I’ve always wondered if a brute force approach to this is to money bomb these areas and let people get large amounts of funds to leave the area and go somewhere where they are slightly more likely to have positive interactions.
Or UBI to make people have some way to actually think about what they wanna do.
I see the pattern that people are too busy with their lives to realistically start thinking about how to come out of it.
But I don't think that will ever happen, because it lowers power of other people. If you have someone that is too busy with the life (job, maybe children, etc.) you get cheap labor that and work force that is just above slavery.
It would also make stuff like involuntary (if there is a voluntary one) prostitution, cheap apartment cleaning, etc.
But then the power that people have over other people would be severely cut, so short of a revolution giving people the power to get out of a shit life isn't likely gonna happen.
People having the means to have meaningful lives or simply things they want will reduce that power.
Of course it won't remove workforce or reduce productivity. That's been proven in many studies. The opposite is true.
But it also means that if you right now have some kind of workforce that ruins their physical and/or mental health for you they'll at the very least ask for adequate compensation. The reason is that people do strive for more. So even if they have enough to come by they will want that car, that vacation, that travel, that iPhone, etc. So they'll work. But they are less likely to damage themselves in the process, if they have air to breath, to think about stuff, or bluntly to have options.
I'm reading Small Is Beautiful[0] (1972) and they make the point that the modern economy incentivizes interlocking problems of smart, healthy people leaving ~rural areas to move to urban areas, and subsequent disinvestment in rural, which creates a dual economy. The solution cannot be bringing the modern economy to non-urban areas, which would be like building a skyscraper in a farmtown.
Your solution would just drain the area of any remaining talent. The remaining people would be the elderly, disabled, and stubborn--and SLS would be even worse.
