THE political shock of Brexit and of the election of Donald Trump have led to new interest in the problem posed by regional inequality. Both shocks drew support from places to which recent economic trends have not been especially kind, and both were reactions, at least in part, against the economic success enjoyed by elites concentrated in a relatively small number of rich metropolitan areas. Even economists, whose "nihilism...about what we can do to help struggling places in the U.S. is, quite frankly, strange" (in the words of Adam Ozimek) have taken to reconsidering their priors on the issue. Myself included; as I noted recently:

The economic literature is pretty clear that moving people from low productivity places to high productivity places is very good for both the people that move and the economy as a whole. It’s also pretty clear that place-based policies designed to rejuvenate regions which have lost their economic reason for being tend not to work very well. And one logical conclusion to draw from these lines of research is that government ought to care about people rather than places, should focus aid to struggling places on things like cash transfers or retraining schemes or efforts to boost the housing capacity of booming regions, and should not be sentimental about the prospect of once proud industrial cities emptying out. And maybe that logical conclusion is the right one. But maybe that’s not the right conclusion at all. Maybe the right question, once again, is which is likely to be more corrosive of the legitimacy of valuable macroinstitutions: the long-run decline of whole regions of advanced economies, or the inevitable waste and inefficiency that would accompany an effort to revive those declining regions. And perhaps benign neglect would win that argument. Yet the argument ought to take place; economists should not ignore the relevance and importance of macroinstitutions and assume that the inefficiency is the clinching argument.

But if neglect is not the right answer, what is? The typical economist answer to the problem of regional inequality is that we should care about people rather than places, and that money that could be spent trying fruitlessly to rejuvenate dying economies might be better spent in the form of simple cash transfers. Give the people money, and let them decide where they want to live. Steve Randy Waldman reckons that's just the ticket. Suppose there were a universal basic income (UBI) paid to everyone in a country, he says. In that case, the real value of the UBI would be far higher in downtrodden communities, where many things (and especially housing) are far cheaper than in the big, booming cities. One of the criticisms of a UBI—that it would encourage people to move away from productive places—is in fact a virtue, he writes. In a UBI world, many people would move to cheap places. And because those people would have money to spend, others of ambition would follow, building businesses to serve spenders in those towns and revitalising their economies.

I like this idea. But it raises questions of the sort that help explain why economists are often sceptics about regional policy. For instance: how do we know that a UBI would encourage moves in the right direction? In America, there are two kinds of cheap city; declining places like Cleveland and booming but sprawling ones like Houston. I imagine that housing-supply constraints in expensive coastal cities, which limit population growth in those places, have been far better for cheap near-substitutes like Atlanta and Charlotte than for declining places like Detroit. I'm not sure that adding a UBI to that dynamic would change that fact. And, if the policy did manage to attract people to Detroit, but at the expense of smaller cities and towns in Rust Belt areas, would that be an acceptable outcome? How dispersed should the population be?

Another problem is that to some extent declining places already are supported by government-provided incomes—pension payments—and that has not led to much of a boom so far. A UBI might make a difference here, in that the young would be able to collect it in addition to the old. But the young also have the most to gain from moving to big, expensive places, which make it easy to job-hop and develop useful skills, and in which it is easier to meet desirable friends and partners. I like this idea, but I'm not sure it would work as Mr Waldman imagines.

That does not mean the idea should be abandoned. There are other good things about a UBI, and moving geographic effects from the vice to virtue column strengthens the case for one. A UBI in combination with other policy steps could move us closer to Mr Waldman's desired outcome. And just because the idea might not work perfectly in practice does not mean it is a worse solution than the nihilistic approach favoured by economists which, after all, is now contributing to a broad backlash against liberalism and globalisation. It's just to say: getting these questions right is hard, and the fact that economists haven't in the past isn't solely the result of their character flaws.