There was once a town in Canada that essentially eliminated poverty, and at the time no one seemed to know. One filmmaker is doing his best to shine a bright light on the research into this town.
Vincent Santiago is producing “The Mincome Experiment” documentary that looks into the Manitoba experiments in the 1970s, which provided a minimum income guarantee to the entire town of Dauphin. Santiago recently spoke with The UBI Podcast about his project.
“The experiment was completed but there was a change in government in Manitoba and federal level so experiment was never analyzed,” Santiago said.
That is until Dr. Evelyn Forget of the University of Manitoba began digging up these old records. Forget found there was a reduction in hospital visits and instances of mental health issues in the area with a minimum income. Despite worries, there was no large reduction in the amount of work being done, Santiago said.
“The only sector that was affected was the mothers who gave birth and the teenagers who stopped working to finish high school,” Santiago said.
Santiago said any new idea like minimum income guarantee will cause backlash, especially if the research is not explained well.
“Just like when they first introduced universal health care in Canada, there was a lot of opposition,” he said.
In order to explain these results, Santiago said it is important for the basic income movement to focus on public relations. He said his documentary is an important way to show the positive results of minimum income systems.
“I would like to make this documentary to dispel a lot of these misconceptions,” he said.
Currently, Santiago is running a crowdfunding campaign to help cover the costs of production for the film.
Joe Huston, the CFO of GiveDirectly, speaks with the UBI Podcast about the largest basic income trial in history.
The trial is in its earliest stage and will expand later, giving entire communities a basic income in Kenya.
A 12-year basic income will be provided to 40 villages, 80 villages will receive basic income for 2 years. A lump-sum payment will be given to 80 villages. There will be 100 villages that will act as control groups.
One interesting takeaway is that Huston said they are already seeing some “spillover benefits.”
“I expect there will be spillover benefits. We kicked off in one pilot village, and already the surrounding villages have mentioned people are buying more services and goods,” Huston said.
When discussing pilot programs, the environmental impact of basic income is often overlooked. Huston said that GiveDirectly does not take a position on this, but he said developed countries should take the lead on the environment.
“My personal view is for these environmental goals you’d want to solve through other means, international treaties or the developed world stepping up, verses trying to slow down development of very very poor areas,” he said.
As the research begins to come out about basic income, Huston said he hopes it can inform the debate about how to best form the social safety net.
“I think evidence from the UBI study showing those who are just poor but receive money and put that toward investment that have big life-changing effects, I think that could change how social protection is done in those countries,” Huston said.
Previously, even after cash-transfer pilots end, Huston said that they continue to see positive effects.
“GiveDirectly’s first study measured effects up to a year after payments stopped…and you still saw pretty strong effects on earnings, assets, food security, reduction in stress levels,” Huston said.
Stress was measured through looking at cortisol levels, which saw significant declines after cash-transfers were administered, Huston said.
Once the 12-year study ends, Huston said he expects they will continue to follow up with these villages to see if there are permanent effects of basic income on these areas.
“We have the potential to end extreme poverty globally, many countries have the potential to end whatever they consider their national poverty line. And that potential…is extraordinarily exciting. It is a huge opportunity for our generation,” Huston said.
“Then the question is, ‘why wouldn’t we test this?'”
Zoltan Istvan is running for governor of California in 2018 and has made headlines for his proposal to develop California lands and use the revenue to form a Universal Basic Income for all California households.
Istvan, who is running as a Libertarian and also ran for president in 2016, recently spoke to the UBI Podcast to discuss his proposal and why he believes it is the surest path to a basic income.
By monetizing federal lands in California, Istvan said he wants to “kill two birds with one stone” by eliminating poverty and pushing economic development in the state. Based on his research, Istvan said each California household could receive over $50,000 annually if the 45 million acres of unused land were developed.
“If we developed land and resources in California, we would be able to afford a basic income,” he said. “I’ve promised to do all of this without raising taxes.”
This plan, he said, would “lift 19 million Californians out of poverty.”
“It doesn’t matter what party you are running for, that is totally unacceptable,” Istvan said.
“With this large of a basic income, the welfare system would naturally go away because they would not have to rely on the state,” Istvan said. He expressed that this form of basic income will also “avoid the traditional opposition from business interests because it would open new development opportunity.”
