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

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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.