10 ms·

>Some are rooted, embedded in their communities; and some are trapped — because housing is unaffordable where the better paying jobs are. And the jobs that are

>Some are rooted, embedded in their communities; and some are trapped — because housing is unaffordable where the better paying jobs are. And the jobs that are high paying are not the jobs they built their lives on. There's some texture and nuance to this statement. I remember on NPR, they interviewed a lady whom mentioned similar sentiments; her and her husband had built a family, worked in the blue-collar industry (precision machining) for decades, and now were losing their jobs. She also mentioned that they had been living in a small town for a long, long time. That last part bothers me a lot. It seems a lot of people just don't want to move. Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. My parents have done the same. People are stuck on this idea of living and dying in the same city once they buy a home or have children. That just isn't the case anymore. Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included).

refurb 9y ago
I'm also convinced that a willingness to relocate plays a huge role in upward mobility. In the past decade I've moved eight times, not always for a new job, but always for new opportunities. However, I do acknowledge that it's easy to say that as a young single person. Marriage and children make that a lot harder, but not impossible. I moved as a child a number of times. Maybe that's why I don't find it so hard to do as an adult?
sidlls 9y ago
Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills in the context of an established citizen and family is entirely different from the context of an immigrant family in almost every case. Moving is generally very expensive, and proportionally more so for those with lower incomes. The "nomadic" lifestyle you mention actually isn't normal, even today.
R_haterade 9y ago
>That last part bothers me a lot. It seems a lot of people just don't want to move. Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. My parents have done the same. How do we build any kind of community with so little permanence? If we can't bond with our neighbors, we become these empty, atomized husks floating from one economic opportunity to another. Put another way, how can a village raise a child if there's no village, no permanent-ness, and eventually none of the social accountability that communities enforce?
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  Isn't that what Facebook and the like are for? I'm being serious here. Since 2002 I have moved 5 times for work: Colorado, Texas, Guam, Maryland and now I'm in Virginia. My family is spread around Texas. I mostly keep up with the people I made friends with through the years and my family on FB, Twitter etc...phone and then rarely on email. The idea of a "local" community you have your whole life is antiquated - if it ever really made sense. Humans were traditionally nomadic - albeit in the same group. With the historically recent invention of agriculture, that stopped and we started staying put. I think remote work and technology means we can probably stay put more, but there is also a return to the nomadic work need, as employers seem to like to have workers on premises. Bottom line, your village will change over time.
  - yborg 9y ago
    >Your village is a hypercorp that sells all your social interactions for profit This, to me, is a "Truman Show" level dystopia.
    - R_haterade 9y ago
      The common theme in dystopic stories is the protagonist's unraveling unawareness of just how bad things are. Enjoy!
      - nostrademons 9y ago
        The irony is that many classic dystopian stories are actually written about today, the time and place where they were written, and not about some hypothetical future. 1984 was based on Orwell's experiences as a propaganda writer for Britain in WW2. Animal Farm was about the Soviet Union. Fahrenheit 451 was inspired by McCarthyism. Saruman's orcs and trollocs in Lord of the Rings were supposed to represent industry, the factories and smelters that were destroying the English countryside in the 30s. The Hunger Games was about the Iraq war and how we numb ourselves on reality TV. If you believe Jared Diamond (and I think he at least has a point), the point where we entered dystopia was when we invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. That was when humans began to accumulate surpluses that they could use to lord over other humans, and men began to serve men (and women to serve men too). Humans have a remarkable ability to adapt, though. Most of us don't think of agriculture as an evil soul-crushing machine, even though it was the beginning of large-scale repression, because it's so ingrained in our experience of how we live.
