This 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.
As a contrast to means-tested welfare the U in UBI (whether “Universal” or “Unconditional”) generally is refers to the absence of means- and behavior-testing, it generally does not actually mean that there is no defined scope of eligibility (usually citizens or legal residents of a particular polity, possibly also with an age floor.)
As for a "does this person actually live in this area" criteria, I have a hard time seeing that single thing alone as "bureaucracy" -- it's quite common.
The EITC was inspired by advocacy for a Negative Income Tax (which is generally isomorphic to UBI funded by income taxes, despite coming from the opposite side of the political spectrum.) But the designers couldn't avoid giving in to all the same problems with means-tested welfare that both UBI and NIT seek to eliminate, except or the separate eligibility bureaucracy, which integrating it into the income tax system avoided.
Of course, a GMI also differs from a UBI/NIT because that term generally refers to means-tested welfare with a sharp (usually 1:1 but not >1:1, which sometimes happens with means-tested welfare programs in aggregate in some ranges) cliff at starting at $0 in outside income up to the level of the minimum guarantee, whereas UBI/NIT benefits have a (usually much) <1:1 clawback via the tax system.
with GMI the conditions are very simple math: what percent of the poverty line are you within?
I agree that adding a lot of conditions is part of the problem, but "help those who most need it first" seems like a very logical primary (and perhaps only) condition.
Feb 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?
I suppose the difference is that we have a means-tested program which the wagies can fall into. Was the proposal to have a UBI with a means-tested program behind it? I thought most UBI proponents count on turning off the means-tested program in order to fund the UBI program.
At $1k/month for 340m people, we will double social welfare spending per capita if we don't turn off the existing programs. That will put the US at the tippy-top of per-capita spending above even Luxembourg. Fascinating.
Hmm, means-tested program behind UBI would mean you get more money if UBI is not enough, right? I have heard some arguments in favor of that, for example for disabled people. You are right that those programs need to be a lot smaller and simpler to be worth the bureaucracy. But I doubt "I spent it all on prostitutes" would qualify you for that.
Other UBI advocates don't want any additional program like that. I think healthcare would need to change a lot to make that viable.
Or if you mean spending restrictions like those that exist for food stamps, then yeah, UBI usually means getting rid of those. So the argument there would be "people who are on food stamps instead of a job are idiots (sic) / too irresponsible to spend it wisely, so we must control what they spend it on", which is one of the foundational ideas that UBI advocates disagree with.
I'd like to add that I feel quite strongly "Universal" and "Basic" are hugely probematic words. You end up with massive digressions immediately.. case in point.. look at this AMA for proof:
How much of that MASSIVE SET OF DIGRESSIONS (which Neil handled like a gentleman, because he's a truly nice person) could have been avoided by not using "universal" (like, every atom in the universe? every person in the world? every mammal in this country) and "basic" (what is basic, even?) ..
The 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.
Part 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.
> 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?
Local 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.
100% 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.
Yes, 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.
If 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.
This 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.
it'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+almo...
Beyond that, maybe SF really is too expensive a place to live in.
I 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.
Your 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).
[4] ‘Too many old people’: A rural Pa. town reckons with population loss - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583495 - June 2024 (81% of rural counties recording more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023)
(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)
"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.
Average age of a farmer is 58, China has reconfigured their imports towards South America for trade stability. "Agriculture dies" = Rural America agriculture, which is needed to sustain Rural America economies.
Farmers also commit suicide at ~3.5x the rate of the general public; it is too early to tell imho how much of the strife I enumerate below will lead to changes in that statistic.
Why 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.
Deindustrialization 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.
Nope. 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.
Technically 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.
Why 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.
I 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.
There'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.
What 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.
We also have the reality that "American charity" has done horrible things to poorer nations - shiploads of free American clothing has decimated African textile industries, boatloads of free American food has destroyed entire nation's ability to feed themselves.
The further away you are from the recipient the harder it is to see the second and third order effects. Local and small means they can be noticed, and things modified to change the outcomes.
It gives me serious "steal from the poor and give to the rich" vibes. Rural Americans are richer than the majority of humans, and Stack Overflow was a fairly global website.
Rural America also has a government that is fully capable of taking proper care of it's underprivileged; most governments across the world are not.
I strongly recommend you check out the book "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America". People -- in this country, not in the third world -- are regularly selling their blood so they can afford to eat. https://www.google.com/search?q=%242+a+day%3A+living+on+almo...
What difference does it make if the government is "capable" when it's not happening in practice?
A lot of areas in this country resemble the third world more than the rest of America. Don't take it from me. Try the book reference I provided and its citations.
These statements paint with a rather broad brush. There are parts of the US that are so impoverished that it defies belief and more closely resemble pre-industrialization countries than they do what most associate with the United States.
