Rural America is in trouble—on this, nearly everyone agrees. It’s shrinking and aging, as college-educated young people leave small, isolated towns for new opportunities. The post-recession recovery in rural areas has lagged behind that of urban centers. But if there is consensus on the problem, solutions are a different matter. From re-training coal miners to funding broadband internet, ideas proliferate and receive piecemeal funding as politicians deem it necessary to earn rural votes. Others, however, have given up. Maybe there’s nothing worth doing, the argument goes; maybe it’s time to let rural America die a natural death.

At Reason, Nick Gillespie declared that bringing broadband to rural America was futile. “The bad news is that all the broadband in the world isn’t going to transform rural America into God’s Little Acre any more than a massively subsidized high-speed broadband boondoggle has turned Chattanooga in Blackburn’s Tennessee into a bustling hub of activity (the city’s population growth since 2000 is actually lower than the state’s rate of 15 percent),” he argued. There’s some truth here: Broadband alone can’t save rural communities. But Gillespie isn’t interested in saving them at all. “The answer to people being ‘left behind’ isn’t to bring the future to them (especially through tax dollars, which farmers and rural states soak up at massive rates). It’s to make it easier for them to move,” he concluded.

Gillespie isn’t alone. “Some towns are better off dead,” Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review. The proper response to dwindling rural towns and impoverished communities is to urge residents to leave: “Get the hell out of Dodge, or Eastern Kentucky, or the Bronx,” he wrote. “We spend a great deal of money trying to help poor people in backwards communities go to college; we’d probably get better results if we spent 20 percent of that helping them go to Midland, Texas, or Williamsport, Pa., or San Jose, Calif., where they’re paying delivery drivers $25 an hour to bring people their fruity gluten-free lunches.”

It sounds easy enough: If you can’t find a job where you are, move. But experts tell me that this refrain is a gross oversimplification. The problems that plague rural America did not originate there, and their consequences do not end where cities begin. The roots of rural poverty in fact say quite a bit about the nature of poverty generally—both why it happens and what can be done to prevent it.

“Just like there’s not one urban America, there’s not one rural America either,” explained Kenneth Johnson, who teaches demography and sociology at the University of New Hampshire. Some rural areas shrink with disproportionate speed; others, however, are actually experiencing net in-migration. The differences frequently map onto differences in regional industries. “For example, the parts of rural America that tend to receive net in-migration most of the time are those that are just beyond the edges of the urban areas,” Johnson said. “And then the other ones that often will receive migration gains are recreational or retirement kind of amenity areas.”