tinkerdol 9y ago
>Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included). For an individual this might be a solution (even for me! I've moved around lots too) But for a whole society it's not. Especially when we seem to be hearing similar stories across thousands of towns and cities. Is everyone supposed to move to the bay area, NYC, Boston, Seatle? What is the housing going to look like? Does the rest of the country just empty itself?
- bluedino 9y ago
  You don't have to move to NYC or SF - you just can't stay stuck in Cleveland for 20 years after the factory jobs disappeared. There's opportunity to be had in Texas, the southeast, the northwest.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  The answer to your last paragraph, for the majority of people, is yes. That's how urbanization looks like. That's what the other generations have done. That's how it worked a hundred years ago, with a huge portion of people leaving countryside to relocate in urban centers, that's how it transformed China recently (uncountable millions of people moving from inland farming to their east coast manufacturing), that's how it's ongoing now, and that's how it's going to happen in the future. The current world increasingly favors centralization and economies of scale, so the "optimal" spread of people gets more and more centralized. Living on the fringe, unless there's a specific economic need (we'll still need some (1%? less in the long term) people living as on site farmers) is increasingly becoming an expensive "hobby"/lifestyle choice, since you're going to get less services at a much higher cost and with less opportunities for income.
  - nitrogen 9y ago
    ...less services at a much higher cost... While the "less services" part is sometimes true, in semi-rural/sparse suburban areas it's often possible to get quite a bit more for a lot less. Car maintenance, food, land, recreation, all much cheaper outside of the major urban areas and high-cost states. This is yet another obstacle people face when trying to move to a big city. They can't afford to pay twice the price for half the food.
friedman23 9y ago
> That just isn't the case anymore. It's never been the case. People have always moved to find work and today fewer people are moving than ever.
cmurf 9y ago
Strict universal nomadism is incompatible with agricultural development. Most of human existence has been nomadic, but the recent default for ~10000 years has been sedentary (non-migratory) mainly because of agriculture. And we've replicated the "farmer schedule" in most all subsequent careers. The rise of interdisciplinary personalities (or at least recognizing this is a thing) might just be a new old thing: the modern version of a nomad who had to become near expert at a wide variety of things for survival as well as intellectual stimulation.
- scarmig 9y ago
  Nomadism is entirely compatible with agriculture, actually. A lot of Native American tribes had a nomadic lifestyle while simultaneously relying heavily on intentional agriculture for a lot of their caloric intake. "Strict universal" is doing a lot of work there. I suspect very few societies would end up even qualifying as nomadic with that.
- tpallarino 9y ago
  It's not nomadic in the sense that nobody was moving thousands of miles in one fell swoop into completely foreign environments full of complete strangers and an unfamiliar culture.
sliverstorm 9y ago
Research backs you up- people are less willing to move than in the past. In the case of this lady though, I can understand moving being a really bad & undesirable option if you're only a few years away from retirement. That's not the best time to buy a new more expensive house in a more happening locale.
abecedarius 9y ago
Moving to where there's more work is what other generations did, before the rent there got too damn high. There was an economics paper about this recently, blaming ills of vaguely this sort (I'm sorry I don't remember better) on the housing restrictions in the American cities with growing economies.
hysan 9y ago
For people who have lived in the same area for several years, moving means losing all of your political capital that you've built up in the form of: * votes / campaigning for your representatives * learning about the local laws and maybe even having voiced yourself at town halls to make real changes * all bonds you've made in your community which helps when wanting to make a push for local changes Moving means losing all of that. The only exceptions to this are the wealthy, famous, or well connected. So I can very well see why some older people wouldn't want to move.
