Doctoral Dissertation Research: When Poverty Disappears: Investigating the Impact of a Universal Guaranteed Income

Erik O.WrightDavid Calnitsky威斯康星州大学如果消除贫困，小镇会发生什么？如果所有居民突然都能通过普遍的收入转移机制以大量现金支付的形式实现真正的经济保障，会发生什么？这项研究考察了20世纪70年代末一个未被充分研究的准实验的影响，该实验名为马尼托巴省基本年收入实验，或称MinCome。由加拿大和马尼托巴省政府实施的明科姆项目，测试了一项为期三年的全民基本年收入计划。该计划的参与者能够为一个四口之家获得相当于18,725加元的保证收入。虽然MinCome发生在三个主要地点，但研究重点是位于马尼托巴省Dauphin镇的所谓“饱和”地点，那里的所有居民都有资格获得MinCome付款。关于基本收入及其融入广泛的资本主义经济的主题，有广泛的理论文献。争论主要集中在对劳动力供应和劳动关系的影响上，其次是性别和家庭关系。还有一本关于贫困的更大的相邻文献，它仍然与基本收入可能影响从犯罪到福利国家管理的广泛社会结果的方式相关。本文将小城镇的基本收入作为自变量，其中工作、性别和家庭、教育、犯罪和暴力以及社会政策的污名效应被视为因变量。未来几十年的挑战可能与其说是寻找新的就业来源，不如说是分配稳步增长的产出。当代的经济瓶颈可能不是因为人们愿意工作，而是因为就业的可靠生产。尽管如此，关于保障最低收入政策可能以何种方式运作的证据仍然很少。明康是一次史无前例的实验，提供了丰富的信息来源，应该进一步分析。虽然没有一项实验可以一劳永逸地回答工作-收入关系的广泛重塑所带来的所有深刻问题，但Dauphin实验的结果有可能为这一主题提供宝贵的知识。

SES-1333623Erik O. WrightDavid CalnitskyUniversity of WisconsinWhat would happen to a town if poverty were eliminated? What would happen if all residents suddenly could achieve genuine economic security in the form of substantial cash payments through a universal income transfer mechanism? This research examines the impact of an understudied quasi-experiment from the late 1970s called the Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment, or Mincome. Mincome, conducted by the Canadian and Manitoba Governments, tested a three-year universal basic annual income program. Participants in the program were able to secure guaranteed incomes equivalent to $18,725 CDN for a family of four. While Mincome took place in three main sites, the study focuses on the so-called "saturation" site located in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, where all town residents were eligible for Mincome payments. There is a wide-ranging theoretical literature on the subject of basic income and its integration into a broadly capitalist economy. Debates focus primarily on the effects on the labor supply and work relations, and secondarily on gender and familial relations. There is an even bigger adjacent literature on poverty that remains relevant to the way a basic income might affect broad social outcomes from crime to the administration of the welfare state. This dissertation treats basic income in a small town as the independent variable, where work, gender and the family, education, crime and violence, and the stigma effects of social policy are treated as dependent variables.Broader Impact While economic growth has been fairly steady since the 1990s, unlike the post-war decades it has been increasingly disconnected to employment growth. The challenge of the coming decades may be less about the search for new sources of employment than the distribution of a steadily expanding output. The contemporary economic bottleneck may not be due to people's willingness to work, but rather the dependable production of employment. Nonetheless, there is still little evidence on the various ways a guaranteed minimal income policy might operate. Mincome was a unprecedented experiment and provides a rich source of information that should be further analyzed. While no experiment can answer once and for all the deep questions posed by the broad reshaping of the work-income relationship, findings from the Dauphin experiment has the potential to contribute valuable knowledge on the subject.