> But what 30 year old would want to live and work in a village of 5000?

Married with kids and want to move to the country to settle down. Isn’t that what a lot of 30-year-olds do? Especially middle class people like doctors.

Well, there's probably no work for your wife, and the daycare or school are probably miles away. That kind of moves it from "settling down in the countryside" to "getting away from civilization entirely" territory.

(That's speaking in broad generalizations, of course. This isn't the usual case, but there are broad parts of (especially Eastern) Germany that are depopulating rapidly since there are so few job opportunities)

I guess that problem just went away with work-from-home though?

I personally don't know, but I also can't imagine - German internet speeds outside of metropolitan areas is notoriously somewhere between non-existant and absolute garbage.

https://breitbandmessung.de/kartenansicht has a scrollable map, but it doesn't say from when the measurements are, nor if "no coverage" means that there is no coverage, or if they have performed no measurements there.

But you're probably lucky to get into the double digits of Mbps. Note how the whole map tops out at ">= 50Mbps".

Good thing starlink service was made available in Germany earlier this year.

All the sources I can find (like [0]) say "Starlink is currently available in some major cities especially in Western Germany, and promises to bring the network up mid-to-end-of-2021, but many, especially rural areas, are not in reach yet".

So IMO not applicable.

[0] https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-internet/spacex-toch...

Starlink is still in its infancy and needs 10 times as many satellites up there before it can really provide a global coverage.

I believe they will make it by 2024 or perhaps a bit sooner (if Starship development goes well - that ship has an enormous cargo capacity to LEO), but it isn't an option for most people yet.

There are programs in the US to encourage physicians to practice in under served rural areas through student loan forgiveness and other benefits.

https://nhsc.hrsa.gov/loan-repayment/nhsc-rural-community-lo...

But those programs generally only apply to physicians who have finished residency. We really need to increase funding for residency programs in general so that those are no longer a limiting factor in training new physicians.

There is exactly this problem in the USA and Canada. To the point that students that want to be rural country doctors have a very hard time getting to be so, because the system is set up to maximize for city specialists. Pay is worse, but acceptable to most, because of lower costs of living. Costs of education (indebtedness) are still astronomical. (System is slowly improving though.)