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# Does Basic Income Cause Divorce? 50 Years of Evidence Says No.
- URL: https://www.scottsantens.com/universal-basic-income-divorce-relationships-history/
- Published: 2026-10-06T16:54:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-11T17:56:18.000Z
- Author: Scott Santens

### The 1970s fear that UBI breaks up families came from a statistical error. Finland, Canada, Kenya, and Alaska show no rise in divorce, and instead better relationships with less domestic violence.

Researchers at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare just [published a study](https://www.demographic-research.org/articles/volume/55/21/?ref=scottsantens.com) in the journal *Demographic Research* that tackles a question basic income skeptics have been thinking they know the answer to for over half a century. Does giving people basic income break up families?

**The answer is no**. Using national registry data covering all 2,000 participants in Finland’s 2017–2018 basic income experiment and more than 173,000 people in the control group, the researchers found no evidence that basic income changed whether people moved in together, married, separated, or divorced. That held during the two-year experiment and for two years after it ended, for both men and women.

If anything, the numbers leaned toward more stability. By the end of 2020, about 14% of married basic income recipients had separated compared to 16% of married people in the control group, and cohabiting basic income recipients were somewhat more likely to marry. Those differences weren’t statistically significant though, so I wouldn’t claim them as findings. I’m just pointing out which way they lean.

However, Finland’s experiment had real issues [as I’ve written about](https://www.scottsantens.com/what-is-there-to-learn-from-finlands-basic-income-experiment-did-it-succeed-or-fail/) before. It only included unemployed people, it only lasted two years, and because it mostly swapped an existing unemployment benefit for an unconditional one, it didn’t add much new money for those who didn’t find work. The study’s authors say as much. But it’s the first test of this question in a Nordic welfare state, and it found no impacts of concern.

That should make this a non-story, but it *is* a story to tell, because fear of divorce once helped bury the closest the United States ever came to guaranteeing an income. So let’s talk about that fear, why it was wrong, and why it was never really about divorce.

## “Seemingly It Is Calamitous”

In 1969, President Richard Nixon proposed the Family Assistance Plan, which would have [guaranteed a family of four $1,600 a year](https://jacobin.com/2016/05/richard-nixon-ubi-basic-income-welfare/?ref=scottsantens.com). That’s roughly $14,600 in 2026 dollars. The House of Representatives [passed it on April 16, 1970](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-urging-senate-action-the-family-assistance-bill?ref=scottsantens.com). Then it hit the Senate Finance Committee and its chairman, Russell Long of Louisiana. [It died at his hands without ever reaching a floor vote](https://taxprofblog.aals.org/2021/12/22/guaranteed-income-chronicle-of-a-political-death-foretold/?ref=scottsantens.com), despite there being enough support in the Senate to pass it and a president waiting to sign it. Nixon tried again, and on June 22, 1971, the House [passed it a second time](https://voteview.com/rollcall/RH0920100?ref=scottsantens.com). Long’s committee stalled it again, and by the time the bill cleared the Senate in 1972, the plan had been [reduced to a pilot test that was then dropped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family%5FAssistance%5FPlan?ref=scottsantens.com) before Nixon signed it.

Long’s objection was that the plan would let poor people be choosier about low-wage work. According to a *New York Times* account, he once exclaimed to Nixon’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Elliot Richardson, [“I can’t get anybody to iron my shirts!”](https://web.archive.org/web/20240803203123/https://basicincometoday.com/fifty-years-later-reflecting-on-the-defeat-of-nixons-family-assistance-plan/) Near the end of his career, Long called the plan’s defeat the most rewarding victory of his four decades in the Senate. (By the way, [his dad Huey was very pro-UBI](https://www.hueylong.com/programs/share-our-wealth?ref=scottsantens.com)).

The idea continued to be tested though. Through the 1970s, the federal government ran a series of large income maintenance experiments, the biggest in Seattle and Denver, and in 1978 President Carter proposed his own cash assistance plan for poor families. Then came the divorce numbers.

The first Seattle-Denver results on marriage, published in 1977, appeared to show a near doubling of marital breakups among families receiving the income. The final report in 1983 put the increase at 40% to 60%. At 1978 Senate hearings on Carter’s plan, Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Russell Long both used the findings against it. Moynihan, an early champion of guaranteed income, then wrote to William F. Buckley that he’d been wrong, adding, [“Seemingly it is calamitous. It increases family dissolution by some 70%.”](https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/20/3/1395/6065770?ref=scottsantens.com) Conservatives piled on. George Gilder told Congress that millions of marriages would be put in jeopardy. Charles Murray cited the same findings in *Losing Ground* (despite later proposing [his own UBI plan](https://www.conallboyle.com/BasicIncomeNewEcon/MurrayReview.pdf?ref=scottsantens.com)).

