Come work in Vermont - they'll pay you $10,000 to move

Vermont is a beautiful place. We bought some maple syrup there and, according to my son, you can't go far wrong with maple syrup. The thing is, and I don't want to upset all those fans of Vermont's socialist senator, that the Green Mountain State is the back of beyond. And this means:

Vermont, like many states, is suffering from demographic challenges. It has the fourth slowest population growth of any state since 2000. It has the lowest share of its population who are children under 18 (if you exclude the District of Columbia, a “city-state” from the figures). Vermont is also impeccably progressive, has many quaint cities and towns, and is known for natural beauty. None of these factors has driven population growth there. Population growth is not the only metric, but the situation in much of New England is not looking healthy to me, especially northern New England.

So reports Urbanophile, Aaron Renn as he explains that (in an echo of other beautiful places likes Sardinia, Switzerland and Calabria) the state is offering a bung to people who move there:

A new bill signed into law Wednesday will pay remote workers $5,000 a year for two years to make the Green Mountain State their home, as long as their employer is based somewhere else.

So you've got mountains, forest, quaint historic towns, lots of bears and that maple syrup but folk don't move there because, well, it's a long way from Boston, New York or Chicago where the jobs are. Will a little gentle incentive (ten grand's worth of incentive) work by pulling in people who write software, edit textbooks or so or other job not requiring either physical interaction with co-workers or the facilities of a city? Remains to be seen - perhaps some kind researcher might like to look at how well these sorts of schemes work - but it might answer an important question as to whether the people are in the city because the jobs are there or whether they're there for the culture, social life, drugs and sex meaning that's where the jobs go?

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It's Hallowe'en so we get some nonsense about rural crime from the Country Land & Business Association...

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We're always that October and November are peak months for burglary - lots of stuff about the clocks going back and the nights drawing in. However, this applies everywhere not just in that mystic place "the countryside" - however the Country Land & Business Association thinks otherwise:

Again sadly, rural areas present the greatest opportunity for thieves. Isolated houses and buildings, less lighting, fewer witnesses and the ease of being able to watch the owner’s movements all add up to a very attractive target for thieves. 

Except this simply isn't true. Rates of house burglary are much lower in rural areas compared to urban areas. To help understand this here are the country's top "burglary hotspots":

LS23, Bramley, Gamble Hill, Moorside, Rodley and Swinnow
BD12, Low Moor, Oakenshaw and Wyke in Bradford
N12, North Finchley
M30, Eccles
RM3, Harold Wood, Harold Hill, Noak Hill in Romford
SW12, Balham, Clapham South, Hyde Farm in London
LS18, Horsforth in Leeds
UB3, Hayes, Harlington in Middlesex
SE22, East Dulwich, Peckham Rye, Loughborough Junction, Herne Hill
LS28, Calverley, Farsley, Pudsey, Stanningley.

There you go - Inner London, Leeds and Bradford (and some place where they make pastry cakes with currants in). Not a rural place in sight.

In the Skipton & Ripon constituency (as rural as it gets really) there were 548 burglaries over the past year - that's 45.7 per month. In October and November last year there were 41 and 36 respectively - below the average.

By comparison in Leeds West (which contains the place on top of that burglary hotspot list) that average is 125.6 per month (1507 burglaries) nearly triple the rate in "the countryside". Again October and November at 104 and 109 respectively are below the average.

I also suspect that, if we were to exclude the two towns of Skipton and Ripon, the remaining countryside would have very little crime at all.

I've no problem with good advice about security - locking doors, putting tools away, marking property and so forth - but it simply isn't true that crime is going to rise "when the clocks go back" (it might but it might not) and it certainly isn't true that rural areas are targeted by thieves.

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