As it is such a massive societal change, some sort of testing and experimentation would have to be done, I think. The recent Freakonomics episode on the topic

As it is such a massive societal change, some sort of testing and experimentation would have to be done, I think. The recent Freakonomics episode on the topic talked about a Canadian experiment "Mincome" from the 70s. There were some interesting results. Worth a listen. "FORGET: One of the findings was that high-school completion rates had increased, and we discovered that boys, in particular, in low-income families had been under a fair amount of pressure to become self-supporting as quickly as they could. When mincome came along, some of the families decided that they could allow their sons to stay in high school just a little bit longer. So instead of quitting school at age 16 and getting their first full-time job, these boys stayed in school until they were 18, until they graduated from high school and took their first full-time job a little bit later." http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mincome/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mincome/