The divorce conclusion stuck. A guaranteed based income “destroys” families.

## Oops, the Number Was Wrong

In the late 1980s, [economists Glen Cain and Douglas Wissoker](https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc104a.pdf?ref=scottsantens.com) went back to the Seattle-Denver data and found the conclusion didn’t hold up. Several features of the original analysis pushed the results toward vastly overstating breakups.

First, the experiment didn’t test one thing. It tested three: cash alone, a job training program alone, and cash combined with training. The original analysis lumped the cash-only and cash-plus-training groups together and called the result the effect of cash. Second, it emphasized families in the 5-year version of the experiment during only its first three years, rather than everyone over the full length of the study. Third, people dropped out unevenly. 20% of control couples left the study compared to 12% of couples receiving income, and the control families who dropped out were likely the ones going through upheaval, breakups included. Fourth, families receiving payments reported their household status every month because their payments depended on it, so even brief separations got recorded. Control families had no such reason to report.

There was also a result that should have stopped the presses. The plans that paid separated wives the *least*, no more than the welfare already available to them, appeared to cause the *most* breakups. No sensible story could explain that.

When Cain and Wissoker separated cash from training and used all the years of data, breakups among cash recipients were about 14% higher, a difference that was no longer statistically significant. After adjusting for the uneven dropout rates, the gap even fell to around 5%. Their verdict was that **the cash had an effect on marital stability “of no practical or statistical significance.”**

But the damage was already done. To this day, people still cite the false findings.

## What Were They Really Afraid Of?

Think about who was doing the worrying, and when. Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, a married woman generally [couldn’t get a credit card in her own name](https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5163432?ref=scottsantens.com). If a bank approved one at all, her husband co-signed and her credit history went to him. A wife who left often left with nothing — not even a credit history.

Notice what the fear assumed. It assumed the husband earned the money and the wife depended on him. It assumed a marriage held together by that dependence was a marriage worth protecting. And it assumed that if wives left husbands the moment they could afford to, the policy was the problem rather than the marriage itself.

In that world, a policy that let a woman afford to leave was treated as a threat to the family. The independence that terrified people back then is the same independence we now recognize as a precondition for marriage being an actual consensual choice.

I don’t think higher divorce rates would be a successful argument now against basic income even if true. If a woman leaves a marriage because for the first time she can afford to, the problem is the marriage. And we have good evidence of what happens when people gain the power to exit. When states adopted unilateral divorce, allowing either spouse to end a marriage without the other’s consent, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found [**an 8% to 16% decline in female suicide**](https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/5145?ref=scottsantens.com), roughly a 30% decline in domestic violence against both men and women, and a 10% decline in women murdered by their partners.

**The power to leave protects people in relationships even when they never use it.** An abuser who knows his partner can walk out has to behave differently. Economists call that bargaining power.

Basic income doesn’t even raise divorce rates, though. What it actually does is better.

## What Canada’s Experiment Found

In the 1970s, the Canadian province of Manitoba ran a negative income tax experiment called Mincome, including in the town of Dauphin, where *every* resident was eligible. Sociologists Pilar Gonalons-Pons and David Calnitsky dug into Mincome survey data that had sat largely unanalyzed for decades, including a survey of married women about life inside their marriages. Mincome was even designed so that splitting up wouldn’t pay a couple more than staying together.

They found that unhappy couples receiving Mincome became more likely to *talk* about separating, but separations overall did not increase. Mincome reduced the marital conflict that comes from financial stress. Some measures of wives’ bargaining power went up, and in Dauphin, disagreements over husbands’ habits, including drinking, fell significantly. Their conclusion was that **basic income has real potential to make family life *fairer* and *more equal***.

None of this should surprise anyone who has ever been in a relationship. We all know how much money fuels strife. Researchers who had couples record their arguments at home found that [money fights were more intense, lasted longer, and were more likely to stay unresolved](https://clipsheet.strategiccommunication.wisc.edu/?p=39196&ref=scottsantens.com) than fights about anything else. A study of more than 4,500 couples found that financial disagreements were [the strongest predictor of divorce](https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/4526?ref=scottsantens.com) of all the common things couples argue about. **Reduce the stress, and you reduce the strife**.

That’s what more equal power looks like inside a relationship. Couples who were miserable gained the ability to say so out loud. Couples who were fine got along better because they fought less about money. **Nobody’s marriage was destroyed by their guaranteed basic income. Their relationships *improved*.**

The same researchers also [studied crime in Dauphin](https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/%7Edcalnits/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Calnitsky-Gonalons-Pons-SP-manuscript-2020.pdf?ref=scottsantens.com) compared to similar towns. Violent crime fell by about 350 incidents per 100,000 residents in a town that averaged around 600, which works out to roughly 37% fewer violent crimes than Dauphin would otherwise have seen. Total crime fell around 15% by the same math. Assaults made up 89% to 96% of Dauphin’s violent crime, and Statistics Canada noted at the time that most assaults were domestic in nature. So the researchers concluded that **intimate partner violence was the most plausible candidate for the violence that declined**. This too has been observed elsewhere.

