Why Are Americans Staying Put?

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.

thaumasiotes• 13 years ago

What'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)?

cperciva3• 13 years ago

I 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.

michaelt• 13 years ago

Well, there's "completely unable to find work" and there's "unable to find good enough work to make the move worthwhile" - especially if your salary (or lifelong dreams) depend on you using your unusual specialist skills.

Let's say I'm an expert in discovering new drugs, and my partner is a dancer for a professional ballet company.

For me to take a job that ended her professional career (or vice-versa) the payoff would have to be huge.

mslate• 13 years ago

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_...

cperciva3• 13 years ago

the percentage of married households with two earners has hardly changed over the last thirty years

Interesting, but not necessarily enough to rule out a connection -- I would expect a spouse who works part-time in a low-wage would provide less friction than a spouse who works full-time in a professional capacity. Women (let's be honest, that's mostly who we're talking about here) may not have increased their penetration of the job market over the past few decades, but they have certainly moved upwards -- and into jobs which are harder to drop on short notice.

yardie• 13 years ago

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.

frobozz• 13 years ago

Another difference (in addition to the other responses) is that thirty years ago, DINKYs bought houses at prices that a single-income family could afford, then sold them on (or let them out) at prices only DINKYs could afford.

A middle-class two-income late-20s couple 30 years ago could still comfortably afford the mortgage or rent on a family home if the lower earner stopped working (as was almost always the case when a baby arrived).

joeblubaugh• 13 years ago

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

peterwwillis2• 13 years ago

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.

yummyfajitas3• 13 years ago

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.

ars_technician• 13 years ago

Why let stats get in the way of a feel-good rant?

peterwwillis2• 13 years ago

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.

MaysonL• 13 years ago

Yes, but given that the number of job openings is about a third the size of the number of unemployed, the sanity of moving hoping to find a job when you get there is not high.

ds9• 13 years ago

It's not even a choice for a lot of people.

Posters on HN, it seems are generally in IT, middle class, in demand and in many cases even get moving costs paid by a new employer. A large percentage of lower class workers literally can't afford to move themselves and a a few suitcases, and those a little higher on the scale can't afford to travel for interviews, or are unwilling to sell most of their possessions to reduce the cost of moving, as the replacement cost would take a long time to be outbalanced by a better job.

There is also the fear of not finding a new job, even in an area with a better market, if they can't (afford to) line up one in advance.

The NYT article is basically the capitalist class whining that the workers' stubborn attachement to their own meagre interests is interfering with corporations having a ready supply of cheap labor wherever they want to set up.

bluedino• 13 years ago

Why move when you can stay put and the government keeps extending benefits?

awkward• 13 years ago

North Dakota has less than a quarter the population of Nevada. The real numbers of jobs available there aren't going to employ a significant percentage of Nevadans.

zaraflan• 13 years ago

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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

johnrob• 13 years ago

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

nostrademons• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

nexttimer• 13 years ago

Why Are Americans Staying Put?

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

anoncowherd• 13 years ago

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

alexeisadeski32• 13 years ago

So hard to organize a riot when Blue Bottle just got a new single origin!

mjolk• 13 years ago

Why 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• 13 years ago

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.

nohuck13• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

MichaelApproved• 13 years ago

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.

VLM• 13 years ago

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.

jotm• 13 years ago

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.

Why Are Americans Staying Put?

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