The working couple makes a big difference. If you have the traditional stay-at-home wife a family can much more easily move with a job or for a new job. With two jobs involved its nearly impossible. Also a reason why so many people want to live in bigger cities rather than small places.
I bet mobility is part of why nursing and teaching remain ultra-popular for women. They offer more flexibility than normal for time off for raising a family, and both are remarkably good as a supplementary job to a higher-earning spouse, because of their relatively high mobility—every place has schools and hospitals, more or less, and if they don’t there are no other jobs there anyway. Good options for the do-both-career-and-semi-traditional-family-thing set, which is probably a pretty large proportion of preferences (not saying a majority, but enough to explain the high interest in those careers)
Nursing’s the better of the two from that perspective, but re-licensing as a teacher in a new state is usually not that bad, and once you’ve got that you will find a job if you’re anything but terrible at it.
My wife teaches Chinese, and this is spot on our situation. Schools and language centers are always hiring. She usually has 1-2 private online students she tutors (generally adults who are learning Chinese for fun). As long as she commits to a semester at a time and doesn't leave in the middle of her semester, she can always return to her job. If we have kids, she can go part-time or be a full-time mom for a few years. Every school teaches the same stuff, so it's not like she has to "keep up" like I do as an engineer and learn new things every few years.
Her income is a lot less than mine, but the extra cash is nice. We've set up our life so we don't NEED the money she brings in so if it ever goes away we'll never panic.
Wasn't there some HN post on rule-of-thumb from 1980s Japan about some threshold % of GDP activity or disposable income for first-time homebuyers or starter home cost in terms of years-of-salary that determines when housing market starts damaging or restricting an economy?
(I can't remember the criterion otherwise I'd search it here)
This article mentions changing demographics, aging population etc.
While the number are out there, I've always found the below story (to the best of my recollection), illustrates what life was like for someone born in the early 1950s:
- "I went to brand new schools built during the start of the baby boom. All of the teachers were excellent b/c this was before women started entering the workforce"
- "I got into an Ivy League school b/c acceptance rates were around 50% due to the Eisenhower funding getting cut so the schools needed more students to cover the lost funds"
- "I got a job from looking in the paper and started a few weeks after graduating from college"
- "Six months after I started, my boss retired at 55. So there I was at age 22 with a management role and a secretary"
I think about this story often whenever someone mentions demographics and/or the economy and why young people are spending more time living at home after college.
I can confirm through my family’s history that coming of age in that era was also life on easy mode for very-poor white men who moved to the city early and were willing to able to show up to work consistently. No degree needed. Everyone who fit that description did really damn well, often despite multiple mistakes the presence of which in a bio would mean fucked finances for life for someone today.
Pensions were magical and housing was cheap. Powerful combo.
I know several people who finished grad school and entered the workforce in the 1960s. Compared to later generations, they do seem to have lived a charmed life.
I think your points dont sound quite right.
* Yes there were lots of new schools in the suburbs but does that make education better? Were men better teachers than women of today?
* Ivy league were much easier to get in if you had the right background, but very few poor/middle class people applied or could afford it.
* The last two years are tough but still most grads work after graduation
* The retirement age was much higher in the old days. https://www.statista.com/statistics/319983/average-retiremen.... People are promoted much more quickly now, in the old days you had to work your way up over time.
OP is saying that teaching (at primary / secondary level) was one of the few professional jobs available to women so women teachers in that era were more likely to be overqualified.
Which, I guess, contributes to school's problems today.
Underpaying when you have many excellent applicants may be a problem for the employees, but not for the organization. If you get used to underpaying and the supply of excellent candidates dries up, the organization has a problem.
I think the point being made is that we need genius level people working in education. Literally what else is more important than forming the next generation?
Quite literally no. the whole argument is they were well overqualified. A women teacher of today is qualified with high likelihood a genius women of today is working in a field that suits her genius. A genius women of that time could rarely work elsewhere.
The teachers weren't men, they were all women. Back in those days, educated women had only 2 professions available to them: nurse or schoolteacher. Anything else was basically off-limits. So schools were full of very smart women who didn't want to be a nurse and didn't have any other career opportunities.
No it wasn't, there were barely any female programmers because there were barely any programmers at all. Number of programmers has been exponentially increasing for a really long time, there weren't many of them before it became male dominated.
How large part of this was actually secretarial work? Which has very largely disappeared with advent of personal computer in business. Lot of typist and such positions were women too. Not just teachers and nurses.
> All of the teachers were excellent b/c this was before women started entering the workforce"
Additionally and probably more important it was before the takeover of the teaching academies by political activists who have turned these institutions away from a) teaching and b) subject matter into activist training camps churning out missionaries for the cause. It takes a strong character to survive there without being turned into a minion.
