NYC pays poor residents for "good behaviour"

by Kaitlin | June 20, 2007 at 06:23 am

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NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has put the wheels in motion for a plan to pay the city's poor residents for exhibiting so-called "good behaviour." Bloomberg has modeled this plan after similar programs in Mexico and Brazil that have proven effective; the payout program would commence this fall.

Among the possible rewards in New York's program are $25 for attending parent-teacher conferences, $25 a month for a child who maintains a 95-per-cent school attendance record, $400 for graduating high school, $100 for each family member who sees the dentist every six months and $150 a month for adults who work full time.

According to analysts, however, it's a program that ignores some of the basic issues that have led to the poverty in question:

"It just reinforces the impression that if everybody would just work hard enough and change their personal behaviour we could solve poverty in this country and that's not reflected in the facts," said Margy Waller, co-founder of Inclusion, a research and policy group in Washington.

How would such a program fly in Vancouver, I wonder? And who would get the money?

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