“Implementing the basic income this way would attract support from both sides,” Istvan said, “because it would develop the economy and help the poor.”
Some of the primary criticisms of this plan are likely to come from environmentalists. But Istvan, who once worked for Wild Aid and National Geographic, said that environmentalists should not be worried, and eliminating poverty should be a high priority for the left.
“We can make all the arguments we want for why preserving the environment is good, but for me feeding people, giving them the right education, these are things that matter more,” Istvan said.
To ensure that the land was preserved, Istvan said the land would be “leased, not sold”, and the land will have to be returned to the state in its previous condition or better. The plan will not involve national parks.
“The environment can be preserved through radical green technologies that are just on our front door,” he said.
If Istvan is elected, he said he would immediately begin pushing this proposal. Once the revenue starts coming in from the development, Istvan said he could begin handing out a partial basic income.
“I want to transform poverty. It is just insane to me as somebody who loves technology and science that in the Twenty First Century we have a system where 40 percent of Californians are at the poverty line,” Istvan said. “This is something that does not just sound wrong to me, it sounds outright insane.”
The team behind the upcoming Bootstraps documentary, which will follow a group of actual basic income recipients, has launched a crowdfunding campaign.
Conrad Shaw and Deia Schlosberg, the Bootstraps team, announced the campaign on the UBI Podcast to raise $50,000, in the next two months, to start a pilot program with real people.
Once the first $50,000 is raised, Shaw said they can begin handing out the basic income, initially, to a small number of recipients. Each recipient will receive $1,000 a month for two years.
For each $50,000 raised, they will be able to fund two basic income recipients.
Every time $50,000 is raised, a member of the Bootstraps newsletter can choose an American to participate in the documentary and receive a basic income.
In addition, those that contribute to the crowdfunding campaign can get rewards, such as a Bootstraps t-shirt or even tickets to the premier of the documentary.
The overall purpose of the campaign is to bring awareness of basic income to the “public at large” in the United States.
“The reason our pilot is different is that it is designed to facilitate storytelling,” Schlosberg said.
To carry out the campaign, the team is working with Handup, an organization that is focused on helping homeless individuals. Shaw said the leader of Handup is a proponent of basic income.
Schlosberg is confident that greater media interest will follow once they raise enough money.
“A lot of people have said ‘Sounds great. Get back to us once it is up and running.’”
Each day, the team will release a UBI thought of the day, which will often be accompanied by an interview with one of many basic income scholars they have interviewed.
“We’ve been interviewing a lot of thinkers on UBI and we have hours and hours of amazing material,” Schlosberg said. “We want these great thoughts out there.”
So far, most of the academics whom the team has interviewed have been proponents of the basic income. The larger resistance to the idea, Shaw said, has been from people on the street.
“What we find, in general, is it is all about how you sell the idea. Basic income sells itself,” Shaw said.
In the last six months, during the initial stage of the documentary, the general public has become much more aware of the basic income, Shaw said.
For Shaw, the campaign is an important step in establishing a Universal Basic Income throughout the country.
“You have to pick which projects have the best chance of having a large impact and we designed this project to fill a hole that we see,” Shaw said.
Hong Kong’s newspaper of record, South China Morning Post, recently covered the surge of interest in Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the Asia Pacific.
The author, David Green, points out the positive data that has been demonstrated thus far from cash-grant experiments, such as in India.
South Korea has had interest in basic income since the “youth dividend” was implemented in Seongnam city. BIEN held its Congress in South Korea last year.
The article notes that Taiwan is seeing increased interest in the idea of basic income since the first Asia Pacific focused Basic Income conference was held in Taipei.
The headline references China’s dibao program, which is a cash-grant minimum income guarantee. The dibao has many differences to UBI as conceived by Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). Primarily, dibao is not a universal cash-grant (dibao is means-tested and only given to those that are under the dibao poverty line).
Due to dibao’s means-tests, the article notes there are an array of issues with China’s minimum income guarantee, primarily that it does not reach the poor.
Tyler Prochazka, features editor of BI News, was quoted as advocating for China to create “special economic zones” to test a UBI.
