Here’s an interesting stat from the New York Times. In the sixties, 20% of the population used to move ever year. That went down to 15% in the nineties, and is now at 10 percent, the lowest since 1948.
No exaggeration here. Of all alarming economic statistics, that is the most alarming of all.
It is an American tradition that you get up and go to where the opportunities are. No longer. That was kind of the interesting thing about the North Dakota fracking boom. People went there, for sure, but it wasn’t a mass migration like we would have had thirty years ago. People went in dribs and drabs, and there were a lot of jobs that went unfilled (which explained why wages went so high). The NYT article (by Arthur Brooks) says it explicitly. You would think that people would be leaving high-unemployment Mississippi to go to low-unemployment North Dakota. But they didn’t. They stayed put. Why is that?
Before we answer that question, let me throw another head exploder at you. It is millennials who are the least mobile of all. Makes sense if you think about it. With all the debt, they are kind of stuck.
There are other reasons, too. People get a job and get tied to health insurance, and then can’t leave.
If I were to say what the number one determinant of economic growth is as you go from country to country, it would be the flexibility of the labor market. As you go around Europe, it is difficult or impossible to fire people. This means it is difficult or impossible to hire people. When people can’t move from job to job to match their skills, the economy suffered.
Saw a great tweet from Marc Andreessen over the weekend. 1968: Who wants to work for the man? 2016: Everyone needs a job working for the man!
As a metric, I think about all the people who never left my hometown. I think about how provincial those people are. I was one of those people. I lived about 15 miles from the Rhode Island border, and went to Rhode Island maybe 4 times growing up. I spent most of my childhood occupying a very small piece of real estate, though I take pains to mention that pre-parents’ divorce, I lived all over the country.
And that is really the larger cultural point, is that there are grave consequences to people staking out these little fiefdoms and not traveling to the rest of the country to see how other people live. Like, in the previous example, can you imagine someone in Mississippi traveling to Palo Alto for an opportunity (or, vice versa)? Leave aside the education aspect--assuming the person is smart, can you culturally make that work? Aside from the obvious economic consequences, I would say that our country has become more culturally polarized in the last 50 years. Us versus them, and all that. People are still amazed that I live in South Carolina. It’s not so bad!
Jeb Bush said he was going to get the country to grow 4%. Getting the country to grow 4% is bigger than cutting interest rates or lowering taxes. It is eliminating regulations and making the labor market as liquid as possible. We are becoming Europe, bit by bit.
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Neat stuff, thanks for sharing.
Great post and insight.
Have you considered that more people are living in dense urban areas, so it's not necessary to move locations for new jobs. Also, more people are working remotely than 20 years ago, so their physical location is less important.
Gosh, you mean it's hard to move across the country when you're an un/underemployed millennial with the mailing address 1234, Mom's Basement?
There have been a number of articles (and I think economics studies) recently linking this trend to how the cost of housing creates barriers to economic mobility (i.e., "Can't move out of Bumfuck Nowhere because it's too expensive in NYC? Stay poor, then.").
Just move to Jersey City for $600/mo or less. Under a one-hour commute to NYC.
One thing this article forgot to mention - most important thing - was the internet. Now masses don't have to flood terrible places like ND because there are no jobs where they live... Now people can live at the beach/mountains/van/CA/MN/NY while working for a company who has 100% online sales model with staff all over the globe.
The falling percentages of people moving has been tied to health insurance being pushed from the individuals to companies. Now people are more afraid of leaving their job to move somewhere where they don't have a job to look for new opportunities.
i moved to the midwest from my parents house in Miami then college in the deep south last year and have no regrets. I find people are always willing to meet someone new in their city
I moved from my small, 3,000 person town in Ohio to Michigan and even that cultural change was shocking to me. I definitely agree with culture polarization in our country. People are much less inclined to move, and for millennials it isn't as much a requirement (or even option) as it used to be for going to college. The 1950s didn't have online art schools that "allow you to learn your way" while living at mom's, and local commuter state schools are a much cheaper option if you don't have the dough to move somewhere else.
Good post, even if the inserted political reference seems a bit irrelevant. I don't think this is a political effect as much as it is a social & economic shift.
the 1968 number is crap because that was the height of the suburb explosion across america after the federal aid act of 1956.
Also 20% of the population moved where? Define "move". If I move to a different unit in the same building, technically I moved.
Interesting data. I'm sure for millennials it's a combination of not being able to move because they can't find a proper job and are living in mom's basement and not needing to move to work with all of the e-employment and remote working options out there.
Oddly enough, I couldn't be more opposite. Lived in 4 different states in the past 4 years. Being young is the time to do it.
To that same point though, I disagree with your cultural aspect. I've lived in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia and have family/have spent extensive time in NYC and Maryland. Each place is a bit different from the other, but there's no "culture shock" as much as just a difference in church attendance levels and different fashion trends that make my closet too large.
The crazy thing to me is that it SHOULD be much easier to move today versus 30 years ago due to technology. Cell phones and the internet should have revolutionized this.
Think about 40 years ago - if you move somewhere, you literally had to let all your contacts know about it, store their addresses / home phone numbers somewhere, and then after you move you would have to follow up with each one of them so they could get your new contact information.
To navigate a new city you would need to use things like maps (the print kind) and yellow pages. Trying to find an apartment? How would you even go about that before your move? As a millennial, I honestly don't know the answer, but I can guarantee it's not as easy as submitting an online application.
You would get on the phone (use the operator as a starting point, if you're totally in the cold and don't know anybody where you're moving to). If you're in the area, you would buy a newspaper and look at the classified section.
