What happened to the tiny farming town where everyone got free money?

[MachineGhost]

[quote=http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/ ... 7209545071
]FORTY years ago, a tiny farming town in Canada was the stage for a groundbreaking social experiment.

Everyone who needed it would get free money.

The effect of the policy was astonishing. Dauphin, Manitoba thrived in almost every way.[/quote]

[Jan Van]

Cool. Guess the MMT folks have a thing to model their Job Guarantee after.

Of course, them Canadians were a bunch of socialist commies. 

[Lowe]

A small town, more or less of a single racial and religious background, where social policing is possible.

[MachineGhost]

A small town, more or less of a single racial and religious background, where social policing is possible.

That's a good point.  I think how it works out in India would be more instructive due to the many different ethnicities and classes there.

In Switzerland, it seems almost like an elitist afterthought considering how strict they are about who they allow to immigrate into the country and that they're all crony being the world's banking HQ, etc...  There just can't be any truly poor people there!

[stone]

Cool. Guess the MMT folks have a thing to model their Job Guarantee after.

Of course, them Canadians were a bunch of socialist commies. 

Actually I rather think the Job Guarantee advocates have a deep seated visceral hatred of the citizens' dividend advocates

I think they are somewhat different approaches with very different political philosophies.

A citizens' dividend supposes that people themselves have an idea of what they want and that individuals' ingenuity is the vital resource that needs to be allowed to flourish.

A Job Guarantee is purposefully intended to avoid any competition for labour. It is simply supposed to provide a floor price for labour at a living wage. The Job Guarantee  is supposed to fritter away the workers time in pointless toil whilst keeping them "work ready". It is a sort of ghastly mash of soviet ideology about the need to herd the proles around and blinkered MMT theorising IMO.

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=23719

The Job Guarantee jobs would ‘hire off the bottom’, in the sense that minimum wages are not in competition with the market-sector wage structure. By not competing with the private market, the Job Guarantee would avoid the inflationary tendencies of old-fashioned Keynesianism, which attempted to maintain full capacity utilisation by ‘hiring off the top’ (i.e. making purchases at market prices and competing for resources with all other demand elements).

I also thought that this was an interesting look at a citizens' dividend that resulted from a casino on a Cherokee reservation:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... pend/?_r=0

A cash infusion in childhood seemed to lower the risk of problems in adulthood. That suggests that poverty makes people unwell, and that meaningful intervention is relatively simple.

Bearing that in mind, Randall Akee, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a collaborator of Professor Costello’s, argues that the supplements actually save money in the long run. He calculates that 5 to 10 years after age 19, the savings incurred by the Cherokee income supplements surpass the initial costs — the payments to parents while the children were minors. That’s a conservative estimate, he says, based on reduced criminality, a reduced need for psychiatric care and savings gained from not repeating grades. (The full analysis is not yet published.)

But contrary to the prevailing emphasis on interventions in infancy, Professor Akee’s analysis suggests that even help that comes later — at age 12, in this case — can pay for itself by early adulthood. “The benefits more than outweigh the costs,”? Emilia Simeonova, a Johns Hopkins Carey Business School economist and one of Professor Akee’s co-authors, told me.

[MachineGhost]

It is a sort of ghastly mash of soviet ideology about the need to herd the proles around and blinkered MMT theorising IMO.

At first I thought it was going to be some kind of Brave New World kind of deal, but I agree that it is even worse than that.  Truly terrifying.