mincome
[dauphin, manitoba ]
intro’d to mincome 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.
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.
more on mincome:
Mincome was an experimental Canadian basic income project that was held in Dauphin, Manitoba during the 1970s. The project, funded jointly by the Manitoba provincial government and the Canadian federal government, began with a news release on February 22, 1974, and was closed down in 1979.
The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a guaranteed, unconditional annual income caused disincentive to work for the recipients, and how great such a disincentive would be.
It allowed every family unit to receive a minimum cash benefit. The results showed a modest impact on labor markets, with working hours dropping one percent for men, three percent for wives, and five percent for unmarried women. However, some have argued these drops may be artificially low because participants knew the guaranteed income was temporary. These decreases in hours worked may be seen as offset by the opportunity cost of more time for family and education. Mothers spent more time rearing newborns, and the educational impacts are regarded as a success. Students in these families showed higher test scores and lower dropout rates. There was also an increase in adults continuing education.
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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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the peckham experiment ness?
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Evelyn Forget talking dec 2012 about mincome..
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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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dec 2014:
A Canadian City Once Eliminated Poverty And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/23/mincome-in-dauphin-manitoba_n_6335682.html
Residents of a Canadian city were given monthly basic income checks from the government. Poverty disappeared after five years.
Universal basic income works.
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unconditional basic income et al ness
bien – basic income earth network
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Scott Santens (@scottsantens) tweeted at 3:45 AM – 23 Mar 2017 :
Some #basicincome news via @basicincomeorg: Simpson, et al, “The Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment: Lesso… https://t.co/9Ff71IEYVQ (http://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/844847643033403393?s=17)
be you. 