Why Americans Are Moving Less: New Jobs Aren't Worth It | Hacker News Reader

Why Americans Are Moving Less: New Jobs Aren't Worth It

theatlanticcities.com

59 pointsjrs23525 comments

The rapid rise in dual-income households goes unnoticed, despite being inordinately important to this question. Intergenerational caretaking (of parents/grandparents, or of children/grandchildren) goes unnoticed. Overall labor participation (an inverse first-choice proxy for Actual Real-Life Unemployment) isn't broken out as a term. The incredible rise in housing prices relative to stagnant or falling early-career wages (and the fact that much of the country is paying off their housing at the lower prices of mortgages made decades in the past) isn't broken out as a term.

"The authors explore several competing explanations to the joint declines in residential and labor market mobility, including changes within the housing market, the decline in higher paying manufacturing jobs, the polarization of the job market, and the rise of dual-career households, but find little empirical support for them."

This intuitively is flawed. If you offer me more money in a place with expensive housing, the decision is based on the joint NPV(x|y) wher x is an income vector and y is a cost vector. Likewise, a single job offer is going to be only 1/2 of the x vector. On its faces, a new job offer for a two income household stream would be 1/2 as implactful as under a 1 income scenario. That is not even counting doing the joint probability of x=xa+xb when xb has to change because xa'=/=xa. These variables are also non-observable, so without actually reading the study its implausible to consider them well accounted for IMHO.

Similarly, there is a lot of technical overhead when dealing with housing costs in relation to work opportunities. Each opportunity has to be considered in relation to the balance sheet, not the income stream. Most 100k jobs lose 30k to taxes and 30k to expenses each year (at a minimum) netting 30k of savings. But many US metro's where 100K jobs are prevealent have homes with average prices edging north of 10x 100k. So, that is 30 years of net saving--a hugely consequential trajectory for a NAV calculation. So, if you have assets invested in a hot housing market, it will take more than just a good job offer in another area to get you to move. because moving reduces your exposure to a market that is equally if not more consequential to your NAV than your Job. Unlike the stock market, you can't just keep the same portfolio of residential RE as you move about.

How do they control for this - is this a case of no evidence = not important?

look at table 4 in the paper ( available for free here http://www.scribd.com/doc/219732275/99907-w20065 ; pg 35). The authors say, "As a proxy for two-career households, we create an indicator for households where both spouses are employed in a professional or technical occupation." That addresses the dual-income question, though I think it fails to address it adequately. The authors show that intra-state migration fell both for couples both employed and even attempts to break out prof/tech and college degree requiring employment. Nonetheless, the base year is 1981-89, and I think (even attempting to call it technical employment) that this is possibly long enough ago -- at least 25 years -- that the nature of women's employment has changed. Perhaps the nature of work of secretaries is more homogenous, less value-adding, or easier to find as compared to senior engineering leads? So as women became more the latter than the former, perhaps this doesn't control.

To the authors' point, though, this isn't a big enough fraction of the population to skew their results. That is, while the situation may well suck for dual-earner professional households, there aren't that many.

If you think dual-income houshold are problematic then thats nothing compared to divorced/2nd marriage housholds. That actually makes you much less likely to move.

I completely agree dual-income households are much less likely to move. I know of a family where one works for Toyota (just announced moving from California to Texas) and the other one works also at a pretty good job. Now that Toyota announced they will move to Texas, will the family move to Texas?

If the family moves to Texas one is giving up a secure job with no promise of finding another one in Texas. Not to mention having to leave their family/friends behind.

