Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

Hari acknowledges that current social and economic circumstances are a major obstacle to his ideas for reconnection: “Most people are working all the time, and they are insecure about the future” (298). He describes a social experiment the government of Canada conducted in the 1970s on the small town of Dauphin in Winnipeg. The government put the town’s citizens on a universal basic income, which gave them enough money to pay for basic necessities. The experiment ended after three years when a new political party came to power.

An economics student in Toronto, Evelyn Forget, and a group of researchers became the first to actually look at the data from the experiment after it was shut down. They found that people in Dauphin were able to start a business or get a postsecondary education, such as a woman who was the first person in her family to go to college and became a successful librarian. The number of babies with low birth weight declined, students performed better, and there was a 9% drop in serious mental illnesses, including depression (302). Forget argues that the need for a universal basic income has grown since the 1970s since it is harder to make a career and earn a pension after retirement, and the automation of jobs through technology has continued.