Canadian researcher Dr. Evelyn Forget says guaranteed income “works as an antidepressant.”
At junior school they told us a story about how the Sun and the Wind wagered over who could get a man to take his coat off. You may have seen it as a children's cartoon. The Wind blew and blew, but the man just held hard into his coat, and then it was the Sun's turn and he made the world sunny and warm and the man glady took his coat off. One tried to force the man and it didn't work, but the other offered gentleness and positive experience to influence the man and it was successful.
Many on the right want a hard world where people are forced to work. It works, because no one wants to starve, but at a price as it produces a harsh and unpleasant society and less productive people. It's counterintuitive, but the gentler approach works much better as welfare creates happier, more productive people who may go on to be self reliant.
Their children are happier too, and this affects vital brain development as they grow up, and so they become more successful as adults as well. It's an investment that we all benefit from: Less crime, less expense of prisons, safer streets, less drug and alcohol problems, happier employees who like work, and finally, more people at work paying taxes, which means lower taxes for the rest of us.
The Basic Income has been shown to bring the above benefits too, and is probably a lot more effective.
It shows how mainstream economics got so wrong about incentive. Libertarianism is no better, from which neoclassical economics is derived.
Then they stood back to see what would happen. Dr. Evelyn Forget, of the University of Manitoba, has carried out the most detailed research on this three-year experiment in a universal basic income. Many important things happened – there were significantly fewer low birth-weight babies, because mothers had better nutrition; people studied more and longer; hardly anyone gave up working, but some people turned down lousy jobs and held out for better ones, so overall work standards in the town improved. But the most important result? A big fall in depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental illness. In just three years, hospitalizations due to mental illness fell as much as 8.5 percent. Compare that to the past decade, where global depression rates have risen by 18 percent.
