For four years in the 1970s, poverty simply didn't exist in Dauphin, Manitoba. Every resident was guaranteed enough money to live on, no questions asked. It was called Mincome, and it was one of the most ambitious social experiments ever conducted in North America.

Then the government changed, the program ended, and 1,800 boxes of data sat forgotten in a warehouse for decades.

How Mincome Actually Worked

Launched in 1974, the program offered a guaranteed annual income to every family in this small prairie town of about 10,000 people. If your income fell below a certain threshold, the government topped it up—no bureaucratic hoops, no proving you deserved it.

The amount wasn't lavish. A family of four received roughly $19,000 in today's dollars. But it was unconditional. You got the money whether you worked or not.

The Results Nobody Saw

When the program ended in 1979, a new conservative government came to power. They had no interest in analyzing data that might support giving people free money. The research was abandoned, and the boxes gathered dust.

It took until 2009 for economist Evelyn Forget to dig through those archives and publish her findings. What she discovered challenged nearly every assumption critics had made:

People didn't stop working. Employment dropped only 1% for men, 3% for married women, and 5% for unmarried women.
The people who did work less? New mothers spending time with infants. Teenagers staying in school instead of dropping out to support families.
Hospitalization rates dropped 8.5%. Fewer mental health visits, fewer accidents, fewer domestic violence incidents.
High school completion rates went up. Kids from Mincome families were more likely to graduate.

Why Did People Keep Working?

This was the question skeptics obsessed over. If you give people money for nothing, won't they just stop contributing to society?

The data suggested something more nuanced. The guarantee wasn't enough to live comfortably—it was a floor, not a ceiling. People still wanted better lives, nicer things, and the dignity that came with work. They just weren't desperate anymore.

That desperation, it turned out, had been causing a lot of problems. When you're not sure how you'll feed your kids next week, you make different decisions. Worse decisions. More hospital visits, more family breakdown, more kids dropping out to work dead-end jobs.

The Experiment's Quiet Legacy

Dauphin moved on. Most residents who lived through Mincome barely remember it—just a few years when government checks arrived and life got a little easier.

But the buried data has since inspired guaranteed income pilots around the world: Finland, Kenya, Stockton, California. Each one echoing that small Canadian town where, for a brief moment, they proved you could eliminate poverty if you simply decided to.

The 1,800 boxes of evidence sat in storage for thirty years. The question of whether we'll ever act on what they contained remains unanswered.

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