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Launching the Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative
- bryanlarsen 8mo agoWhy rural Americans? The same amount of cash will go a lot further and likely be more effective in rural areas of other countries. The source of Atwood's wealth (Stack Overflow etc) is global, not American.
- rangestransform 8mo agoDeindustrialization has hollowed out most American cities outside of major cities, and the corresponding anti globalism tantrum contributed to the current political situation. Because of the apportionment of House and Senate seats, these people hold most Americans hostage with their disproportionate voting power, and paying a ransom seems better than the alternative we are living through.
- giraffe_lady 8mo ago[flagged]
- hshdhdhj4444 8mo agoNope. Globalism has made America richer than pretty much any nation in the existence of human history. The election of leaders who prioritize the distribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest rather than vice versa has hollowed out rural America. And rural America disproportionately votes for such leaders.
- js8 8mo agoTechnically you're not wrong, but without globalization, deindustrialization wouldn't have happened and unions (and strike threats) would probably be strong enough to prevent the poor to rich redistribution. So even if globalization made America richer on average, it also destroyed the fair redistribution mechanism.
- Sparkle-san 8mo agoWhy not rural Americans? When helping someone in my community, I don't first stop and analyze whether my time/money could be better allocated to maximize some sort of utilitarian loss function, I help them because they're there, need my help, and I'm able to help.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- evanjrowley 8mo agoI don't disagree with you, but there is value in considering how money could be best put to use for the common good. One perspective overlooked here is the purchasing power of non-Americans (i.e., not U.S. citizens). Dollars in developing countries can be worth multiple times what they are in the United States. For example, you could help 5000 rural Vietnamese for every 1000 rural Americans. There is also a higher potential for rural Americans to obtain dollars vs. non-Americans. In utilitarian terms you have the potential to do more good by sending money to rural communities overseas. I'm saying this as someone who loves Appalachia.
- Sparkle-san 8mo agoThere's a lot of value in helping out locally as well. I don't have as much lived experience of someone in Vietnam as I do someone in my community. Nor do I understand the language or the culture. There's more overhead in making it happen and there will likely be a lot of things I'll never take into account or understand. On the other hand, I know what it's like living in a HCOL state where many jobs don't pay enough for a family to survive and have struggled in my own past. Could my money have more purchasing power elsewhere? Sure. And they're still people in my community struggling and I have the power to help them and a greater understanding of what they're facing. Community seems to get discounted a lot in the discussion around effective altruism and I think that's unfortunate.
- evanjrowley 8mo agoWhat I know for sure is, if I could, I would invest my money into clean drinking water infrastructure for both communities. Helping families pay the water company to distribute jugs of filtered drinking water is great, but infrastructure that's not contaminated would be so much better for everyone.
- OGEnthusiast 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ralfd 8mo agoHe writes: > because that’s exactly where my parents and I are from.
- antonymoose 8mo agoNot to mention one of his choices is a white-minority county in rural Mississippi. The idea that Jeff Atwood of all people is a raging racist is insanely laughable to anyone that has followed his work over the last 15+ years.
- jccooper 8mo agoBecause this is not about charity, but about politics. Specifically demonstration with the intention of advocacy. The advocacy falls down when the demonstration is less applicable.
- codinghorror 8mo ago"Why rural Americans? The same amount of cash will go a lot further and likely be more effective in rural areas of other countries." Again, the data goes into an open global repository that DOES help the entire world. We will all learn from it. When our house is currently on fire, I think we should deal with that first. It's also "yes, and". Gates Foundation (among others) is working on other areas of the world and has vastly more money.
- bombcar 8mo agoA direct answer - because if you donate and work with people near you, you have to deal with the people. It doesn't sound like much, but it's the whole linchpin - you have to face the reality and often realize that what you want to do simply can't be done for any number of reasons, and then you have to back up and try a different tactic. If you ship your money across the globe you can sit back and be content that it's working well based on the glossy reports you get; you don't have to actually deal with the people as people; just as statistics.
- chrisBob 8mo agoIf AI and robotics reach their logical goals then projects like this are about to become more and more important. I don't mind machines taking all of the jobs, as long as all of those displaced workers don't starve.
