Coverage of Dauphin, Manitoba’s “mincome” experiment

The conventional fear that instituting a basic income will lead to a significant drop in work and productivity has also been challenged by modern research. Between 1974 and 1979 the Canadian government tested a basic income plan in the small town of Dauphin, Manitoba. A subsequent study found that during the trial period hospitalizations dropped 8.5 percent compared to a control group, high school completion rates increased (especially for boys in low income families), women spent more time with new born babies, and, importantly for people worried about the effect a basic income would have on work and productivity, there was minimal impact on the number of hours people worked.

While it may nonetheless be argued that everyone should contribute something to the community from which she takes something, the question of a income free of means testing or a work requirement also appears in a different light when considered in historical and especially technological perspective. If we begin with Solow’s calculations for the first half of the 20th century, up to 90 percent or so of that basic income could be considered a gift from the past. If we take the founding of the country as starting point, or if we begin the technological clock much earlier — i.e. consider all the way back to the invention of arithmetic, writing etc., without which, obviously, very little subsequent technology could have been developed– this percentage would clearly be even higher.

So, for instance, if a basic income were set at $25,000 — and if we subtract that which comes as a gift of the past — no more than, say, $5,000 (using a very conservative 80 percent threshold) has to do with redistributing the proceeds from actual “work” in the here and now. A reasonable case could be made to affirm some moral obligation to contribute something back to society in exchange for the gift from the past. On the other hand, a generous society might just as well say that as a matter of principle no one should go hungry or live a life of fear and insecurity, no matter what. If so, a modest part of the gift of the past would simply be allocated in support of a basic income as a simple matter of community.

Such generosity is likely, human nature being what it is, to come back to the community somehow and in some way, and penny pinching requirements are likely to reduce rather than increase the kind of culture a good society would hope to nurture. In this context, a basic income could also be seen as a dividend for the unpaid care work — the bulk of which falls on women and the poor — that is currently not valued in our economic system.

The development of one or another form of basic income is no substitute for the need for a far greater and more fundamental transformation of the current radically inequitable and ecologically unsustainable system. On the other hand, and, quite apart from whether we should force the very poor — and especially those caring for children and the elderly — to leave such responsibilities in order to work elsewhere (if they can find jobs…), the accumulation of inherited technological and other knowledge represent an extraordinary gift to us all — one that, if acknowledged and embraced, has the potential to help give meaning and shape to a new and more equitable, more caring, more generous, and more community-focused society in general.