They also ignore that even if other rural areas are technically speaking more rich than the rest of the world, still struggle with an extreme shortage of opportunity, upward mobility, and sense of purpose.
I speak from experience, having been raised in one such area. Had I not moved to a tech hub in search of greener pastures (which is not something everybody is capable of), my life would look so different now as to be unrecognizable. Instead of earning the upper end of the salary band for my line of work with numerous upward trajectories to pursue and a solid bit of retirement stuck away, I'd be working a job earning maybe ~20% as much that doesn't keep track with inflation with zero mobility and an even smaller fraction of retirement funds, and that's one of the best possible outcomes in that region and inaccessible to most.
I've not aligned with the area I hail from politically for a long time now, but clearly it needs help.
I would be too, but I can also see how someone in such a situation could feel depressed, hopeless, and neglected, particularly with the sheer amount of wealth other parts of their own country are producing.
A 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.
Not 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.
"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.
Because 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.
I’d love to know how Mercer County, West Virginia was chosen. I grew up there.
This 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.
As a contrast to means-tested welfare the U in UBI (whether “Universal” or “Unconditional”) generally is refers to the absence of means- and behavior-testing, it generally does not actually mean that there is no defined scope of eligibility (usually citizens or legal residents of a particular polity, possibly also with an age floor.)
If you have a requirement that the UBI be for citizens only, or for residents only, you've already introduced bureaucracy.
(Amusingly enough the earned income credit is NOT GMI but it kind of almost is in some cases ...)
The EIC connection is covered in the history pages, which are fascinating in my opinion: https://rgmii.org/history-of-gmi/
As for a "does this person actually live in this area" criteria, I have a hard time seeing that single thing alone as "bureaucracy" -- it's quite common.
The EITC was inspired by advocacy for a Negative Income Tax (which is generally isomorphic to UBI funded by income taxes, despite coming from the opposite side of the political spectrum.) But the designers couldn't avoid giving in to all the same problems with means-tested welfare that both UBI and NIT seek to eliminate, except or the separate eligibility bureaucracy, which integrating it into the income tax system avoided.
Of course, a GMI also differs from a UBI/NIT because that term generally refers to means-tested welfare with a sharp (usually 1:1 but not >1:1, which sometimes happens with means-tested welfare programs in aggregate in some ranges) cliff at starting at $0 in outside income up to the level of the minimum guarantee, whereas UBI/NIT benefits have a (usually much) <1:1 clawback via the tax system.
with GMI the conditions are very simple math: what percent of the poverty line are you within?
I agree that adding a lot of conditions is part of the problem, but "help those who most need it first" seems like a very logical primary (and perhaps only) condition.
Feb 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.
I also like getting angry at situations I made up in my head
Feb 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?
well, none of the study data actually supports these claims, for one thing. Take a look. https://rgmii.org/gmi-study-analysis/
I suppose the difference is that we have a means-tested program which the wagies can fall into. Was the proposal to have a UBI with a means-tested program behind it? I thought most UBI proponents count on turning off the means-tested program in order to fund the UBI program.
At $1k/month for 340m people, we will double social welfare spending per capita if we don't turn off the existing programs. That will put the US at the tippy-top of per-capita spending above even Luxembourg. Fascinating.
Hmm, means-tested program behind UBI would mean you get more money if UBI is not enough, right? I have heard some arguments in favor of that, for example for disabled people. You are right that those programs need to be a lot smaller and simpler to be worth the bureaucracy. But I doubt "I spent it all on prostitutes" would qualify you for that.
Other UBI advocates don't want any additional program like that. I think healthcare would need to change a lot to make that viable.
Or if you mean spending restrictions like those that exist for food stamps, then yeah, UBI usually means getting rid of those. So the argument there would be "people who are on food stamps instead of a job are idiots (sic) / too irresponsible to spend it wisely, so we must control what they spend it on", which is one of the foundational ideas that UBI advocates disagree with.
I'd like to add that I feel quite strongly "Universal" and "Basic" are hugely probematic words. You end up with massive digressions immediately.. case in point.. look at this AMA for proof:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1onb5y8/can_guarantee...
How much of that MASSIVE SET OF DIGRESSIONS (which Neil handled like a gentleman, because he's a truly nice person) could have been avoided by not using "universal" (like, every atom in the universe? every person in the world? every mammal in this country) and "basic" (what is basic, even?) ..
EDIT: Wow, I misread.
> in reply to your downvoted post
Huh? My post? It's not.
Oh, sorry.
No worries :)
Yes yes, your 30 word dismissal completely obliterates all contrary evidence.
American 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/
The 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.
Part 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.
> 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?
Local 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.
100% 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.
