The New Jersey Basic Income Experiment of the 60s-70s

In the 60s and 70s there were several Basic Income Experiments conducted in the USA. The first of these experiments was known as the New Jersey Income Maintenance Experiment. This experiment was the “Founding Experiment” for Mathematica, a company that performs public policy research and is still operating in Princeton, NJ, and that has recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. In this piece, I present a summary of the NJIME in case that is of interest for those of you studying or interested in the idea of Basic Income.

How did the Income Maintenance Experiments start?

The idea of a negative income experiment was proposed formally to the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) by Heather Ross, William Baumol and Albert Rees in 1966 (Kershaw & Fair, 1976). It was intended that the OEO would fund Mathematica to create a negative income tax experiment. The OEO department was headed by Joseph Kershaw, the father of David Kershaw who became Mathematica’s first president. However, it was proposed that the contract should be given to an academic rather than a for-profit company and the experiment was awarded to the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty, which had been funded with OEO money. Has soon as the grant was awarded, the Institute subcontracted with Mathematica to run the field operations and part of the…