7 ms·
Why Are Americans Staying Put?
- auggierose 13y agoI remember reading that exact article a couple of months ago. So the publishing date of December 10 seems strange to me.
- pg 13y agoHrm, there have been so many articles about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/adam-davidson-mobile-class.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/adam-davidson-mob... http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2011/11/17-migration-census-frey http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2011/11/17-mig... http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/web-exclusive/why-are-americans-staying-put http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/web-exclusive/why-are-america... http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november_december_2013/features/stay_put_young_man047332.php?page=all http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november_december_...
- peter_l_downs 13y agoMy browser marks the washington monthly article as visited — maybe that's the one that op saw?
- clarkm 13y agoI was thinking the same thing. And I'm pretty sure it was also in the NYT.
- yodsanklai 13y ago"Economists admire Americans for many traits: our profound respect for property rights, our tendency to forgo vacation days" What "economists" are they referring to?
- tdfx 13y agos/admire/are bewildered by/g
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoThe NYT never fails to deliver quality 'shudder' moments.
- cperciva 13y agoOne factor not mentioned in the article is the two-body problem: In a society where most families have two incomes, moving is only possible after finding two jobs in the same area.
- thaumasiotes 13y agoWhat's blocking the move? If I lifted you up and put you down in Austin, are you saying you'd be completely unable to find work? If one single person can move first and find a job second, why can't one married person do the same (on the assumption that the other one has already found a job)?
- cperciva 13y agoI don't know why you're being downvoted, these seem like reasonable questions to me. If I lifted you up and put you down in Austin, are you saying you'd be completely unable to find work? No, but I'd certainly prefer to find work before moving. If one single person can move first and find a job second, why can't one married person do the same (on the assumption that the other one has already found a job)? There are a lot of dual-income couples who would be severely stressed by losing one of their incomes.
- yummyfajitas 13y agoThe last point is key. A lot of two income couples upgrade their lifestyle, taking on a much riskier financial profile in order to consume more. Relocating when only one person has a job would result in a large decrease in consumption - from a house/car/groceries to a smaller house, cheaper car and trader joe instead of whole foods.
- omaranto 13y agooff-topic: Trader Joe's is cheaper than Whole Foods? I guess I am to poor to notice that! I can't afford to shop at either one and just go there for occasionally luxury items like wine or cheese.
- joeblubaugh 13y agoBecause moving is fucking expensive, the housing market still sucks and there are very few good jobs worth moving for.
- peterwwillis 13y agoI thought this article's title sounded stupid at first, so I began reading, and this gem just popped out at me: "Imagine how much worse off the country might be if the 49ers had decided against making the trek to California or the sharecroppers chose to stay in the South." I'm assuming by '49ers' he means the gold rush of 1849, many of whom took a chance on coming out to the west to try and find gold. But sharecroppers? Sharecroppers didn't "choose" to move away from the south. They were basically poor uneducated people without any other form of work available to them. A good portion of them were the direct descendents of slaves who used to work the same land in the same way. They lost their indentured servitude when they became obsoleted by the mechanization of farming. There were no other jobs in the area, but as luck would have it, a big push for more industrial workers was happening in the north and west. That's not some kind of "admirable trait". They had no choice but to go find work elsewhere, and were lucky to find it. You don't have to be an economist to figure out that today, people aren't going to be spending lots of money they don't have to move around the country for jobs that don't exist. We live in a global marketplace now, and almost all of our exports are things machines assemble for us. Unskilled labor is shrinking fast. Our economy is weak. Our government is hobbled. Our education sucks. Our healthcare gets exponentially more expensive. The only incentive I can think of to move is for educated people to move toward centers of white-collar business for the remaining and new jobs, and maybe gentrification away from expensive metropolises people can no longer afford. So yeah, NYT, we're not going anywhere.
- yummyfajitas 13y agoNorth Dakota has 2.7% unemployment. Nevada has 9.3%. On a per-county level the disparities become even bigger. Jobs exist elsewhere, people have just stopped moving to them. The article isn't stupid, they clearly looked at the stats.
- ars_technician 13y agoWhy let stats get in the way of a feel-good rant?
- peterwwillis 13y ago
- zaraflan 13y agoI love these "economists" waffling on about reasons why young people aren't spending money on X like their parents used to, that have nothing to do with oh I don't know "stagnant wages", "crippling student debt", or "30% unemployment". "It's All About The Material Conditions, Stupid" -- Karl R.R. Marx, A Song of Capital and Ice
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago>"It's All About The Material Conditions, Stupid" -- Karl R.R. Marx, A Song of Capital and Ice That's brilliant. Can I steal it?
- DonGateley 13y agoTo move volitionally usually implies the belief that something will get better because of it. That delusion has pretty much been erased.
- johnrob 13y agoIt seems like a growing portion of 20 somethings are living with their parents. Could this be related?
- nostrademons 13y agoThe bit about heavy industry clumping together while service industries spread out seems a bit strange when you consider knowledge industries that the creative class works in. These also tend to clump together. As a computer programmer, the Bay Area holds far and away the best opportunities for me; the runners up (Boston, NYC, Austin, Seattle) barely compare. As a petroleum geologist, my sister has basically 3 options for cities to live in: Houston (ConocoPhillips, BP, Chevron), New Jersey (Exxon), and San Francisco (Chevron). If you want to make movies, you move to LA. If you want to work in finance or advertising, you move to NYC.
