From the article (read by all commenters, of course): """ The scale of the consensus on the idea is a far cry from a long-buried experiment in the rural Manito

From the article (read by all commenters, of course): """ The scale of the consensus on the idea is a far cry from a long-buried experiment in the rural Manitoba town of Dauphin in the 1970s, a comprehensive, five-year trial that is now regularly cited by advocates as the strongest proof yet that it works as a poverty reduction strategy. The experiment, known as ‘Mincome’, was jointly bankrolled by the then provincial New Democratic government and Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals, and offered an unconditional annual income to every family. Those that worked had their Mincome cut by 50 cents for every dollar earned. The idea was to offer a cushion for shifting crop prices or crop failures. The governments were interested to see whether such a support would produce a disincentive to work, a town full of lay-abouts. If successful, the long game was to roll out a similar plan nationwide. But the scheme ended up costing $17 million, much more than had been envisaged. It was scrapped as recession hit Canada at end of the decade. Almost 2000 boxes’ worth of data on the trial were packed away, not to be heard from again until University of Manitoba health sciences researcher Evelyn Forget tracked them down in 2009. She found that there was essentially no reduction in working hours with two notable exceptions: women who were mothers of young children, or had elderly or disabled relatives and who were now choosing to stay home, and teenagers, who now felt free to continue in school and not help out their parents on the farm. Meanwhile, there were fewer work-place injuries, fewer car accidents, less domestic abuse and hospital visits declined by 8.5 percent. """