Why Americans Stopped Moving
axios.com
axios.com
While the number are out there, I've always found the below story (to the best of my recollection), illustrates what life was like for someone born in the early 1950s:
- "I went to brand new schools built during the start of the baby boom. All of the teachers were excellent b/c this was before women started entering the workforce"
- "I got into an Ivy League school b/c acceptance rates were around 50% due to the Eisenhower funding getting cut so the schools needed more students to cover the lost funds"
- "I got a job from looking in the paper and started a few weeks after graduating from college"
- "Six months after I started, my boss retired at 55. So there I was at age 22 with a management role and a secretary"
I think about this story often whenever someone mentions demographics and/or the economy and why young people are spending more time living at home after college.
The teachers weren't men, they were all women. Back in those days, educated women had only 2 professions available to them: nurse or schoolteacher. Anything else was basically off-limits. So schools were full of very smart women who didn't want to be a nurse and didn't have any other career opportunities.
OP is saying that teaching (at primary / secondary level) was one of the few professional jobs available to women so women teachers in that era were more likely to be overqualified.
Underpaying when you have many excellent applicants may be a problem for the employees, but not for the organization. If you get used to underpaying and the supply of excellent candidates dries up, the organization has a problem.
This is what life was like for privileged white men born in the early 1950s.
Pensions were magical and housing was cheap. Powerful combo.
Additionally and probably more important it was before the takeover of the teaching academies by political activists who have turned these institutions away from a) teaching and b) subject matter into activist training camps churning out missionaries for the cause. It takes a strong character to survive there without being turned into a minion.
- Dual incomes. It was easier to move when only the father worked.
- In the 1960s (which this article uses as a baseline) 70% of households had cars and this number was growing. It is 90% now and is stable. Everyone getting a car made previously unlivable spots livable (and cheap), but there haven't been as many innovations since.
- Laws like prop 13 in California gave people incentive to stay in their abode or face rising tax rates. In California that was passed in 1978, but other states have similar laws.
- Measurement error. The stat of Americans "living at home" includes students who live in dorms 6 months a year. 50 years ago these young people maybe moved to a city and waited tables. I'd argue that going to college could at least sorta count as moving. At the very least, more people going to college skews the results.
This is the biggest one. IBM, for example, used to be a moniker for "I've Been Moved". What the wife did simply wasn't considered.
> In the 1960s (which this article uses as a baseline) 70% of households had cars and this number was growing
70% of households had a single car. People have forgotten what a pain coordinating around that was.
> Laws like prop 13 in California gave people incentive to stay in their abode or face rising tax rates.
Not really. A person only lives so long. In addition, houses were turning over at a decent rate in California as people tended to use the previous house to afford the next house.
The real problem with Prop 13 is on commercial real estate because ownership can outlast human lifespan. When I was in the Bay Area, commercial real estate would have something like 15+ layers of subleases in order to get around Prop 13.
If you bought a house in California in 2000 for $250,000 you are only paying taxes on it as if it is worth $360,000, due to prop 13, even though it may be worth closer 1M.
If you want to move to a different equivalent house that is the same market value, your monthly tax payment would triple so you probably just dont move. If you want to downsize your tax rate would still likely go up.
Even if you bought a house five or ten years ago the same general pattern disincentivizes moving quite a bit.
This lock in effect was not present in California in the 1960s.
Not saying that isn’t significant but there is likely other more costly considerations.
There's still some of that, but everything is much more mixed - you can get a quite decent "tech job" in almost any city now, and that's not even counting remote work.
No, you moved to Boston.
California is pretty unique with prop 13. No other state will as drastically limit property tax increases except maybe in very niche cases (eg elderly who are not rich).
Nursing’s the better of the two from that perspective, but re-licensing as a teacher in a new state is usually not that bad, and once you’ve got that you will find a job if you’re anything but terrible at it.
Her income is a lot less than mine, but the extra cash is nice. We've set up our life so we don't NEED the money she brings in so if it ever goes away we'll never panic.
The solutions there are extremely straightforward and uncomplicated in a technical sense (such as overriding local zoning and permitting to allow hihg-density construction everywhere). The barriers to it are purely political.
The world change and it's not taxes making people move, I think it was Churchill who say taxing is like putting feet in a bucket and trying lifting alone pulling the handle, that true. To have a dynamic economy we need an evolutionary mood. We need tech changes, and INDIVIDUAL ability to change.
In a world where few big actors own anything and all others essentially conform to their offer or die they can't be no mobility, the economy can't work for long.
I've moved because I've look for something else, in a world where anything is the same and from Tokyo to New York you see the same buildings, brands etc, why moving? In a world where anything is decided by giants why moving, I can't create anything or at least creating small things that work demand much effort for little results with a looming Damocles sword of some big who might want to erase or not my creation.
