Part 4:
When people have enough money to meet their basic needs, and even save a little for future goals, everything begins looking up. Perhaps the biggest single UBI experiment to date, dubbedMINCOME, was conducted by the Canadian government and the province of Manitoba from 1974 and 1979. Every eligible family in the town of Dauphin, pop. 10,000, received an income. The study data, though abandoned, was unearthed by economist Evelyn Forget in 2004, resulting in a research paper titled “The Town With(out) Poverty”. What Forget discovered when looking at the data collected about these families who received the guaranteed income was that they had better health outcomes – less mental health hospitalizations, accidents, and injuries. The high school completion rate went up during the years of the study, and young women were much less likely to have children before age 25. Most tellingly, Manitoba’s guaranteed income experiment brought most of its recipients above Canada’s poverty line.
As with the MINCOME experiments in 1970s Canada, recent cash transfer experiments, such as the pilot program run by Give Directly in Kenya and Uganda, have revealed that when you give people money, especially the poorest among us, they tend to invest in themselves instead of excessively spending on vices such as drugs and alcohol (another fear expressed by UBI naysayers).
I don’t see how poverty is beneficial to anyone. Some argue that there is a point to poverty, that it is even essential to the structure and functioning of society. But the only thing that poverty contributes to society that is even remotely “useful” is a systematically oppressed underclass to fill low-wage service jobs. It also creates dysfunction in families, communities, and society: crime, physical and mental health issues, abuse, neglect, and the list goes on. With a UBI granted to everyone, regardless of status, we’d see healthcare costs fall, crime stats fall. Why does anyone need to rob or steal if their basic needs are being met? Of course, you are never going to fully eradicate crime or poverty or any other social ill, because these are deeply complex phenomena whose origins lie in the darkest corners of the human condition. But UBI would be a hell of a fucking start, and we are at the perfect time in history to kick-start it.
America needs to change. We can’t keep up the level of prosperity that we’ve been at for the last 60 years or so because we’re seeing that it is coming at a very human cost. This country has not directly invested in its people in over 50 years, since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson, and even those systems, so visionary at the time, are now obsolete or nearly so. Instead, we over-invest in corporations and ramp up defense spending to the point where we are #1 in the world at it. The Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, so beautifully invoked in the Declaration of Independence nearly 250 years ago, has been replaced by The Right to Debt, Drudgery, and Pursuit of Things.
UBI is a beautiful idea because it encourages people to invest in themselves, their communities, industry, and their country, rather than encouraging dependence upon beleaguered government programs and stigmatizing those in need in the process. It will usher in an era of post-work, in which what you do isn’t so important, but what you choose to do is. It will end poverty as we know it. Is UBI the future? Or the now?