- lovich 9y ago
  If everyone started living like the parent suggests then it would just increase the power disparity between the wealthy and everyone else. Only those wealthy enough to afford a home and be insulated from the need to follow employment opportunities would have any say in even local politics anymore
jboggan 9y ago
It's really not easy to uproot and move from an economically depressed area to an active metropolis. I've done it (Athens, GA to San Francisco in late 2012) and it was incredibly expensive and involved a large amount of personal credit use, cash assistance from family, and time. It was a huge stretch at the time for me to move across the country and break into a new industry, and I did it as a single man, willing and able to sleep on couches and occasionally a cheap hotel room (which left me going to the next job interview itching with flea bites). I spent a lot of days scrambling to figure out where I was sleeping that night while I navigated the terribly tight housing market in San Francisco. I would have never been able to do that with any sort of family. If you are coming from a town where $28,000 is a really good salary for a job and your rent (as a single person with roommates) might be $250-$300 a month, how on earth do you save up enough to get two months rent in SF or even Oakland? Especially considering how little savings most families have in America, and that's when you haven't been laid off. When you have certain highly fungible skills moving around is relatively easy. Now that I'm a programmer I can theoretically get a job in pretty much any American city I choose, and probably negotiate a starting/moving bonus so I'm not out-of-pocket for any costs associated with moving. That's true for all of my former coworkers and a lot of my friends out here in California, so I think it's easy to forget how abnormal that is.
- hack_mmmm 9y ago
  "Now that I'm a programmer I can theoretically get a job in pretty much any American city I choose, and probably negotiate a starting/moving bonus" Try getting a job in Athens Georgia with equal or greater salary than you are earning now in SF
  - hack_mmmm 9y ago
    It's not easy outside Bay Area Bubbles or concentrated zones to find the programming jobs that you really would like and grow in.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    I don't know where those downvotes are coming from: you're very much on the money, here. There is a major set of blinders techies in the big centers have with respect to how good the market is...anywhere else. It might be easy to walk across the street and land another $120k/year (low for SF, but still respectable enough especially for a single person) job in one of these markets and be doing something a bit more interesting than simple CRUD, but not elsewhere. The fact is most technology jobs outside these hotspots pay poorly (usually not more than a small premium over other professions in the area) and are just not common anyway. They also are much closer to "grunt worker on the line" than "build your resume by being able to work with lots of technologies". A typical software developer job isn't at a software company in these places. It's in the IT Department as a low-class cost-center line item, working on basic CRUD with little or no say in the infrastructure or even product development, or else a fixed specification project in which you're more or less tinkering around the edges of a pre-existing system.
nerfhammer 9y ago
One reason: costs created by artificial real estate shortages. https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-has-regional-income-convergence-declined/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-has-regional-income-c... https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thwarting-economic-mobility-2466575966.html https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thw...
ChemicalWarfare 9y ago
I can totally see this happening to an "older" generation - people who get decent jobs locally but then in their late 40s or so are forced to deal with the uncertainty if the industry they are in gets into a shaky state. Also, these things are periodic in some industries. Construction, for example, is booming where I'm at right now - you have to wait a few weeks for anything semi-major to be done because there's a shortage of contractors. Back in 08 they'd come sweep your porch on a 5 min notice :) One other point/observation - I personally know quite a few ppl who live/work in the country - all of them had their kids move to either a large metropolitan area in the same state or farther out after graduating from college. Kids who graduated HS also left for the most part, some stayed but mostly in situations where there's a family business for them to partake in.
