
Why Are Americans Staying Put? - pg
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/why-are-so-many-americans-staying-put.html?pagewanted=all
======
cperciva
One 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.

~~~
mslate
_Some might suspect that the proliferation of two-earner couples is an
explanation. Surely having a spouse who works can make it more difficult to
pursue job opportunities in distant places. Yet the percentage of married
households with two earners has hardly changed over the last thirty years.
Instead, the relevant change is that today’s two-paycheck married households
are about 46 percent less likely to move across state lines than were their
counterparts in the 1980s._

From a previous article on the subject:
[http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november_december_...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november_december_2013/features/stay_put_young_man047332.php?page=all)

~~~
yardie
> the percentage of married households with two earners has hardly changed
> over the last thirty years.

I think the statement just barely covers what 2 incomes mean in the 80s verses
now. It's far easier to move if one skilled and one unskilled partner find a
new job. A scientist and a secretary for example. It's much more complicated
when 2 partners have career and salary parity.

~~~
jzwinck
Strangely, two people who each earn a high income may find it harder to move
within the US, yet they may also find it easier to move outside the US,
relative to two-income couples with a larger wage gap. This is because many
countries offer work visas for "high skilled" or "in demand" jobs and require
each person to qualify independently. So while a programmer and a cook may
find it relatively easy to move between cities or states, the lower-earning
partner would be denied the right to work in some other countries.

Whether that makes economic sense for those other countries I am not sure. It
does make some political sense: the high-earning locals can find work
anywhere, but low-earning ones are more likely going to stay in their own
country, where they would prefer not to compete with foreigners.

Not every country works this way; the UK for example grants many spouses and
partners the right to work (but read about their new "12 month cooling off
period" before you apply!).

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peterwwillis
I 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
North 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.

~~~
peterwwillis
Yes, different places have different unemployment rates. And different states
have different industries, some of which were hit worse than others, and some
of which are slowly recovering as there's renewed interest in certain exports.

But I have no idea how the unemployment stats of two states applies to
available jobs and moving to them. The entire subject is based on finding
specific available work in remote places and being able to afford the
transition. I don't see how unemployment figures give any insight to such a
correlation.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
You're right that the association between unemployment rates and available
jobs can be problematic. A 55 year old unemployed office worker from Nevada
will not be able to fix fracking equipment in the Bakken Shale.

But if the unemployment rate falls to extremely low levels as it has in North
Dakota it means that job availability has trickled down from one specific
booming industry to basically everything. So there will be a job opening for
that 55 year old office worker.

Still, it's possible that rents there are sky high and it might not make
economic sense to move just to take a job at a burger joint.

~~~
MAGZine
in these places, even when the rent is sky-high, the burger joints pay a
pretty penny, too.

however, they're typically enormously unfavorable to live in.

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zaraflan
I 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
>"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?

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ohwp
Lately 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.

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yodsanklai
"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
s/admire/are bewildered by/g

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joeblubaugh
Because moving is fucking expensive, the housing market still sucks and there
are very few good jobs worth moving for.

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nostrademons
The 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
I think you are greatly exaggerating how clustered programming jobs are. There
are excellent opportunities for programmers in almost any major metropolitan
area.

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nohuck13
"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.

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nexttimer
> Why Are Americans Staying Put?

I was expecting an article on why Americans don't riot, given the
circumstances and the trend.

~~~
anoncowherd
I thought it might be about getting the fuck out of the US while the getting
is good, but then I saw the domain.. :p

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auggierose
I remember reading that exact article a couple of months ago. So the
publishing date of December 10 seems strange to me.

~~~
pg
Hrm, there have been so many articles about this:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/adam-davidson-
mob...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/magazine/adam-davidson-mobile-
class.html)

[http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-
front/posts/2011/11/17-mig...](http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-
front/posts/2011/11/17-migration-census-frey)

[http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/web-exclusive/why-are-
america...](http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/web-exclusive/why-are-americans-
staying-put)

[http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november_december_...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november_december_2013/features/stay_put_young_man047332.php?page=all)

~~~
peter_l_downs
My browser marks the washington monthly article as visited — maybe that's the
one that op saw?

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johnrob
It seems like a growing portion of 20 somethings are living with their
parents. Could this be related?

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DonGateley
To move volitionally usually implies the belief that something will get better
because of it. That delusion has pretty much been erased.

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MichaelApproved
Another 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.

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drpgq
It'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
Not 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.

------
VLM
Nobody 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.

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jotm
It 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.