## Kenya, and the Kicking, Dragging, and Beating That Stopped

In Kenya, economists studying GiveDirectly’s unconditional cash transfers [measured intimate partner violence directly](https://www.povertyactionlab.org/sites/default/files/research-paper/Income-Changes-and-Intimate-Partner-Violence%5FHaushofer%5FRingdal%5FShapiro%5FWang%5FFebruary2019.pdf?ref=scottsantens.com). **Among women in households that received cash, the share who reported being kicked, dragged, or beaten by their husbands in the prior six months fell by 51%**. It got cut in half. Reports of being slapped fell by a third. Forced sex fell too.

Three details stand out to me here. Physical violence fell even when the cash went to the husband instead of the wife, suggesting reduced stress as the driver. Physical violence also fell among women in the same villages whose households received nothing, suggesting norms around violence also shifted across entire communities. And husbands’ own psychological wellbeing improved when their wives received the money. It was an all-around positive.

Now let’s also talk about the rest of a family.

## Healthier Kids, and More of Them

Researchers linked Alaska’s universal annual cash payments to child welfare records and found that [an extra $1,000](https://www.nber.org/papers/w31733?ref=scottsantens.com) in a child’s first few months of life made that child 10% less likely to be referred to Child Protective Services by age three. The extra cash also reduced child mortality.

Alaska’s dividend also appears to have led families to have more children. Since 1982, it has gone to every resident, including infants, and one study found it [increased fertility and shortened the spacing between births](https://www.nber.org/papers/w26712?ref=scottsantens.com), with an overall estimate as an increase of more than 13%. Another, by sociologists Sarah Cowan and Kiara Wyndham-Douds, found [births rose in the one to two years after payments](https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soac013?ref=scottsantens.com), with two average dividends instead of two minimum dividends raising the predicted fertility rate from about 80 to about 86.5 births per 1,000 women, roughly 8% higher.

I think the key here is that Alaska’s dividend scales with household size. A newborn gets the same dividend as a CEO. Every child added to a family adds a full share of income. When kids receive the same amount as adults, or something close to it, having a child doesn’t automatically make everyone in the household poorer. Any UBI meant to support families should keep that feature of including kids.

## More Time for the People We Love

Another finding keeps showing up across guaranteed income pilots in the US. People spend more time with their families and friends (without working less either).

In Stockton, California, recipients of $500 a month had more time for their families, and one of the lead researchers summed up the most important finding as [“financial scarcity generates time scarcity.”](https://nextcity.org/podcast/the-results-so-far-is-guaranteed-income-cutting-poverty?ref=scottsantens.com) Stockton recipients were also [better able to help out friends and family](https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2021/03/09/stockton-california-guaranteed-income-madison-wausau-pilots/?ref=scottsantens.com). In Cambridge, Massachusetts, caregivers receiving guaranteed income [spent more time with their children](https://sp2.upenn.edu/report-guaranteed-income-improved-financial-health-for-caregivers-in-cambridge-ma/?ref=scottsantens.com) while also being more likely to work full time than the control group.

Relationships run on time and attention. Poverty steals both, as does financial insecurity. When people aren’t juggling three jobs and constantly doing mental math about monthly bills, they have more of themselves to give to their partners, their kids, their friends, and their neighbors. That’s [social cohesion](https://www.scottsantens.com/universal-basic-income-ubi-increases-social-cohesion-capital-trust/), and every family and community needs more of it.

## But Wait, There’s More

There’s one more benefit of basic income that rarely gets discussed. The evidence suggests basic income would also likely improve people’s sex lives.

In a national survey of 2,783 married women in Vietnam, women who had a bank account in their own name or owned all or part of their home [reported greater sexual satisfaction](https://www.psypost.org/study-married-women-have-a-better-sex-life-when-they-own-property/?ref=scottsantens.com). So did women with higher incomes. The lead researcher’s interpretation was that owning property gives a woman more decision-making power in the family, including in her sex life, and may lead her husband to treat her more as an equal.

Research on American newlyweds points the same way. Spouses under more economic pressure [reported lower sexual satisfaction](https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/4548?ref=scottsantens.com). And in a nationally representative study of 1,447 newlywed couples, when wives felt less economic pressure, [both wives and husbands reported better sex](https://newprairiepress.org/jft/vol12/iss2/3/?ref=scottsantens.com).

