doesn’t.
Studies from all over the world drive home the exact same point: free money helps. Proven correlations exist between free money and a decrease in crime, lower inequality, less malnutrition, lower infant mortality and teenage pregnancy rates, less truancy, better school completion rates, higher economic growth and emancipation rates. ‘The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money’, economist Charles Kenny, a fellow at the Center for Global Development, dryly remarked last June. ‘It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem.’
In the 2010 work Just Give Money to the Poor, researchers from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) give numerous examples of money being scattered successfully. In Namibia, malnourishment, crime and truancy fell 25 percent, 42 percent and nearly 40 percent respectively. In Malawi, school enrollment of girls and women rose 40 percent in conditional and unconditional settings. From Brazil to India and from Mexico to South Africa, free-money programs have flourished in the past decade. While the Millenium Development Goals did not even mention the programs, by now more than 110 million families in at least 45 countries benefit from them.
OECD researchers sum up the programs’ advantages: (1) households make good use of the money, (2) poverty decreases, (3) long-term benefits in income, health, and tax income are remarkable, (4) there is no negative effect on labor supply – recipients do not work less, and (5) the programs save money. Here is a presentation of their findings.Why would we send well-paid foreigners in SUVs when we could just give cash? This would also diminish risk of corrupt officials taking their share. Free money stimulates the entire economy: consumption goes up, resulting in more jobs and higher incomes.
mincome – Evelyn..
In March 1973 the governor of the province had decided to reserve $17 million for the project. The experiment was to take place in Dauphin, a small city with 13,000 inhabitants north of Winnipeg. The following spring researchers began to crowd the town to monitor the development of the pilot. Economists were keeping track of people’s working habits, sociologists looked into the experiment’s effects on family life and anthropologists engaged in close observation of people’s individual responses.
The basic income regulations had to ensure no one would drop below the poverty line. In practice this meant that about a 1,000 families in Dauphin, covering 30% of the total population, received a monthly paycheck. For a family of five, the amount would come down to $18,000 a year today (figure corrected for inflation). No questions asked.
Four years passed until a round of elections threw a spanner in the works. The newly elected conservative government didn’t like the costly experiment that was financed by the Canadian taxpayer for 75%. When it turned out that there was not even enough money to analyze the results, the initiators decided to pack the experiment away. In 1,800 boxes.
For three years, she (prof Forget) analyzed and analyzed, consistently coming to the same conclusion:
Mincome had been a great success.
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Evelyn’s report on mincome:
A final report was never issued, but Dr. Evelyn Forget (/fɔrˈʒeɪ/) conducted an analysis of the program in 2009 which was published in 2011.
- She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren’t under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating.
- In addition, those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did.
- Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidences of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse.
- Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations with health professionals
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dec 2012:
it’s about respect..
get money into people’s hands and then get out of the way
allows everyone to live with dignity, with or without working..
10 min – what happened in dauphin..?
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aug 2013 – interview:
From 1974 to 1979, a basic income social experiment known under the name of “Mincome Program” took place in a small canadian town. Evelyn Forget, researcher, is one of the very few persons who have studied the sociological impact of the guaranteed income experiment. She tells us more about her findings, 20 years after the experiment ended.
a town w/o poverty – dec 2012:
3:50 – 4 billion dollars savings just from health – 8.5% reduction of health issues
5 min – my concern is costs of delivering the healthcare system – a lot of what you are treating are..
the consequences of poverty
present day potential..?
Did the experiment help in convincing people about basic income in Canada ? And how about your work? Does it have any relevance for today’s debate?
Interesting you should ask: no, many people are still uncomfortable with basic income, notwithstanding the evidence. I talked to many people who support the concept, but many more think it’s too expensive and people should just work for a living. As was the case in the late 1970s, many people think that we can’t afford social justice.
I knew about it because I was an undergraduate student in the 1970s, and my economics profs told me this experiment would revolutionize the way Canada delivered social programs. This would be the foundation for social justice.
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august 2014:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/26/dauphin-canada-cash.html
According to Forget, the idea of a guaranteed basic income “seems to come back every 20 years … There has been perennial dissatisfaction with social programs,” she said. “Everybody is always looking for a better way of dealing with these issues.”
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find/follow Evelyn:
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Timothy MacNeill (@TimothyMacneill) tweeted at 6:02 PM – 24 May 2018 :
#NABIG2018
Evelyn Forget with a great quote at the North American Basic Income Congress: “we spend health care money inneficiently. We spend it in the hospitals and clinics trying to deal with the consequences of poverty” (http://twitter.com/TimothyMacneill/status/999802749482143744?s=17)
so too we spend time/energy on money/measuring-things rather than roots of healing
ie: hlb via 2 convos that io dance.. as the day..[aka: not part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake…].. a nother way
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Jamie Cooke (@JamieACooke) tweeted at 5:04 AM – 26 Aug 2018 :
Final plenary of #biencongress2018 with Evelyn Forget, key figure within the global #BasicIncome movement- and coming to Scotland in September (http://twitter.com/JamieACooke/status/1033671623352741890?s=17)Jamie Cooke (@JamieACooke) tweeted at 5:10 AM – 26 Aug 2018 :
Evelyn Forget is exploring the appalling decision made to cut the #Ontario #BasicIncome experiment by @fordnation and his administration – an inhumane decision with very real negative human impact #biencongress2018 (http://twitter.com/JamieACooke/status/1033673109604368384?s=17)Basic Income Europe (@basicincomeEU) tweeted at 5:21 AM – 26 Aug 2018 :
Moving emails from participants in Ontario’s cancelled #basicincome trial about the affects on their health shared by Evelyn Forget @BasicIncomeOrg #biencongress2018 https://t.co/wnyrJFxEks (http://twitter.com/basicincomeEU/status/1033675921579024384?s=17)
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Basic Income Canada (@basicincomecdn) tweeted at 3:15 PM – 6 Jul 2019 :
You have to look at the cost of #BasicIncome in two separate ways. The upfront cost, but also as a return on investment, right?
“We’re spending a whole lot of money treating the consequences of poverty.” ️Evelyn Forget, Health Economist https://t.co/xZUiFnFX6A (http://twitter.com/basicincomecdn/status/1147614961532887041?s=17)
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be you. 