Without a middle class, rich enough to have margin to move autonomously experimenting, falling and still being afloat without having water up to the throat there is no dynamism. It's the very opposite of the current economic vision, people do not move effectively because they are forced by the economy, people move because they want. Forcing means just trying to replicate a phenomenon without having a clue about it's nature.
personally, the amount of quality and human-friendly housing is getting more rare than I'd like. Newer apartments feel cold and unnatural, it almost feels like paying a lot of money to rent a prison cell. Renovated or flipped houses also seem to use the same material: lots of grey and white, and that infamous grey-ish/black-ish vinyl faux-wood flooring. No trees. What vegetation I see is well kept grass.
Housing in general, while it maybe a good investment if you own it. To live in a rented or owned house alike feels like entering into a long term contract with low return on investment.
I fear this would get only worse, because the government will build lots of new apartments and incentivize builders to build lots of cookie-cutter houses.
If you have safe and secure housing and you're ok with your commute and job-search situation, there isn't much reason to move unless you're building a house or you're lucky enough to find an HOA-free community.
Then they moved from rural communities to cities around the beginning of the 20th Century. Jobs were plenty in the cities and perhaps they had no desire to continue farming like their parents.
Post-WWII there was some migration westward (California, etc.). Perhaps the jobs and lifestyle appealed to my midwestern relatives. No doubt the interstates and car proliferation contributed.
But college, jobs, and opportunity have continued to send myself, my father, mother, sister to the four corners of the U.S.
Recently I am aware of relatives moving from places like California to places with more affordable housing.
I think it is also that making a living in farming became harder. I had an ancestor who was a small farmer in the 1880s-90s, and his career was one of increasing prosperity. His son worked just as hard but it was a struggle, and he eventually lost the farm in the late 1920s and went to work at a factory.
Between counties or states? Yeah, transport is for sure costly then. But apparently that's not where the decrease is (and may even be increasing). [1]
[1] https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
(I can't remember the criterion otherwise I'd search it here)
Jobs are getting more and more concentrated in large metro areas, leaving smaller cities to whither.
And once you're in a large city, you have fewer reasons to move. Jobs are there, and likely close to each other. So even if you change a job, you probably don't _need_ to move.
This, of course, drives up the price of real estate. People want to be close to there the jobs are, so they compete for the limited space in proximity to large metros. Thus making companies more likely to relocate (or open) their businesses there. Rinse, wash, repeat.
This is not healthy. We are again nearing the historical record for the number of housing units per capita or per household, far more than in the 80-s or 70-s. Yet we're somehow in a "housing crisis".
The lack of common culture or identity is real, I think, but it's always been there: black people have always had a very different culture and identity than white Americans, most notably. What's different is the proportions: 60 years ago, racial minorities were small minorities, numerically, so white people could basically ignore their cultures and issues. (Of course, many times this involved "white flight": moving to the suburbs to get away from the problems in inner cities, thanks to the rise of the automobile.) But these days, white people are no longer a huge majority, in fact they're almost a minority (but the largest one of many), and a lot of different people from very different cultures have moved in, and white flight no longer works (all the minorities have followed them to the suburbs), so it's understandable that many don't feel like there is a common American culture/identity any more. But I really don't see how this is keeping anyone from moving around; I think it's entirely economic.
I always thought it was preposterous. Why should people (workers) be uprooted and move, rather than capital (money)? The latter is supposedly much easier to move around.
So, I am glad Americans are finally coming to some common sense.
A financial economy, or an IT based economy can be more centralised and can be located wherever the talent is.
My point is this. Of course, for mining and heavy industry, it makes sense to build factories in a given place, and move people to them, everybody does that. But the Czechia underwent deindustrialization in the 90s, and the moving was touted by economists for the so-called "service economy" (which we were supposedly moving to after liberalization). So I am talking about the idea that people have to move on the whims of the financial capital, the modern ruling class. That's insane, and you still see it, for example, everybody is investing in Sillicon Valley, despite high living costs for the working class there. There are also negative examples, where factories (supposedly hard to move) get suddenly moved because of the tax or other incentives, which don't favor the investors.
The difference is, investors (people who make decisions where to put capital) try to externalize the negligible cost (if any, sometimes it's simply a herd behavior) of investing at different places onto society, where it becomes a pointless but large cost of moving labor around. But a sane society, in my opinion, should rather let people live where they live and let the capital chase them (which is, with the exception of heavy industry, and possibly some intelectual endeavours, Akademgorodok comes to mind, what communists did). It is a choice every society can make. And as I mention earlier, the sanity check is, if you truly move people around only as much as is necessary from the production point of view, then the wealth should appear in the regions based on industries which are not easy to move (because of the additional incentive for the workers to move).
Second, there was never really a need to rush to move to another location offering better opportunities. As consequence of the 1990s policies the local capital vanished into the hands of western entities and with it the opportunities worth moving for. The post 2000 capital which moved to the region just found spots with cheap labor to build new factories or logistic centers to keep the German powerhouse running. With an unfair advantage of cheap eastern energy, cheap eastern workers across the border and cheap euro currency as a result of sharing it with the unproductive european south.
That’s just so untrue I don’t know where to start. Our boomer parents invented the latch key kid, we were often basically thrown to the wolves at 18. Now as a Gen X parent, I’m not sure if I’m spoiling the kid or not, he is only 7.