A UBI eliminates the stigma of welfare – the Mincome experiment in Canada proves

By now the Mincome experiment is well known. In the 1970s, every resident of Dauphin, a small Manitoba town, was given the option to collect substantial cash payments without work requirements. Economist Evelyn Forget’s findings about Mincome’s positive effects on health and education helped to resuscitate the concept of a basic income in Canada. With basic income pilots on the horizon, it is worth considering new lessons from an old experiment. One of the most important, but overlooked, virtues of basic income is the absence of social stigma. The routine humiliation of the poor, an enduring feature of highly conditional social assistance systems, melts away in a universally available basic income regime. As one Dauphin participant wrote midway through the experiment, “It trusts the Canadian people and leaves a man or woman, their pride.” Mincome collected data on an extraordinary range of issues, most of which sat in boxes for decades. I have been digitizing a number of those lost surveys, and I recently reported on findings related to social stigma during the Mincome years. When you compare people’s views of Mincome to welfare what stands out is that people took ardent, moralistic positions about welfare, but were pragmatic when asked about Mincome. In fact, the social meaning of Mincome was powerful enough that even participants who opposed welfare on moral grounds and believed strongly in the principle of earning one’s own living felt able to collect government payments without a sense of contradiction. One person refused welfare, writing, “I feel that [welfare] is more for disabled or people which are too lazy to work. It doesn’t include us, we’re both able and willing to work but can’t get a job due to the low employment rate.” They joined Mincome for pragmatic reasons: they were “short of money.” The design of our social policies has an important but under-appreciated effect: To increase rather than decrease social cleavages among the country’s poor and working people. If you’re older and need a steady income stream we have one set of policies for you. If you can’t find work, and meet certain criteria, we have another policy. And if you can’t find work, but don’t meet that criteria, we have another still. Together, the policies place recipients on a gradient of deservingness.