Doing genealogy I've seen a pattern (my own relatives) of moving, post Civil War, to the midwest where I think there was plenty of land to farm.
Then they moved from rural communities to cities around the beginning of the 20th Century. Jobs were plenty in the cities and perhaps they had no desire to continue farming like their parents.
Post-WWII there was some migration westward (California, etc.). Perhaps the jobs and lifestyle appealed to my midwestern relatives. No doubt the interstates and car proliferation contributed.
But college, jobs, and opportunity have continued to send myself, my father, mother, sister to the four corners of the U.S.
Recently I am aware of relatives moving from places like California to places with more affordable housing.
> perhaps they had no desire to continue farming like their parents.
I think it is also that making a living in farming became harder. I had an ancestor who was a small farmer in the 1880s-90s, and his career was one of increasing prosperity. His son worked just as hard but it was a struggle, and he eventually lost the farm in the late 1920s and went to work at a factory.
overlooked explanations: gas, cars, rent , storage + transport too expensive. The process of transporting your stuff costs money. Looking for rent or other housing is an opportunity cost. This means paying a big deposit and background and credit checks.
I don't think transport costs are a large factor for young adults moving in the same city.
In my experience most people have someone in their social network that has a van or truck. And people usually don't own much at that age so it's basically free.
Between counties or states? Yeah, transport is for sure costly then. But apparently that's not where the decrease is (and may even be increasing). [1]
Demographics aside, there’s lots of intertwined things mentioned here but the strongest thing is the mortgage.
As soon as your house becomes too precious to simply leave behind without thinking much of it, mobility is lost.
Cheap housing and the resulting mobility was the key difference between fast growing US and stagnant Europe.
Now that advantage is gone and it looks pretty impossible to go back to it.
The solutions there are extremely straightforward and uncomplicated in a technical sense (such as overriding local zoning and permitting to allow hihg-density construction everywhere). The barriers to it are purely political.
Since this article is just a list of thoughts, a few other ideas:
- Dual incomes. It was easier to move when only the father worked.
- In the 1960s (which this article uses as a baseline) 70% of households had cars and this number was growing. It is 90% now and is stable. Everyone getting a car made previously unlivable spots livable (and cheap), but there haven't been as many innovations since.
- Laws like prop 13 in California gave people incentive to stay in their abode or face rising tax rates. In California that was passed in 1978, but other states have similar laws.
- Measurement error. The stat of Americans "living at home" includes students who live in dorms 6 months a year. 50 years ago these young people maybe moved to a city and waited tables. I'd argue that going to college could at least sorta count as moving. At the very least, more people going to college skews the results.
Another big thing was "industry towns" - if you wanted to build cars, you moved to Detroit. If you wanted to do "that computer thing" you moved to silly valley, etc.
There's still some of that, but everything is much more mixed - you can get a quite decent "tech job" in almost any city now, and that's not even counting remote work.
> Dual incomes. It was easier to move when only the father worked.
This is the biggest one. IBM, for example, used to be a moniker for "I've Been Moved". What the wife did simply wasn't considered.
> In the 1960s (which this article uses as a baseline) 70% of households had cars and this number was growing
70% of households had a single car. People have forgotten what a pain coordinating around that was.
> Laws like prop 13 in California gave people incentive to stay in their abode or face rising tax rates.
Not really. A person only lives so long. In addition, houses were turning over at a decent rate in California as people tended to use the previous house to afford the next house.
The real problem with Prop 13 is on commercial real estate because ownership can outlast human lifespan. When I was in the Bay Area, commercial real estate would have something like 15+ layers of subleases in order to get around Prop 13.
Home prices have almost quadrupled in California since 2000.
If you bought a house in California in 2000 for $250,000 you are only paying taxes on it as if it is worth $360,000, due to prop 13, even though it may be worth closer 1M.
If you want to move to a different equivalent house that is the same market value, your monthly tax payment would triple so you probably just dont move. If you want to downsize your tax rate would still likely go up.
Even if you bought a house five or ten years ago the same general pattern disincentivizes moving quite a bit.
This lock in effect was not present in California in the 1960s.
> In California that was passed in 1978, but other states have similar laws.
California is pretty unique with prop 13. No other state will as drastically limit property tax increases except maybe in very niche cases (eg elderly who are not rich).
Since my childhood in post-1989 Czechoslovakia, neoliberal economists have been touting supposed benefits of "flexible" workforce sloshing around the country, and the US was often given as an example, how amazingly nomadic it is.
I always thought it was preposterous. Why should people (workers) be uprooted and move, rather than capital (money)? The latter is supposedly much easier to move around.
So, I am glad Americans are finally coming to some common sense.
Mines, factories, warehouses, railways and ports are actual capital and they’re not easily moved. An economy that is mostly based on manufacturing is going to move workers to where the factories are.
