If you could get a 21-year-old to move into the countryside, it might have significant long-term upside even if the person appears like a slacker right now. They could find a spouse and have kids. They could come up with an online business (which might still look like “slacking at a computer” to most of the world). They could eventually do local volunteer work that is important but can’t get done at market prices. There’s a lot of ways that a young person’s life can go.
For older people the equation is a bit different for obvious reasons. But most government programs can’t discriminate by age, so you’d have to aim at a compromise.
An addition would be to create various centres to allow people to learn new skills and eventually reenter the workforce
I wonder why. I would love to empty and re-wild more countryside.
A lot of people are concerned about the countryside going empty, and there are various policies aimed at reversing or at least halting that. They are necessarily income-transfer programs where cities subsidize the countryside.
An individual getting paid 500 euros to live in a remote area doesn’t seem like a bad deal in that context. It’s a much more measurable outcome than many of these other programs, at least.
But somehow giving money to an individual is much more morally controversial than giving money to a larger collective like a province or state. For example, Republicans generally don’t have a problem with federal programs that transfer income from rich states like California and New York to poor states like Alabama and Mississippi. But they would absolutely oppose similar income transfer on a personal level.