Motherboard: Universal Basic Income Is the Path to an Entirely New Economic System
Sooner rather than later, a robot is going to be able to do part or all of what you do for a living. In response to this and other pressures, the Canadian province of Ontario is gearing up to launch a basic income trial this summer. For a limited period of time, and in three regions across the province, the government will be giving people a living wage, for free and with no strings attached, and seeing how the hell it goes, eh?
It’s not the first time that Canadians have flirted with the idea. In the 1970s, the Manitoba government experimented with a basic income in the town of Dauphin. As a result, poverty was virtually eradicated and high school completion rates went up….
Aspects of a basic income will benefit future generations just as it did people in Dauphin decades ago, according to University of Manitoba professor Evelyn Forget, who has extensively studied the Dauphin experiment and others around the world.
“You’re going to reduce the poverty rate, and it’s going to give people more control over their lives,” Forget said. “They can invest in intellectual capital, they can get job training, and they can make longer-term decisions instead of focusing on how they’re going to feed the kids. Today, unlike in the ’70s, most people finish high school, but we may see higher completion rates in other kinds of education and training.”