Thanks. We are involved in The Healing Center locally and that’s definitely a place to lean in on “more heavily”.
https://www.healingcentercincinnati.org/
I’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-guarante...
[2] https://rgmii.org/
Yes, 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.
"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.
If 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.
This 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.
it'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+almo...
Beyond that, maybe SF really is too expensive a place to live in.
I 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.
It sounds harsh and mean, but banning unsecured credit cards outright would probably help tons of people in the long run.
Mary 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
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Your 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-th...
[2] https://www.wapt.com/article/mississippi-ranks-among-top-sta...
[3] 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 - 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 - 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)
"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.
Average age of a farmer is 58, China has reconfigured their imports towards South America for trade stability. "Agriculture dies" = Rural America agriculture, which is needed to sustain Rural America economies.
Farmers also commit suicide at ~3.5x the rate of the general public; it is too early to tell imho how much of the strife I enumerate below will lead to changes in that statistic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_West_Virginia
https://usafacts.org/articles/us-agricultural-exports/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_the_Uni...
https://www.propublica.org/article/utah-farmers-therapy-ment...
Former Farming Leaders Warn U.S. Agriculture Could Face ‘Widespread Collapse’ - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/us/politics/us-agricultur... | https://archive.today/dDebF - February 3rd, 2026
China to favour Brazilian soybean imports in 2026 H1 despite renewed US inflows - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-favour-brazilian-s... | https://archive.today/NXFCC - January 27th, 2026
$12 Billion Farm Aid Package Not Enough, Farm Leaders Say - https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2025/12/12-billion-farm-... - December 12th, 2025
Farm Bankruptcies Rising in 2025 - https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2025/07/farm-bankruptcie... - July 15th, 2025
Q1 2025 U.S. farm bankruptcies exceed 2024 - https://www.uaex.uada.edu/media-resources/news/2025/july/07-... - July 7th, 2025
I'm always surprised how even the people I consider incredibly intelligent get pulled into bad ideas.
What's bad about this idea? I'd like to know.
Why 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.
Deindustrialization 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.
Nope. 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.
Technically 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.
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Why 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.
I 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.
There'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.
What 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.
We also have the reality that "American charity" has done horrible things to poorer nations - shiploads of free American clothing has decimated African textile industries, boatloads of free American food has destroyed entire nation's ability to feed themselves.
The further away you are from the recipient the harder it is to see the second and third order effects. Local and small means they can be noticed, and things modified to change the outcomes.
It gives me serious "steal from the poor and give to the rich" vibes. Rural Americans are richer than the majority of humans, and Stack Overflow was a fairly global website.
Rural America also has a government that is fully capable of taking proper care of it's underprivileged; most governments across the world are not.
I strongly recommend you check out the book "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America". People -- in this country, not in the third world -- are regularly selling their blood so they can afford to eat. https://www.google.com/search?q=%242+a+day%3A+living+on+almo...
What difference does it make if the government is "capable" when it's not happening in practice?
A lot of areas in this country resemble the third world more than the rest of America. Don't take it from me. Try the book reference I provided and its citations.
These statements paint with a rather broad brush. There are parts of the US that are so impoverished that it defies belief and more closely resemble pre-industrialization countries than they do what most associate with the United States.
They also ignore that even if other rural areas are technically speaking more rich than the rest of the world, still struggle with an extreme shortage of opportunity, upward mobility, and sense of purpose.
I speak from experience, having been raised in one such area. Had I not moved to a tech hub in search of greener pastures (which is not something everybody is capable of), my life would look so different now as to be unrecognizable. Instead of earning the upper end of the salary band for my line of work with numerous upward trajectories to pursue and a solid bit of retirement stuck away, I'd be working a job earning maybe ~20% as much that doesn't keep track with inflation with zero mobility and an even smaller fraction of retirement funds, and that's one of the best possible outcomes in that region and inaccessible to most.
I've not aligned with the area I hail from politically for a long time now, but clearly it needs help.
I grew up on a farm. I'd far rather be rural poor in America than middle class in the third world.
I would be too, but I can also see how someone in such a situation could feel depressed, hopeless, and neglected, particularly with the sheer amount of wealth other parts of their own country are producing.
Maybe they should try not voting for a fascist three times in the row if they expect sympathy from the "rest of their own country".
if we want a better place to live, we have to stop basing social welfare availability on political extortion.
positive change is slow and revenge politics makes it slower.
Rural Americans are responsible for the situation they're in.
Aren't we all?
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What office is Jeff Atwood running for? I can't seem to find that information in TFA.
You don't think there are blacks, gays, atheists and commies in rural US?
Sure, but he has limited availability.
A 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.
He writes:
> because that’s exactly where my parents and I are from.
Not 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.
"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.
Because 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.
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