People in the places he’d traveled lived from paycheck to paycheck. They were exposed to risks in ways that he was not: the weather was just one of those risks. He began to notice other kinds of data—for instance, that 40 percent of Americans can’t cover an unexpected expense of a thousand bucks. The farmers usually weren’t so bad off, but their situation was inherently precarious and threatened by modernity. Farmers didn’t work on desktop computers, and so they’d largely skipped the initial internet revolution. But they had mobile phones, and in 2008, when the 3G networks went up in rural
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