@Daojoan I’m not sure how true this is in the US, but in the UK a lot of the ‘shortage’ is caused by geographically limited indirect subsidies.

It’s cheaper to fly to the US from London than from one of the airports in the West of England, even though the distance is a few hundred miles longer. There’s over an order of magnitude more per-capita spending on public transport in London than in the North of England. There’s no requirement on BT OpenReach to provide high-speed Internet everywhere and so it’s clustered in places that already have high population densities.

If you want to set up a company in a place that’s easy for international visitors to access, you are constrained to the south east. If you want to be able to work remotely, you are constrained to existing cities (unless you have enough spare cash to pay for a few kilometres of fibre).

There are lot of houses for sale outside of the south east for low prices, and a lot that have been on the market for a year or more, but they aren’t where the jobs are. The previous government’s insistence that civil service workers go back into the office after two years of proving that they could work effectively without doing so made this worse.

Support in the tax system for remote work would go a long way. I’d love to see a 10% payroll tax for office workers who are required to be in the office and who do not need access to specialised equipment.