How to get Americans moving again
By Arthur Brooks
Walt Whitman’s beautiful “Song of the Open Road,” begins, “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me, / The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.”
That could have been my grandfather’s anthem. He grew up in Illinois, moved to New Mexico, then back to Illinois and out to California. When his kids left home, he got rid of his permanent physical address entirely and lived with my grandmother in a trailer they towed around the country.
I inherited my grandfather’s wanderlust, albeit in a strain that’s more Kerouac than Whitman. Since growing up in Seattle I have moved between states or countries 10 times as a musician and academic. Ask “Where do you consider home?” and I will have to check my driver’s license.
So who is the outlier — me or my grandfather? You might think he was. People in the old days stayed put, while folks today are less rooted, right? Wrong.
Through census data, we know that Americans are less geographically mobile today than at any point since 1948. Other scholarship suggests that the decline stretches back further. This might help explain why our country is having such a hard time getting out of its national funk.
Mobility is more than just a metaphor for getting ahead. In America, it has been a solution to economic and social barriers. If you descended from immigrants, I’m betting your ancestors didn’t come to this country for the fine cuisine. More likely they came in search of the opportunity to work hard and get ahead.
Even for those already here, migration has long been seen as a key to self-improvement. As Horace Greeley so famously advised in 1865: “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” (What preceded that advice was almost as interesting: “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable.”)
Fewer and fewer people are taking Greeley’s suggestion. In the mid-1960s, about 20 percent of the population moved in any given year, according to the United StatesCensus Bureau. By 1990, it was approaching 15 percent. Today it’s closer to 10 percent. The percentage that moves between states has fallen by nearly half since the early 1990s.
Curiously, some of the Americans who would seem poised to gain the most from moving appear to be among the most stuck. We might expect movement from a high-unemployment state like Mississippi (unemployment rate: 6.3 percent) to low-unemployment states like New Hampshire (2.6 percent) or North Dakota (3.1 percent). Instead, Mississippians are even less likely to migrate out of the state today than they were before the Great Recession hit.
What explains the decrease in American mobility? It isn’t simply an aging population. The mobility decline since the Great Recession has actually been the most pronounced among millennials. As the first rungs of the economic ladder became more slippery, young adults began to delay major steps into adulthood and became less likely to relocate for college or careers.
Meanwhile, older adults have faced their own headwinds, including a housing crisis that anchored them to their devalued homes and a safety net that ties recipients to their states. There has also been a decline in blue-collar skills, like welding on a pipeline, that often require moving. This has created a needs-skills mismatch, with companies desperate for skilled tradesmen sitting alongside idle workers.
How do we solve the immobility problem? We can start by reshaping education to prepare people to move where good jobs are found. This entails reviving vocational and technical training in high schools. State and local governments could experiment with trade school vouchers, or offer tax credits to businesses that support apprenticeships. But culture will have a larger impact than policy: We need to get over the elitist idée fixe that a bachelor’s degree is for everyone, and get serious about training people for important, interesting, dignified work that is difficult to outsource.
Second, we should reform place-based welfare programs to reduce the incentive to stay put. The social safety net should be designed to promote mobility and earned success, not to anchor people within struggling communities or to make full-time work harder to find. Additionally, it would not be particularly expensive to fund experimental programs to provide relocation allowances.
Finally, we need leaders who extol the American spirit of courage, adventure, optimism and the willingness to break from the moribund past. Instead of vowing to insulate Americans from economic trends, our leaders should encourage the traditional ruggedness that Alexis de Tocqueville found here in the 19th century. In 1835, he observed with admiration that Americans did not view “instability” as a disaster to be feared; rather, it was welcomed and seen as the source of “nothing … but wonders.” In our society, he wrote, change is understood as the “natural state of man.”
Much of today’s political populism on both left and right feeds on the forlorn stagnation of people at the bottom of the American economy. But American decline doesn’t need apologists; it needs solutions. One of those solutions is to help people get out of Dodge. And over to Concord or Fargo.