lkrubner 9y ago
This lacks context: It's what other generations have done Other generations had much higher real wages, and much less risk. During the 1930s and 1940s there was a huge movement of desperate farmers to California. But wages in California were good, and California went 50 years without a recession -- from the 1930s to the 1980s was one long continuous boom. Going back further, consider the events described in Little House On The Prairie. Laura Ingalls Wilder's family faced ruin after locusts ate all the food that the family was growing. So her father went away for awhile and found work where he was paid $1 a day. And that was enough money to completely reboot their lives. Not only could he keep his whole family fed on that, he also had spare money to buy seed and thus plant a crop the next year. High real wages are the reason why millions of people, including all 4 of my grand-parents, left Europe to come to the USA. Male wages have been in decline since 1973. Family income increased till 1999 only because more women started to work. Family income has been in decline since 1999. Movement and migration can not be be justified rationally in a world where wages are stagnant or falling.
nether 9y ago
These people don't want to move because they value community and social support over economics. This attitude is baffling to HN because it defies quantifiable metrics unlike money. Seeing everything as an economic problem is the essence of greed.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Actually, economic models often include such concepts as community and social support. In fact, they can often be quantified too: you can measure what's the necessary increase in salary to convince people to give them up. There's nothing "greedy" about trying to formally model a situation, which is what seeing as an economic problem is about.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Not to mention that many on HN seem to be single, asocial loners with no significant responsibilities outside work.
- logicchains 9y ago
  And people who expect others to pay for them to have the "community" they want (pay to support them living without jobs because there are no jobs they can do in that area) are not greedy? If Jane works hard to move to the city and do something others value enough to pay for, why should she have to support Jo staying back in their hometown because Jo doesn't want to experience the hardship of moving? In my experience, people who call others greedy are expecting others to do something for them while giving nothing back in return. Economics means A gives B something B wants in exchange for B giving A something A wants. People who oppose this seem to think that A should give B something without B giving anything back in return.
imtringued 9y ago
Mostly because rich parts of the US like the sillicon valley don't want these people to move there. The zoning regulations prevent building more housing. Rent control is a subsidy for long term tenants against newcomers. (Rent controlled apartment goes for $1500 but should actually go for $2000, land lord sells second apartment for $2500 to cover losses)
gaius 9y ago
Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. You have never experienced being a part of a community, that is why you don't value it.
Kluny 9y ago
> Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included). Yeah, but after all the moves I've done in the last 10 years, I'm starting to realize that the cost of moving isn't just the cost of a U-haul truck. The cognitive load of finding new grocery stores, new dentists, new mechanics, a new social scene, a new favorite restaurant, navigating a new city, working with new utility companies... It's really a lot. It's more than I realized the first time I changed cities at age 17. That time, I thought I was depressed. Actually, it just took me a couple of years to achieve the stability that I had when I lived with my parents. I couldn't take on more cognitive load until I dealt with the basics, so stuff like relationships, socializing, and advancing my career all went really slowly at first. The second time I moved cities I also moved countries. I'm older now and much better mentally equipped to handle these problems, but I also notice it a lot more than I used to. Moving is _hard_. I don't expect to have a healthy social network for at least another year. My relationship seems to be standing up to the pressure, but trust me, there has been pressure. The effort was worth it, but the cost is very real. If I could have avoided paying it, I would have.