- OutOfHere 8mo ago[flagged]
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoYour point with regards to criteria has merit, but this is unlikely to move the needle as Rural America continues to hollow out, so it's their funds to run the experiment. West Virginia has one of the oldest populations in the country (3rd [1]) while having the lowest birth rate (~16k/year and falling), for example (one of their pilots was in Mercer County, WV). Similar for Mississippi (highest out migration in the US [2] [3]). There is simply no political appetite for the spending required in this regard without broad system changes to enable remote work to support rural communities as employers leave and agriculture dies. As you mention, this population cohort is what SNAP and Medicaid was stripped from. If some people have better lives through direct cash transfers while the outcome isn't going to change, that's fine I suppose. There are worse hobbies someone with resources could have. TLDR Rural America will remain in decline [4] [5], urbanization will continue (because that's where the economic potential and jobs are). [1] https://www.wboy.com/news/west-virginia/west-virginia-has-third-oldest-population-in-the-united-states/ https://www.wboy.com/news/west-virginia/west-virginia-has-th... [2] https://www.wapt.com/article/mississippi-ranks-among-top-states-people-are-leaving-national-moving-study-finds/69882639 https://www.wapt.com/article/mississippi-ranks-among-top-sta... [3] https://mississippitoday.org/2025/07/15/faq-mississippi-brain-drain-crisis/ https://mississippitoday.org/2025/07/15/faq-mississippi-brai... [4] ‘Too many old people’: A rural Pa. town reckons with population loss - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583495 - June 2024 (81% of rural counties recording more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023) [5] Map Shows 21 States Where Deaths Now Outnumber Births - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889024 - February 2026 (I track the decline of Rural America broadly to reach out to institutions to ingest their data and collections for long term archival before they evaporate)
- OutOfHere 8mo ago"Agriculture dies" makes zero sense. Have people stopped eating food and plants? There are hundreds to thousands of plants with commercial value that are grown around the globe. You're trying to tell me that WV can't grow one of them profitably. Or maybe it's because they've so thoroughly and irreversibly poisoned their soil and water to where nothing good will grow anymore.
- readthenotes1 8mo ago"Those 10 words had a profound effect on the world. " And are a paraphrase of even older words: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." ~30AD And probably even older than that.
- ranprieur 8mo agoThis is better than nothing, but the big advantage of the UBI is that there is no bureaucracy deciding who gets it and doesn't get it. If there are any conditions on the income, then there's a constant danger that the program will become another tool of control.
- wang_li 8mo agoFeb 1: receive monthly UBI payment Feb 2: spend all of it on strippers/drugs/alcohol/twinkies/etc. Feb 3: I'm hungry. Unless you are prepared to let the idiots starve to death, UBI will never work.
- cwillu 8mo agoYes yes, your 30 word dismissal completely obliterates all contrary evidence.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ryanmcbride 8mo agoI also like getting angry at situations I made up in my head
- hmry 8mo agoFeb 1: receive monthly paycheck Feb 2: spend all of it on strippers/drugs/alcohol/twinkies/etc. Feb 3: I'm hungry. Unless you are prepared to let the wagies starve to death, wages will never work. Or to put it in less sarcastic terms: Why would UBI payments be more likely to be squandered than any other monthly payments? Especially by people who can't afford food without it. Are there any studies that show such behavior?
- some_furry 8mo agoEDIT: Wow, I misread.
- jmathai 8mo ago> all we want to do is advance the concept of direct cash transfer I love the simplicity of this. I've been thinking a lot about generosity myself. And while I don't have $100m, our family also has everything we need. What ideas, resources and tools are there for folks like me who want to be as generous as possible with what we have? To start, I've set up a Donor Advised Fund because I learned that it's a great way to do something with a bunch of appreciated stock that I don't want to pay taxes on. What other tips do you all have?
- bombcar 8mo agoLocal is often the best way, especially if you don't have resources that would overwhelm them (donating $1 billion to a local food pantry would likely blow it up). But get involved personally; attend meetings, talk to people in the community, get to know what is being done and by whom, and places where some money goes a long way will start to become clear. In my experience the all-volunteer places are often way underfunded and don't really know what they're doing beyond helping people; if you can help guide them it can be incredibly valuable.
- codinghorror 8mo ago100% do things locally. If there is a food bank in your area, support it heavily. That's the absolute base of the hierarchy of needs. For example, in that blog post, expand the immediate donations. Note $100k to Alameda Food Bank, where my partner Betsy regularly volunteers.
