Hello @joduinn, nice to meet you!
This sort of works, we have seen it ourselves. But I can’t shake off the feeling that it’s a one-off. Only a small part of the workforce has the will and the power to detach themselves from a traditional workplace. The power has to do with large swaths of the economy being dominated by a culture of control, where bosses want to see people at their desks. The will has to do with being prepared to give up the informal “watercooler networks” where deals and alliances are made.
Nevertheless, people with both the will and the power exist, and they will make a scheme like Vermont’s successful. Those people will move to Vermont. But what if Costa Rica tries the same thing? Will there be another cohort of people in that position? Or will people in Vermont decide that Costa Rica is sunnier and cheaper, and what the hell? Or will the Costa Rican scheme simply fail?
As part of my interest for co-housing spaces, I spent some time in Bali, in a space called ROAM. Like many such, it caters to digital nomads: people who write code for, say, BNP Paribas’s IT department, and commit to the company’s codes repos. Why would they not work from remote? And as long as it is remote, why not move to Bali, rather than coding from an expensive Paris apartment?
The people in ROAM understood that everybody wanted them. With a Paris or New York City’s salary, and being so mobile, they were very welcome in most middle- and low-income countries, and even in less central parts of highly developed countries. So, they made it count. They would trade expat tips: “with my salary, I can afford a villa in Bali, but I could have a mansion in Vietnam”, this sort of stuff. They were building lives predicated on local cheap labor to make their Margaritas and give them massages, and made no mystery of their preference for such labor to stay cheap.
I do hope that I am wrong, and that you are right to be optimistic. We will soon know.