"The Town Where Everyone Got Free Money: The ‘Mincome’ Experiment"

"Between 1974 and 1979, the Canadian government tested the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) across an entire town, giving people enough money to survive in a way that no other place in North America has before or since. For those four years—until the project was cancelled and its findings packed away—the town's poorest residents were given monthly checks that supplemented what modest earnings they had and rewarded them for working more. And for that time, it seemed that the effects of poverty began to melt away. Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school.

“Do we have to behave in particular ways to justify compassion and support?” Evelyn Forget, a Canadian social scientist who unearthed ​some of the findings of the Dauphin experiment, asked me rhetorically when I reached her by phone. “Or is simply human dignity enough?”...

This year, the Swis​s Parliament will vote on whether to extend a monthly stipend to all residents, and the Indian government has already begun replacing aid programs with direct cash transfers. Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich has called a BIG “alm​ost inevitable.” In the US, Canada, and much of Western Europe, where the conversation around radically adapting social security remains mostly hypothetical, the lessons of Dauphin might be especially relevant in helping these ideas materialize sooner rather than later."

http://newstoryhub.com/2015/02/the-town-where-everyone-got-free-money-the-mincome-experiment/

This is a conversation among the sort of technology futurist people, talking about how there are going to be fewer jobs - or, really, fewer jobs that are purely defined by behaviors that can be automated. And the categories of behaviors that can be automated are increasing. So it's like, can humans just be humans and still be able to survive on our society? It's like, what is a job, what is value to society, and there are way too many people in charge of this who have no educational background in these questions...