refurb 9y ago

I'm also convinced that a willingness to relocate plays a huge role in upward mobility. In the past decade I've moved eight times, not always for a new job, but always for new opportunities. However, I do acknowledge that it's easy to say that as a young single person. Marriage and children make that a lot harder, but not impossible. I moved as a child a number of times. Maybe that's why I don't find it so hard to do as an adult?

sidlls 9y ago

Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills in the context of an established citizen and family is entirely different from the context of an immigrant family in almost every case. Moving is generally very expensive, and proportionally more so for those with lower incomes. The "nomadic" lifestyle you mention actually isn't normal, even today.

R_haterade 9y ago

>That last part bothers me a lot. It seems a lot of people just don't want to move. Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. My parents have done the same. How do we build any kind of community with so little permanence? If we can't bond with our neighbors, we become these empty, atomized husks floating from one economic opportunity to another. Put another way, how can a village raise a child if there's no village, no permanent-ness, and eventually none of the social accountability that communities enforce?

AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Isn't that what Facebook and the like are for? I'm being serious here. Since 2002 I have moved 5 times for work: Colorado, Texas, Guam, Maryland and now I'm in Virginia. My family is spread around Texas. I mostly keep up with the people I made friends with through the years and my family on FB, Twitter etc...phone and then rarely on email. The idea of a "local" community you have your whole life is antiquated - if it ever really made sense. Humans were traditionally nomadic - albeit in the same group. With the historically recent invention of agriculture, that stopped and we started staying put. I think remote work and technology means we can probably stay put more, but there is also a return to the nomadic work need, as employers seem to like to have workers on premises. Bottom line, your village will change over time.
- yborg 9y ago
  >Your village is a hypercorp that sells all your social interactions for profit This, to me, is a "Truman Show" level dystopia.
  - R_haterade 9y ago
    The common theme in dystopic stories is the protagonist's unraveling unawareness of just how bad things are. Enjoy!
    - nostrademons 9y ago
      The irony is that many classic dystopian stories are actually written about today, the time and place where they were written, and not about some hypothetical future. 1984 was based on Orwell's experiences as a propaganda writer for Britain in WW2. Animal Farm was about the Soviet Union. Fahrenheit 451 was inspired by McCarthyism. Saruman's orcs and trollocs in Lord of the Rings were supposed to represent industry, the factories and smelters that were destroying the English countryside in the 30s. The Hunger Games was about the Iraq war and how we numb ourselves on reality TV. If you believe Jared Diamond (and I think he at least has a point), the point where we entered dystopia was when we invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. That was when humans began to accumulate surpluses that they could use to lord over other humans, and men began to serve men (and women to serve men too). Humans have a remarkable ability to adapt, though. Most of us don't think of agriculture as an evil soul-crushing machine, even though it was the beginning of large-scale repression, because it's so ingrained in our experience of how we live.

tinkerdol 9y ago

>Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included). For an individual this might be a solution (even for me! I've moved around lots too) But for a whole society it's not. Especially when we seem to be hearing similar stories across thousands of towns and cities. Is everyone supposed to move to the bay area, NYC, Boston, Seatle? What is the housing going to look like? Does the rest of the country just empty itself?

bluedino 9y ago
You don't have to move to NYC or SF - you just can't stay stuck in Cleveland for 20 years after the factory jobs disappeared. There's opportunity to be had in Texas, the southeast, the northwest.
PeterisP 9y ago
The answer to your last paragraph, for the majority of people, is yes. That's how urbanization looks like. That's what the other generations have done. That's how it worked a hundred years ago, with a huge portion of people leaving countryside to relocate in urban centers, that's how it transformed China recently (uncountable millions of people moving from inland farming to their east coast manufacturing), that's how it's ongoing now, and that's how it's going to happen in the future. The current world increasingly favors centralization and economies of scale, so the "optimal" spread of people gets more and more centralized. Living on the fringe, unless there's a specific economic need (we'll still need some (1%? less in the long term) people living as on site farmers) is increasingly becoming an expensive "hobby"/lifestyle choice, since you're going to get less services at a much higher cost and with less opportunities for income.
- nitrogen 9y ago
  ...less services at a much higher cost... While the "less services" part is sometimes true, in semi-rural/sparse suburban areas it's often possible to get quite a bit more for a lot less. Car maintenance, food, land, recreation, all much cheaper outside of the major urban areas and high-cost states. This is yet another obstacle people face when trying to move to a big city. They can't afford to pay twice the price for half the food.

friedman23 9y ago

> That just isn't the case anymore. It's never been the case. People have always moved to find work and today fewer people are moving than ever.

cmurf 9y ago

Strict universal nomadism is incompatible with agricultural development. Most of human existence has been nomadic, but the recent default for ~10000 years has been sedentary (non-migratory) mainly because of agriculture. And we've replicated the "farmer schedule" in most all subsequent careers. The rise of interdisciplinary personalities (or at least recognizing this is a thing) might just be a new old thing: the modern version of a nomad who had to become near expert at a wide variety of things for survival as well as intellectual stimulation.

scarmig 9y ago
Nomadism is entirely compatible with agriculture, actually. A lot of Native American tribes had a nomadic lifestyle while simultaneously relying heavily on intentional agriculture for a lot of their caloric intake. "Strict universal" is doing a lot of work there. I suspect very few societies would end up even qualifying as nomadic with that.
tpallarino 9y ago
It's not nomadic in the sense that nobody was moving thousands of miles in one fell swoop into completely foreign environments full of complete strangers and an unfamiliar culture.

