Thornton Holding Court.jpg

Thornton Hall

The Revolution Will Be Kuhnian.

Stockton, California: giving people the damn fish

Is our goal on poverty dead people who know how to fish?

Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he starves to death because there are no fish where he lives and what he actually wanted was money to buy a car to drive to the job he already had, but lost because his car broke down. But he died knowing how to fish.

This is good. $500 A Month, No Strings Attached:

Mayor Michael Tubbs — the city’s first black mayor and, at 27, one of the youngest of any race for any comparably sized city — will soon unroll an experiment to give $500 cash every month to a select group of families for about 18 months. The project, which will begin in 2019, is being funded by $1 million from the Economic Security Project, a philanthropic group helmed in part by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.


Stockton will be the first U.S. city to run the program. Tubbs has spoken in interviews about his familiarity with the issue of basic economic need. His mother was on welfare for the first five or six years of his life, he has said, and he said he thinks the program could help people like her.

Two Books Fighting The Problem Of Wrongness

The Smartest People We Have... Have The Least Imagination About The Media