In November 2018, long before the coronavirus descended and changed the contours of working in America for many, for good, the Tulsa Remote pilot program began courting remote workers. Starting with 70 enrollees, the program set out to test the efficacy of paying work-from-home types to relocate to passed-over places like, well, Tulsa. The program promised $10,000, meted out over the course of a year, along with other perks like discounts on co-working spaces and apartments, in exchange for these remote workers bringing themselves, their jobs, and their disposable incomes to Oklahoma’s second city.

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Compared to the cost-per-job efficacy of the current prevailing economic-development ploys, Tulsa’s program looks like a steal. By comparison, New York state spent $958.6 million to build Tesla’s solar panel factory in Buffalo, and purchase a bunch of the equipment inside of it. By late 2019, auditors had assessed the value of the factory at just $75 million, 8 percent of the money put in. The factory was on pace to cost New York $657,000 per job, without assurances that the wages would be any higher than Tesla’s average starting salary of $33,000.

To be sure, the idea of paying people, rather than corporations, to relocate is something of a gimmick itself; it raises questions about the optics of giving people—largely white-collar, high-earner types who make plenty of money—money because they already have money, when those resources could be directed to desperately needed social services that have been drained from American cities and towns everywhere. Nonetheless, the program has proved to be ahead of the curve on the commonsense public-policy refrain of the coronavirus era: Give people (as opposed to corporations or the super-rich) money. “The problem is, for 50 to 60 years we’ve been sold this story that the way to develop a local economy is to give a corporation a lot of money; all it’s resulted in is a massive shift in resources from local communities to corporate coffers,” said Pat Garofalo, director of state and local policy for the American Economic Liberties Project. “Anything that tries to break the paradigm of raining cash on corporations is directionally the right way.”