The most obvious solution is remote work. The main economic reason people even live in large cities is jobs. If the jobs can be done anywhere, that would certainly revitalize a lot of the US to points we haven't seen in decades. I'd much rather live in a quiet rural area than in a city with high traffic, high crime and high costs.
Remote work would also have a cascading effect. Say 20 people move to a rural area, well they need food, and their vehicles fixed, and their house maintained, etc. They need to fund their hobbies and generally would bring more money to those areas. Big cities with a lot of power don't want that to happen because they will lose their tax base. I suspect some city governments are incentivizing businesses to bring employees back to the office because of this.
I don't really think remote work will end up in any meaningful rural revitalization. The main urban->other migration I've seen from remote work in my peer group (USA) has been from urban large urban area->smaller urban area or urban area->suburban area. If that holds, we'll have more large cities and bigger suburbs, but I don't know that it helps rural areas at all. I think many people want to be around other people, and if you remove them from other people most of the day (with remote work), they'll want to see people even more after work. Urban/suburban areas are better for this
> short-sighted" people who chose to study trades or liberal arts
People who chose to study trades would be doing well off, that’s a terrible analogy.
> liberal arts
Liberal arts has pretty much always had terrible prospects. That’s not short sighted, that’s just straight up blind.
What's attractive and what's viable are often two separate things. NYC is not viable for someone making $40k a year, but neither is moving to the Rust Belt where their "options" are working part-time in department stores or literal crime.
Something tells me that this is a situation that can't be won in some people's minds. If someone makes the rational decision to not move somewhere that is not economically viable, in an area that's projected to become even more unviable with time, that's not good enough for some. If someone lives in a shitty area and moves elsewhere for better career prospects, but still can't make ends meet, well, according to posts like this, they should just have moved somewhere shitty instead.
If we applied the same to degrees, I doubt you'd feel the same about all of the "short-sighted" people who chose to study trades or liberal arts at a state school and now have poor economic prospects, instead of choosing what's attractive at the moment like STEM.