It was the spring of 2010 and Erik Johnson had just graduated from the University of Vermont with a bachelor’s in economics. Two years prior, Johnson had moved to Burlington from Boston to finish his degree, attracted by the Green Mountain State’s natural beauty and laid-back culture. Vermont had a lot of perks for an avid trail runner like Johnson, but he quickly learned that job opportunities were not among them. After a nearly year-long search, Johnson was grateful to land a gig as a webmaster at a local company. It didn’t pay much, but it was better than nothing. Still, he concluded that Vermont’s largest city (population 42,000) didn’t offer much in the way of career advancement. So when Johnson was offered a job at a research university in Boston the following year, he jumped at the opportunity.

Daniel Oberhaus covers space exploration and the future of energy for WIRED.

Johnson’s story is hardly unusual. For decades, young, highly educated Vermonters have left the state to pursue career opportunities in bigger cities. At the same time, Vermont has failed to attract and retain enough outside talent to offset this loss. This phenomenon is known as “brain drain,” and there’s an emerging consensus among policymakers that it may contribute to many of America’s social, economic, and political problems.

In April, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee found that highly educated adults in their thirties were fleeing rural and postindustrial states to major tech centers like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Boston. The report, based on 40 years of Census data, said states in the southeast, New England, and the Rust Belt were losing the most talent to these “winner-take-all” cities. Vermont was one of the hardest-hit states.

Researchers at the Brookings Institution say this brain drain fuels “entrenched poverty, deaths of despair, and deepening small-town resentment” of coastal elites. “Overconcentration in the largest metro areas and this evacuation everywhere else is a serious problem,” says Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings. But the widening economic gap between the so-called “superstar cities” and the rest of the country is a relatively new phenomenon.

America's 'Great Divergence'

Between 1940 and 1980, the wage gap between poorer cities and richer cities in the US actually shrank, according to research by Penn State economist Elisa Giannone. Since 1980, though, Giannone found that college-educated adults increasingly moved to cities that already had large populations of high-skilled workers. Even so, the demand for workers versed in new digital technologies outpaced the supply, pushing wages up in these cities and attracting even more skilled workers.

This has led to what UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti calls “America’s great divergence”: A handful of cities attract the bulk of high-paying jobs, increasing the economic disparity between those who work in these cities and those who do not. Moretti says the trend is the result of what economists call “agglomeration benefits.” When a bunch of skilled workers and firms in a similar industry are located near one another, it’s easier to find specialists, knowledge tends to spill over from one firm to another, and firms see higher rates of innovation and productivity. The result, Moretti says, is that “successful cities generate more success” by attracting still more firms and workers looking to capitalize on these agglomeration benefits. It also explains why firms and workers in highly specialized industries are reluctant to set up shop elsewhere—no one wants to be the first to go to an area that lacks these benefits.

In an effort to reverse this trend, policymakers in Vermont and elsewhere are betting on programs that tap digital technologies to entice skilled workers to relocate. Last year, Vermont governor Phil Scott signed into law a measure designed to attract full-time remote workers to the Green Mountain State. The Remote Workers Grant reimburses employees up to $10,000 for relocation costs, office equipment, and other expenses, as well as in-kind perks like a membership to a coworking space. State senator Virginia Lyons, the bill’s sponsor, says she wanted to attract young tech workers to Vermont to bolster the state’s tax base and rejuvenate its cities.

The first round of applications opened in January and attracted 33 remote workers from a variety of industries including software, insurance, and media. Amelia Potasznik-Kriv, an immigration attorney, moved with her wife and two children from Dallas to Burlington in January. She says the nature of her work, which involves digitally communicating with people around the world, plus a long and amicable professional relationship with her boss, made the transition to a more rural setting seamless.

“I have friends who warned me that it would feel too small coming from a big city like Dallas, but it feels perfect,” Potasznik-Kriv says. “It has all the great things about big city living—art, music, festivals—but it feels much more human-scaled.”