People seem to be taking for granted that this is a good thing. In the short term of course attracting highly paid people is a good thing. In the longer term it's only a benefit if you're the kind of person who looks at Boston and thinks it's a good, highly functional society.

Most of northern new England looks at Boston/MA and sees high cost of living, government that micromanages individuals and lots of crime. Having lived in various places in MA (including Boston) as well as NH, VT and ME I'm inclined to agree. Boston has jobs and nothing else.

Ask people who grew up in NH, VT, ME what kind of people make the place worse and they won't say baby boomers with backwards beliefs, blacks, or bigots, they'll say "Massholes."

Just from living among and talking to people in ME/VT/NH states you'll quickly get the sense that it's not the material difference that make them like the place but the cultural ones. Many people choose to live in ME, NH and VT specifically because they do not have the same busybody, sort of socialist culture (cut me some slack, it's a nebulous and hard to pin down difference) as MA.

Trying to be culturally like Boston will be the death of these states. Seriously, they're biggest industry is tourism and part of the selling point is culture and image. Part of the "branding" of northern New England is that it's a land of freedom compared to MA. You can buy beer at the grocery store, light off fireworks without cops showing up and park a project car on your lawn without your neighbors trying to get the town to bend an obscure and irreverent by law to harass you. Whether these differences are material or not doesn't matter, they're part of the branding. If people wanted to go vacation in the woods and wanted to do it in MA they could head west on I-90. If people wanted to go to the beach and do it in MA they could do it on the south-coast or cape cod.

I could go on and on and on about how to the people in NH/VT/ME the culture is more important than the money, sure they want money too but you'd be hard pressed to find someone from one of those states that thinks any amount of money or economic development is worth letting the place turn into MA.

Yes I know that a lot of you might not be able to relate to this sentiment at all but encouraging people from MA to move to NH/VT/ME is a very thorny subject for most people in NH/VT/ME

I get that ~30-something people per year isn't much but it's the sentiment of "we should be like Boston because money" (which is a prerequisite to "we should be an attractive place for people with money from Boston to relocate) is dangerous (yes I know there's nothing stopping people who are from northern New England but suffering through living in MA because that's where the jobs are from taking advantage of this program). I think the focus should be on retaining talent, not importing it.

To all the people mentioning that the CoL in Vermont is fairly high for how rural it is, well you can thank NY for that. Upstate NY and VT have their CoL inflated by all the NYC money that wants to have a vacation home or retire away from the problem. Pretty much any "tourist" destination that an upper middle class couple with kids can drive to for a weekend will have this issue. Look at housing land prices in ME and driving time to Boston for example.