- TheCoelacanth 13y agoI think you are greatly exaggerating how clustered programming jobs are. There are excellent opportunities for programmers in almost any major metropolitan area.
- nexttimer 13y ago> Why Are Americans Staying Put? I was expecting an article on why Americans don't riot, given the circumstances and the trend.
- anoncowherd 13y agoI thought it might be about getting the fuck out of the US while the getting is good, but then I saw the domain.. :p
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoSo hard to organize a riot when Blue Bottle just got a new single origin!
- mjolk 13y agoWhy would we riot? Encroachments on our perceived inalienable right to privacy and fair taxation are subtle things that do not affect our ability to eat or live.
- ohwp 13y agoLately I have to think a lot about what context switching does to me. It is known that a lot of context switching is turning you in a kind of 'stoned' state. These days the world is bloated with stimuli and I think that's one of the reasons it's hard to keep a fresh mind. Without a fresh mind it's hard to make choices. Choices to move for example. Maybe people are also staying put because they just can't think clearly about the choices they have.
- nohuck13 13y ago"A worker moving to a new town 30 years ago took a huge leap of faith about her new home and workplace. By making information more accessible, the Internet has improved the quality of any given move. As a result, Americans’ moves are stickier these days" The implications of this are even more encouraging than they seem. Assuming that this explanation is true- that the Internet makes any given move less uncertain/higher expected quality for me - then I'm now more likely to move for marginal gains. I don't need as big a payoff to compensate for the chance it doesnt work out, because there's a smaller chance it doesn't work out. So we could have not only the same economic gain with fewer total moves (due to less bouncing around with failed moves) but also more people moving who wouldn't have before, i.e. net gain at a lower rate of moves.
- drpgq 13y agoIt's interesting that Canadians are moving as much as ever. But then Alberta looms considerably larger for Canada than North Dakota does for the US.
- memracom 13y agoNot just Alberta. Vancouver and Toronto are attracting a steady stream of people who want to work in tech startups or successful tech companies that were in startup more 10 years ago or so. There is also some movement to the Northwest Territories with diamond mining and other mineral exploration. Halifax and North Vancouver are attracting welders due to the 10 years of shipbuilding contracts for the federal government. And there is that small Cisco project in Ontario. Canada has always had a certain wave of regional development followed by a slump while another region is peaking. And there is less difference between most cities in Canada. You don't have those big language differences that you get in the USA, not to mention cultural differences. Makes it easier to uproot and move.
- MichaelApproved 13y agoAnother factor was health care. Without a job that provides healthcare for you, you have a hard time moving to another state. You couldn't take a leap of faith and move to a new state based on your savings alone. If you had a preexisiting condition, you couldn't get healthcare so you were less likely to move.
- VLM 13y agoNobody mentioned the death of the transfer / promotion especially via merger mania? In the olden days, like my grandfathers time, major corporations had facilities all over the country. So its highly likely if you live in WI and a job the next level up opened, odds are it'll be in TN not next door, well, you moved to TN. In my dad's generation all those facilities closed except for perhaps one or two, and mostly offshored, and all expansion is of course offshore. So imagine you work at one of the last Milwaukee Tool plants still open in Georgia today. You won't be moving to the Milwaukee mfgr plant because they'll be no promotion at the Milwaukee mfgr plant because that plant closed in my dad's generation. There might be a fantastic promotion job opening in mainland China, Taiwan, or perhaps Korea, but its unlikely you speak the language and are willing to drag everyone in the family along. So that's why the guys working in GA are not moving all over the country; nowhere to go. This also relates to merger mania. My dad always worked for the railroads in the 60s thru 90s. For a couple railroads. Usually in their HQ IT dept. So lets say he worked for the Milwaukee Road Railroad and wanted to move. Well, he could get a job at the Soo line, or the Wisconsin Central (HQ in Chicago, never figured that one out), or CP, or CMSP, or SouthShore, or ... In fact he worked at quite a few of those places at one time or another. Now, of course, there is just the CP which owns them all, or whats left of them all, and the relevant part isn't that 10 or 20 jobs have converged into one, because the workload is constant (actually increasing) there probably still are 20 or so jobs, in fact there's probably 30 due to expansion. The part of this story that's relevant is all 30 of those IT jobs WILL ONLY be at CP HQ in Calgary Canada. When promotional opportunities open, it'll be in the office next door, not Chicago or Milwaukee or Minneapolis or wherever the CMSP was based because those offices closed a generation ago... Therefore no one who works for "the" railroad in the upper midwest will be moving for work; either you already live in Calgary and already work for CP or you're unemployed. This is hardly specialized to IT. There's ONE really big national retailer in Arkansas. There used to be dozens of (now failed) department stores employing about the same number of people. This is also fractally self similar at smaller scales. Three regional womens clothing stores have collapsed and one regional has adsorbed them and/or their traffic. Its not just national level. Much as there were 10 railroads employing 1K in each city and now there's one railroad employing about 9K in one city, at a city level there used to be ten machine shops spread across the city each employing 20 people, now there's like two machine shops each employing 100 people.
- jotm 13y agoIt seems to me that people are not moving because they have already moved to the most desirable places and are mostly content with their situation. Even with the recession, things are nowhere near as bad as they were pre-1940's.