- jmathai 8mo agoThanks. We are involved in The Healing Center locally and that’s definitely a place to lean in on “more heavily”. https://www.healingcentercincinnati.org/ https://www.healingcentercincinnati.org/
- micromacrofoot 8mo agoadvocate for policy change where possible, locally first
- skybrian 8mo agoI’m not sure which parts are supposed to be new since his previous post. [1] I think it’s the website? [2] [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-not-taken-is-guaranteed-minimum-income/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-not-taken-is-guarante... [2] https://rgmii.org/ https://rgmii.org/
- codinghorror 8mo agoYes, within 8 months we went from "how do we make systemic change" to actually doing it. This is proof. And the GMI topics are on that dedicated site, not Coding Horror.
- codexb 8mo agoI'm always surprised how even the people I consider incredibly intelligent get pulled into bad ideas.
- codinghorror 8mo agoWhat's bad about this idea? I'd like to know.
- hirpslop 8mo agoAmerican government cash transfers overwhelmingly skew rural with the caveat that income maintenance is a smaller slice of the pie. This report illustrates rural cash transfers beautifully: https://eig.org/great-transfermation/ https://eig.org/great-transfermation/
- bombcar 8mo agoPart of this is causal - if you're on what used to be called "fixed income" (read: social security) you migrate to places where your costs are lower; which is often rural areas. Another part is that they're looking at total income over county-levels, which means that one Bill Gates or Elon Musk in your county will wipe out millions of people receiving "transfer payments". > In contrast, many metropolitan hubs, affluent suburbs and exurbs, and high-income, high-productivity farming and mining communities remain minimally reliant on transfer income to power their local economies. This may or may not be true; depends on the money flow, rich cities can have large swaths of poor people.
- codinghorror 8mo agoThe largest chunk of federal "cash transfers" is not welfare; it is retirement and disability spending. The rural population is significantly older than the urban population. Bear in mind that rural poverty rates (~17%) remain persistently higher than urban poverty rates (~12%). And in a high-wage urban area (e.g., Seattle), a $20,000 Social Security check is a tiny fraction of the local per capita income. In a rural area, that same $20k check represents a much larger slice of the total economic pie. This makes the reliance on government cash appear massive -- ~29% rural and ~17% urban -- even if the absolute dollar difference is more modest. Also, metro areas receive MASSIVE amounts of federal contracting money (defense, science, universities, federal employees), whereas rural areas get virtually none. Mostly this is caused by the "graying" of rural America and the persistent lack of high-wage employment in rural areas.
- rightlane 8mo agoThis honestly rubs me the wrong way. I have very close friends who mightily struggle financially but they are always just outside the threshold for assistance. Basic statistics don't capture the people who are barely making it or living on debt. The appeal to me of UBI was always that it was highlighting that everyone needs their basic needs met. The moderately paid worker barely making rent in SF needs the money as much as anybody but would never pass a means test.
- bombcar 8mo agoIt sounds harsh and mean, but banning unsecured credit cards outright would probably help tons of people in the long run.
- codinghorror 8mo agoit's "yes, and". Help those people who are selling their blood to buy happy meals first. I am not exaggerating. I wish I was. Check out the book "$2.00 a day: Living On Almost Nothing in America" for so much evidence. Disclaimer: I know the author now. Because I have to. It's related to the work we're doing. https://www.google.com/search?q=%242+a+day%3A+living+on+almost+nothing+in+america https://www.google.com/search?q=%242+a+day%3A+living+on+almo... Beyond that, maybe SF really is too expensive a place to live in.
- bombcar 8mo agoI think too many people (especially here, but it's understandable) think poverty just is "barely making rent". Oh, that's the rich poverty! There are so many layers below that where it ceases to be poverty and starts being something else entirely, an entire alternate system of bartering and deals and staying alive day to day.
- micromacrofoot 8mo ago> The moderately paid worker barely making rent in SF needs the money as much as anybody You should look into how not true this is. Financial strain is not financial insecurity.
- RickJWagner 8mo agoMary Gates? A gentleman named Luke said “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required” a long time ago. https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Luke%2012%3A48 https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Luke%2012%3A48
- jwx48 8mo agoI’d love to know how Mercer County, West Virginia was chosen. I grew up there.
- paleogizmo 8mo agoThis post is a bit old, but it's worth bringing up just what a terrible idea this is. The author takes the chief benefit of UBI and removes its main benefit which is the lack of means-testing. Then he makes it even dumber by restricting beneficiaries to rural areas where jobs are less prevalent.