sliverstorm 9y ago

Research backs you up- people are less willing to move than in the past. In the case of this lady though, I can understand moving being a really bad & undesirable option if you're only a few years away from retirement. That's not the best time to buy a new more expensive house in a more happening locale.

abecedarius 9y ago

Moving to where there's more work is what other generations did, before the rent there got too damn high. There was an economics paper about this recently, blaming ills of vaguely this sort (I'm sorry I don't remember better) on the housing restrictions in the American cities with growing economies.

hysan 9y ago

For people who have lived in the same area for several years, moving means losing all of your political capital that you've built up in the form of: * votes / campaigning for your representatives * learning about the local laws and maybe even having voiced yourself at town halls to make real changes * all bonds you've made in your community which helps when wanting to make a push for local changes Moving means losing all of that. The only exceptions to this are the wealthy, famous, or well connected. So I can very well see why some older people wouldn't want to move.

lovich 9y ago
If everyone started living like the parent suggests then it would just increase the power disparity between the wealthy and everyone else. Only those wealthy enough to afford a home and be insulated from the need to follow employment opportunities would have any say in even local politics anymore

jboggan 9y ago

It's really not easy to uproot and move from an economically depressed area to an active metropolis. I've done it (Athens, GA to San Francisco in late 2012) and it was incredibly expensive and involved a large amount of personal credit use, cash assistance from family, and time. It was a huge stretch at the time for me to move across the country and break into a new industry, and I did it as a single man, willing and able to sleep on couches and occasionally a cheap hotel room (which left me going to the next job interview itching with flea bites). I spent a lot of days scrambling to figure out where I was sleeping that night while I navigated the terribly tight housing market in San Francisco. I would have never been able to do that with any sort of family. If you are coming from a town where $28,000 is a really good salary for a job and your rent (as a single person with roommates) might be $250-$300 a month, how on earth do you save up enough to get two months rent in SF or even Oakland? Especially considering how little savings most families have in America, and that's when you haven't been laid off. When you have certain highly fungible skills moving around is relatively easy. Now that I'm a programmer I can theoretically get a job in pretty much any American city I choose, and probably negotiate a starting/moving bonus so I'm not out-of-pocket for any costs associated with moving. That's true for all of my former coworkers and a lot of my friends out here in California, so I think it's easy to forget how abnormal that is.

hack_mmmm 9y ago
"Now that I'm a programmer I can theoretically get a job in pretty much any American city I choose, and probably negotiate a starting/moving bonus" Try getting a job in Athens Georgia with equal or greater salary than you are earning now in SF
- hack_mmmm 9y ago
  It's not easy outside Bay Area Bubbles or concentrated zones to find the programming jobs that you really would like and grow in.
- sidlls 9y ago
  I don't know where those downvotes are coming from: you're very much on the money, here. There is a major set of blinders techies in the big centers have with respect to how good the market is...anywhere else. It might be easy to walk across the street and land another $120k/year (low for SF, but still respectable enough especially for a single person) job in one of these markets and be doing something a bit more interesting than simple CRUD, but not elsewhere. The fact is most technology jobs outside these hotspots pay poorly (usually not more than a small premium over other professions in the area) and are just not common anyway. They also are much closer to "grunt worker on the line" than "build your resume by being able to work with lots of technologies". A typical software developer job isn't at a software company in these places. It's in the IT Department as a low-class cost-center line item, working on basic CRUD with little or no say in the infrastructure or even product development, or else a fixed specification project in which you're more or less tinkering around the edges of a pre-existing system.

nerfhammer 9y ago

One reason: costs created by artificial real estate shortages. https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-has-regional-income-convergence-declined/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-has-regional-income-c... https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thwarting-economic-mobility-2466575966.html https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thw...