This raises really good points. a dula income move is much harder. and less likely to be done on spec. combine that with the real-estate inflation which has eaten up much of any surplus from regional wage variations--and you have yourself what is likely an 80% explanation.

we've recently hired 2 well paid tech workers to work 100% remotely. 10 (5?) years ago they would have had to move. now they don't. in fact, it never even came up. we only wanted one thing - their skills and experience.

also, more people are commuting via plane or long drive from monday-thursday. companies in wealthier areas can easily cover airfare and hotel for the difference in the price of living - it can be very cheap if you purchase everything ahead of time, like < $2k/month or $24k/year which could easily cover the difference in pay and expenses from, let's say, new york to western pennsylvania or LA to Oregon (on a $150k salary vs. $200k salary that's still a $26k/year savings - no brainer). it happens more with consultants but it also happens with very senior employees i.e. VP level and above.

i don't mean this to be facetious at all but i think the general development and adoption of easy and effective (this stuff didn't actually work until a few years ago!) audio and video conferencing in the past few years makes this all possible. a face to face conversation can be had over the weekend if your'e the boss, or any time during the week if you're a parent.

what is your company? am looking for remote data scientist position

I thought data scientists had to be in San Francisco by virtue of them being statisticians elsewhere :-)

I wonder how it breaks down by age, years experience, or industry. As a programmer, when I was younger and less experienced, I could hop from job to job from region to region and get pretty nice bumps in salary each time. My last two job changes however have come with pretty much no change (probably negative when you consider cost of living). As you get more experienced, you definitely run into a salary ceiling, and it no longer becomes worth uprooting your family and moving every four years.

The incentives in unemployment benefits mitigate against relocation: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/unemployment-benefits...

Can this be extrapolated into what the employment landscape would look like with a minimum income for all? If unemployment benefits mitigate against relocation, would minimum income mitigate against even seeking a job?

One acquaintance I have suggests removing people from her stack of applicants would be a good thing - those remaining would probably have more of a tendency to be the kind of reliable employee she seeks.

I think most serious economists would agree that unemployment benefits of any sort mitigate against seeking jobs.

I don't mean this in an ideological "if you don't agree you're not serious" sense, I actually think I've seen a very similar question in a paper titled something like Where is there Consensus among American Economists? A survey of 40 Propositions - there are several dangerously-similarly-titled papers though and I don't have the tools or motivation to look them up right now. (JSTOR etc). It's pretty well-predicted by theory and I believe that there exist studies that back it up a little.

Of course the real question, as most in economics, isn't an all-or-nothing proposition, but a marginal one: How much unemployment benefit maximizes the utility experienced by society? Would spending more of our national resources on these benefits, or spending less, help or hinder our current situation?

Yet another article about a broad negative economic trend that completely skips the entire software industry. We truly are blessed.

Developers are moving less because it's becoming easier to work remotely. So sure, go nuts and move your head office to Pittsburgh. We can telecommute there as quickly as we can to Palo Alto.

Paradoxically for me, this means I've actually been moving more lately. With no fixed office to tie me down, I'm free to explore the boundaries of "remote."

As someone who is moving states to take advantage of a major career opportunity, I'm interested to see what others here feel about this study.

Are you in a committed relationship? If so, does your SO have a job or are they able to relocate easily too?

Do you currently own a home?

Do you have children?

Are you an urban nomad?

Frankly, I'm glad to hear it. When I lived in the US, I counted a number of times where I'd go visit some friends or colleagues at their place, only to discover they lived cold, segregated lives, because "they're always moving and never had time to unpack" .. its a matter of comfort, I guess, but I was never comfortable hanging with my American' friends homes after they'd just moved - and they sure moved around a lot, 6 months on average ..

Watch remote working become the next big trend.

Cost of living is also a factor since relocating to a more expensive area is no longer generally worth unless the new salary is way higher. Kids and home ownership would make it very unlikely I would relocate to somewhere likely SF even for double my current income.

When I was a kid I never knew of anyone who drove more than one town away for work. Now, I only know a few people that actually work in the same town they live. I think the willingness to commute plays a role in this too.

Maybe attractive jobs are more evenly distributed than before, or maybe attractive jobs/areas have already attracted most of what they need and so don't signal as loudly.

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