Some people, before their move, would call up the newspaper in the area they're moving to and ask to have a subscription sent to their home address. Basically they would receive daily papers (with five days delay or whatever) and make phone calls to apartments/realtors that way.
I'm only 23, but I remember this was the general strategy moving as a little kid.
thanks obama
I'm a millennial who moved but in general, the plan before I moved was to go abroad. I desperately wanted to go spend my younger years abroad but that didn't work out. So I moved to Florida (mom's couch), struggled to get a good job and settled for customer care while aggressively applying to all the banks. I had had enough and was getting no where and was going to go back to the North East, but then I landed a job in a bank and here I am.
I don't know if it's because I'm an immigrant but not had any culture shock in Florida. I mean moving to America there was definite culture shock but not coming to Florida. (Made an idiot out of myself in a punctuation quiz because who knew a period was a full stop. Became the idiot who didn't know a period comes at the end of a sentence...)
Also I laughed so hard at more and more becoming Europe because that can't be any further from the truth. I am not European, but I have many friends in Europe and many of them easily move around especially in college. My friend relocated from England to the Netherlands and a lot of them have opportunities to intern abroad (She interned in Switzerland and was required to). While a lot of people settle in their home countries and there's more job stability once you get a job, I find they have a lot of flexibility in college.
I wonder how much of this lack of moving is based on their parents moving around the country chasing that better opportunity and them wanting no part of it. Especially as the work force has changed and people are working from home, telecommuting and consulting more you can live and work where you want.
^ Lol @ the MS. Just to let you know, there's this site called Craigslist that exists.
Am I the only one who thinks this guy sucks?
As usual your posts are complete shit Jared.
"If I were to say what the number one determinant of economic growth is as you go from country to country, it would be the flexibility of the labor market."
I hope you're not saying that. You could make a pretty compelling argument for any number of factors - free trade, democratic system of government, well educated citizenry, property rights, etc. etc. etc. - being the number one determinant of economic growth, but "flexibility" as you define it here is so obviously not one of them that I question your intelligence.
"No exaggeration here. Of all alarming economic statistics, that is the most alarming of all."
O RLY? Pretty obvious case of correlation not causation; people aren't moving because they can't, or don't need to. People not moving is NOT in and of itself causing some sort of economic crisis; suggesting so is evidence of retardation.
And LOL @ Europe. "Europe" is not a single, homogeneous country, despite what the IMF and World Bank might tell you. And the ability to move both within countries and between countries in the European Union is astounding.
"It is an American tradition that you get up and go to where the opportunities are. No longer."
This isn't an American tradition so much as it is a BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE LOL.
"And that is really the larger cultural point, is that there are grave consequences to people staking out these little fiefdoms and not traveling to the rest of the country to see how other people live."
This however, IS an American tradition: believing that your piece of land on this giant rock i the center of the universe. Forget about travelling to the rest of the country, how about travelling to the rest of the world? I meet Americans in Vegas when I travel for work that say "No need to visit Paris/Egypt because I've seen the Eiffel tower/Pyramids here!"
Seriously, you suck.
His post gave me cancer
ikr? Pretty sure I've got AIDS now...
Dude in his early 20s chiming in. In addition to what's already been pointed out (the price of rent, namely), I think there's a strong negative psychological aspect that derives from how complicated stuff like the tax code has become. Or at least that's my perception of how things are, and I'm confident it's not just me. Logistically, moving cross-country just seems harder--in an overwhelming number of ways--compared to how things supposedly were "back in the Day".
This is a topic I've thought about a lot because I strongly desire to relocate to a warmer climate, but I perceive it as nigh-impossible. This feels like a distinctly Millennial perception.
Doing your taxes takes about 20 minutes online. "Back in the day" you had to go to an accountant. How in the world is it more difficult today?
Lol, I didn't understand that comment either. This is quietly the most moronic post in the thread.
I don't think being "tied to health insurance" has ever been a reason someone decided against uprooting their entire life.
In your example:
"can you imagine someone in Mississippi traveling to Palo Alto for an opportunity"
or
" You would think that people would be leaving high-unemployment Mississippi to go to low-unemployment North Dakota."
I know there are a lot of anecdotal reports, at least early on, that you could just show up and have a job. That isn't really the case in either. There's a massive housing shortage anywhere near those oil fields, driving rent sky high, so someone without any job lined up is going to what, move their ass across country and hope someone is handing out jobs like candy to cover their expenses? What happens if that plan fails? It isn't an equation, oh there's low unemployment in ND, thus if I move there, I will also be employed irrespective of a shit ton of other factors--commonly known as reality.
I'm not sure it ever actually worked like that.
Actually, you're wrong about Europe. There's massive mobility around countries (thank you Schengen treaty), especially if you consider the different languages spoken among countries. Plenty of French working in Germany/UK. Plenty of Germans working in France/Belgium/Luxembourg and so on and so forth. Plenty of Brits and Irish working in Luxembourg etc. There are even people who reside in one country and work in a different one!
You seem to silently put a blame on Americans or regulation for that not happening anymore. While this may be true, there's been a bigger more disruptive move that a lot of people hate: Latin Americans moving to the US to work (not just "Mexicans"). If there is one vivid Geographic mobility reminiscent of the "good old times", that is it! People seeking opportunity, despite linguistic, cultural and 30ft high legal barriers. Guess that doesn't fit well with your conservative narrative is it? Jared Dillian
Agreed dude doesn't know what he's talking about.
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