An almost for­got­ten exper­i­ment proved just how much a decent income can help people’s health and edu­ca­tion. A small com­mu­nity in Man­i­toba, Canada par­tic­i­pated in a study back in the mid-70’s where every per­son in the town received a liv­ing wage for five years. Dur­ing those years, the stu­dent in the com­mu­nity stayed in school longer, and the res­i­dents rarely ever had to rely on Canada’s health system.

From The Van­cou­ver Sun, writer Norma Green­away helped to unearth the almost for­got­ten study.

“Once upon a time in Canada, there was a town where no one was poor.”

No, this is not the open­ing line of some yet to be writ­ten fairy tale. It’s the open­ing line in the sum­mary of a new report that con­tains some heart­en­ing news buried in a long ago and mostly for­got­ten exper­i­ment that ensured all res­i­dents in a small Man­i­toba com­mu­nity were guar­an­teed a min­i­mum annual income for five years in the mid-1970s.

With Canada awash in flu fears, cor­po­rate bank­rupt­cies, ris­ing job­less­ness and pen­sion woes, the grad­ual unearthing of a tiny piece of ‘utopian’ his­tory seems a timely reminder of the ben­e­fits of dar­ing to dream.

So far, researcher Eve­lyn For­get has dis­cov­ered that from 1974 through 1978, the res­i­dents of Dauphin were less likely to draw on the med­ical sys­tem than a con­trol group else­where in the province. Dauphin’s young peo­ple also stayed in high school longer. Within years of the exper­i­ment shut­ting down, those trend lines dis­ap­peared, For­get says.

For­get is bank­ing on learn­ing more about what was known as the MINCOME exper­i­ment once she gets access to about 1,800 sealed boxes, which, among other things, are jammed with per­sonal sur­veys of Dauphin res­i­dents who lived the exper­i­ment.
…

While it lasted, about one-third of Dauphin’s 10,000 poor res­i­dents got monthly cheques to boost their incomes.

The actual dol­lar fig­ures from the period seem shock­ingly small in today’s world. The for­mula for the guar­an­teed min­i­mum income trans­lated into incomes in 1974, for exam­ple, that ranged from $1,255 for a sin­gle per­son to about $4,000 for fam­i­lies of four or five people.

The program’s costs bal­looned as the 1970s pro­gressed and infla­tion took off, spurred in par­tic­u­lar by sky­rock­et­ing oil prices at the time.

Though there remains much to learn from the little-studied exper­i­ment, For­get says she’s increas­ingly per­suaded a guar­an­teed min­i­mum income is a “more rea­son­able, more just, more effi­cient and cheaper way” of elim­i­nat­ing poverty than the cur­rent sys­tem of tar­geted support

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