None of these studies tested basic income directly, and the Vietnam study can only show a correlation, but put them next to what we already know. Having an income of her own raises a woman’s bargaining power. Less financial stress means less fighting. In Kenya, unconditional cash reduced forced sex. Sex that both people freely want, between partners who aren’t fighting about money, is better sex. I don’t think that’s a hard sell.

## The Exit Has to Belong to Each Adult

If you’ve watched *Maid* on Netflix, based on Stephanie Land’s memoir, you’ve seen how hard fleeing abuse is. The main character flees an emotionally abusive partner with her toddler and quickly learns that, without physical injuries or police reports, [the state doesn’t see her as a domestic violence victim](https://www.theringer.com/tv/2021/10/6/22711870/maid-review-netflix-margaret-qualley-andie-macdowell?ref=scottsantens.com). She can’t get subsidized childcare without a job, and she can’t get a job without childcare.

Leaving costs money. A deposit on an apartment, a few weeks of groceries, gas, a lawyer, all of it due before the first paycheck from a new job arrives, if one arrives at all. [Financial abuse occurs in 99% of domestic violence cases](https://nnedv.org/content/about-financial-abuse/?ref=scottsantens.com). Abusers control the money because money is the way out and economic hardship is [the primary reason women return to abusive partners](https://survivingeconomicabuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/SEA-response-Commission-on-Social-Security-Consultation-Final.pdf?ref=scottsantens.com).

That’s why *how* basic income is delivered matters as much as whether it exists. When the US sent pandemic stimulus checks based on joint tax returns, [many survivors’ payments went straight to their abusers](https://www.safehorizon.org/safe-horizon-in-the-news/domestic-violence-survivors-irs-recognize-financial-abuse?ref=scottsantens.com). In the UK, Universal Credit pays one combined benefit into one account per couple, and women’s organizations have [warned for years](https://wbg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/UC-financial-abuse.pdf?ref=scottsantens.com) that this hands more control to abusers. The workaround requires survivors to disclose abuse and request a split payment, and research by Women’s Aid found that [almost 85% of women in abusive relationships](https://www.edms.org.uk/2017-19/1033.htm?ref=scottsantens.com) felt requesting one would trigger even *worse* abuse.

Even Mincome paid households instead of individuals. A wife could leave and then collect as her own household, but the money didn’t arrive in her name while she was still in the relationship. Calnitsky and Gonalons-Pons argue that a basic income paid to every individual would likely do even more to reduce partner violence, because it puts resources directly in the hands of the less powerful partner and makes it harder for the more powerful one to seize the payments.

So a UBI built to best protect people needs to go to each adult, in their own name, into their own account, with no proof of abuse, no caseworker, and no application filed. It can’t stop when someone leaves, and the abuser can’t have any way to cancel it. It has to always be there, before the abuse starts, while it’s happening, and after someone leaves. A survivor shouldn’t have to wonder whether the money will still arrive next month, or whether leaving will disqualify them.

Virginia Woolf understood this nearly a century ago. In *A Room of One’s Own*, she argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write. Her narrator learns that an aunt has left her five hundred pounds a year, forever, around the same time Parliament gave women the vote, and she judges the money to be by far the more important of the two. What she prized most was its permanence. [“No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds.”](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/node/5428?ref=scottsantens.com) By one recent estimate, that’s [almost $38,000 a year today](https://newrepublic.com/article/206731/loneliness-room-one-virginia-woolf-hold-up?ref=scottsantens.com). A room of one’s own requires an income of one’s own.

**An individual UBI is an exit door that can’t be locked.** It also gives every adult the power to say “stop it” with the credibility that comes from being able to leave.

## The Fear Was Always About Power

In the 1970s, men with power looked at basic income and saw women who might leave them. They found that concern confirmed in data that turned out to be wrong.

Fifty years of evidence since tells a different story. Divorce didn’t rise in Seattle and Denver once the data was analyzed properly. It didn’t rise in Canada either. Most recently, it didn’t rise in Finland. What changes is violence, which fell in Dauphin and in Kenya. Child maltreatment fell in Alaska. Families had more kids. Couples fought less about money. People spent more time with the people they love and that time was more loving due to less stress and [real consent](https://www.scottsantens.com/dennis-explains-the-implication-of-saying-no-always-sunny-argument-for-ubi/).

The strongest relationships are the ones where everyone is free to leave and *chooses* to stay. UBI makes that choice real for every adult, every month, forever.

Moynihan called that choice enabled by basic income calamitous for families. I call it **the foundation** of any healthy, happy, and fully consensual relationship, which also happens to be [the best environment for raising kids](https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/turtles-all-the-way-down-the-biological).

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