Basic Income in a Small Town: Understanding the Elusive Effects on Work

Universal Basic Income as a Policy Response to COVID-19 and Precarious Employment: Potential Impacts on Rehabilitation and Return-to-Work

“…A key critique has been that a minimum income would decrease people’s incentive to work. However, pilots of UBI have shown no or limited decreases in work participation [ 7 – 9 ]. Results from an experiment in Manitoba, Canada, in the 1970s demonstrated how such effects were negligible—those who withdrew from work did this in order to engage in education or care work, or because they had disabilities or uneven employment opportunities.…”

The Impact of an Experimental Guaranteed Income on Crime and Violence

“…No final report was produced, and most of the survey data collected on Dauphin has never been analyzed. Subsequent to the end of the Mincome experiment, a small number of journal articles were produced from the digitized Winnipeg data (Choudhry and Hum 1995;Hum and Choudhry 1992;Hum and Simpson 1993;Prescott, Swidinsky, and Wilton 1986;Simpson and Hum 1991); however, until recently no published research has examined the original survey records (Calnitsky 2016(Calnitsky , 2018aCalnitsky and Latner 2017) or administrative data (Forget 2011) on the Dauphin portion of the experiment. 3 Positive tax liabilities were rebated too; the rebate faded to zero once market earnings reached around $43,400.…”

“…While Mincome took place in three sites, this study focuses on the so-called "saturation" site located in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, where all town residents were eligible for Mincome payments. Unlike more common experimental designs that randomize individuals or families who receive benefits, this distinctive town-level experiment design allows us to ask macro-social questions, including how treatment effects spill over and affect community-level processes (Calnitsky and Latner 2017;Calnitsky 2019). Mincome was completely unique with respect to this design feature.…”

Universal Basic Income as a Promoter of Real Freedom in a Digital Future

“…The idea that income received free of charge would be a subsidy to lower labor costs in order to save employers was therefore discredited. Opposition to the Manitoba experiment arose precisely because employers perceived MINCOME as a threat to their businesses (Calnitsky, 2019;Calnitsky & Latner, 2017;Calnitsky et al, 2019). While the most recent analysis of MINCOME data leads to the conclusion that many concerns about basic income cannot be proven on an empirical basis, other work has completely disproved that having income without work can result in a withdrawal from the labor market (Banerjee et al, 2017) or massive spending of money on leisure goods such as cigarettes or alcohol (Evans & Popova, 2017).…”