ChemicalWarfare 9y ago

I can totally see this happening to an "older" generation - people who get decent jobs locally but then in their late 40s or so are forced to deal with the uncertainty if the industry they are in gets into a shaky state. Also, these things are periodic in some industries. Construction, for example, is booming where I'm at right now - you have to wait a few weeks for anything semi-major to be done because there's a shortage of contractors. Back in 08 they'd come sweep your porch on a 5 min notice :) One other point/observation - I personally know quite a few ppl who live/work in the country - all of them had their kids move to either a large metropolitan area in the same state or farther out after graduating from college. Kids who graduated HS also left for the most part, some stayed but mostly in situations where there's a family business for them to partake in.

lkrubner 9y ago

This lacks context: It's what other generations have done Other generations had much higher real wages, and much less risk. During the 1930s and 1940s there was a huge movement of desperate farmers to California. But wages in California were good, and California went 50 years without a recession -- from the 1930s to the 1980s was one long continuous boom. Going back further, consider the events described in Little House On The Prairie. Laura Ingalls Wilder's family faced ruin after locusts ate all the food that the family was growing. So her father went away for awhile and found work where he was paid $1 a day. And that was enough money to completely reboot their lives. Not only could he keep his whole family fed on that, he also had spare money to buy seed and thus plant a crop the next year. High real wages are the reason why millions of people, including all 4 of my grand-parents, left Europe to come to the USA. Male wages have been in decline since 1973. Family income increased till 1999 only because more women started to work. Family income has been in decline since 1999. Movement and migration can not be be justified rationally in a world where wages are stagnant or falling.

nether 9y ago

These people don't want to move because they value community and social support over economics. This attitude is baffling to HN because it defies quantifiable metrics unlike money. Seeing everything as an economic problem is the essence of greed.

icebraining 9y ago
Actually, economic models often include such concepts as community and social support. In fact, they can often be quantified too: you can measure what's the necessary increase in salary to convince people to give them up. There's nothing "greedy" about trying to formally model a situation, which is what seeing as an economic problem is about.
mcguire 9y ago
Not to mention that many on HN seem to be single, asocial loners with no significant responsibilities outside work.
logicchains 9y ago
And people who expect others to pay for them to have the "community" they want (pay to support them living without jobs because there are no jobs they can do in that area) are not greedy? If Jane works hard to move to the city and do something others value enough to pay for, why should she have to support Jo staying back in their hometown because Jo doesn't want to experience the hardship of moving? In my experience, people who call others greedy are expecting others to do something for them while giving nothing back in return. Economics means A gives B something B wants in exchange for B giving A something A wants. People who oppose this seem to think that A should give B something without B giving anything back in return.

imtringued 9y ago

Mostly because rich parts of the US like the sillicon valley don't want these people to move there. The zoning regulations prevent building more housing. Rent control is a subsidy for long term tenants against newcomers. (Rent controlled apartment goes for $1500 but should actually go for $2000, land lord sells second apartment for $2500 to cover losses)

gaius 9y ago

Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. You have never experienced being a part of a community, that is why you don't value it.

Kluny 9y ago

> Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included). Yeah, but after all the moves I've done in the last 10 years, I'm starting to realize that the cost of moving isn't just the cost of a U-haul truck. The cognitive load of finding new grocery stores, new dentists, new mechanics, a new social scene, a new favorite restaurant, navigating a new city, working with new utility companies... It's really a lot. It's more than I realized the first time I changed cities at age 17. That time, I thought I was depressed. Actually, it just took me a couple of years to achieve the stability that I had when I lived with my parents. I couldn't take on more cognitive load until I dealt with the basics, so stuff like relationships, socializing, and advancing my career all went really slowly at first. The second time I moved cities I also moved countries. I'm older now and much better mentally equipped to handle these problems, but I also notice it a lot more than I used to. Moving is _hard_. I don't expect to have a healthy social network for at least another year. My relationship seems to be standing up to the pressure, but trust me, there has been pressure. The effort was worth it, but the cost is very real. If I could have avoided paying it, I would have.