A financial economy, or an IT based economy can be more centralised and can be located wherever the talent is.
I am not sure if your (and sibling) comment is meant as a polemic, but let me add some context. Of course, communists did exactly that - there was enforced full employment so if you didn't get a job where you lived, you had to find it in the region where it was needed. There were incentives too, often the mining and heavy industry regions were actually the wealthiest in the country. For example, just after the WW2, my grandfather got a chemical engineering job at a petroleum plant in the north of Czechia (the plant was built by Germans to make fuel from the brown coal), and the job came with a nice new rowhouse (which he was able to, after cca 20 years, buy from the government as a private property).
My point is this. Of course, for mining and heavy industry, it makes sense to build factories in a given place, and move people to them, everybody does that. But the Czechia underwent deindustrialization in the 90s, and the moving was touted by economists for the so-called "service economy" (which we were supposedly moving to after liberalization). So I am talking about the idea that people have to move on the whims of the financial capital, the modern ruling class. That's insane, and you still see it, for example, everybody is investing in Sillicon Valley, despite high living costs for the working class there. There are also negative examples, where factories (supposedly hard to move) get suddenly moved because of the tax or other incentives, which don't favor the investors.
The difference is, investors (people who make decisions where to put capital) try to externalize the negligible cost (if any, sometimes it's simply a herd behavior) of investing at different places onto society, where it becomes a pointless but large cost of moving labor around. But a sane society, in my opinion, should rather let people live where they live and let the capital chase them (which is, with the exception of heavy industry, and possibly some intelectual endeavours, Akademgorodok comes to mind, what communists did). It is a choice every society can make. And as I mention earlier, the sanity check is, if you truly move people around only as much as is necessary from the production point of view, then the wealth should appear in the regions based on industries which are not easy to move (because of the additional incentive for the workers to move).
In the 1970s oil prices were high and companies in Texas spent billions on new drilling, new pipelines, refinery upgrades, etc. The companies that did all these things needed new factory buildings, office buildings and housing. Construction workers moved to Texas. Many secondary businesses expanded. Then in 1984 oil prices went down and all the work stopped. Everyone moved out. Similar things happen in vacation towns where tourists only come in the winter or the summer.
In post Czechoslovakia if you moved out of your hometown, you lost valuable networks. Healthcare and childcare were always connection based - you needed to know the local doctor, teacher, homebuilder - to get connected with specialists, skip the queues, get preferred treatment, faster processing of documents, etc. Once you part with your network, you start to build new one from scratch which takes many years. Unlike in US which is more market based - as long as you have the money you can recreate similar lifestyle elsewhere in the country.
Second, there was never really a need to rush to move to another location offering better opportunities. As consequence of the 1990s policies the local capital vanished into the hands of western entities and with it the opportunities worth moving for. The post 2000 capital which moved to the region just found spots with cheap labor to build new factories or logistic centers to keep the German powerhouse running. With an unfair advantage of cheap eastern energy, cheap eastern workers across the border and cheap euro currency as a result of sharing it with the unproductive european south.
It might be as simple as the regional options that middle-American households can afford have decreased. For example, in 1990, the median home price in California was 10x the median household income in West Virginia. Today, the gap has increased to 16x. Meaning that even fewer West Virginian households can include California as an option to move to as 25 years ago.
These people you propose are renters, not buyers. I don't entirely discount the impact of CoL differences (moving to California is pretty annoying from that perspective, and I've done it twice), but it's not the barrier you're suggesting.
I actually researched it, and it's strongly correlated with the rising urbanism.
Jobs are getting more and more concentrated in large metro areas, leaving smaller cities to whither.
And once you're in a large city, you have fewer reasons to move. Jobs are there, and likely close to each other. So even if you change a job, you probably don't _need_ to move.
This, of course, drives up the price of real estate. People want to be close to there the jobs are, so they compete for the limited space in proximity to large metros. Thus making companies more likely to relocate (or open) their businesses there. Rinse, wash, repeat.
This is not healthy. We are again nearing the historical record for the number of housing units per capita or per household, far more than in the 80-s or 70-s. Yet we're somehow in a "housing crisis".
My personal theory: Americans feel less and less as if there is a common American culture/identity, such that culture shock becomes a serious hindrance.
While I agree that many Americans feel this way, I don't think this has anything to do with hindering relocation. The culture in various American metro areas is basically the same, if you stay within the same profession and demographic group, perhaps differing if you go from a blue place to a red place or vice-versa.
The lack of common culture or identity is real, I think, but it's always been there: black people have always had a very different culture and identity than white Americans, most notably. What's different is the proportions: 60 years ago, racial minorities were small minorities, numerically, so white people could basically ignore their cultures and issues. (Of course, many times this involved "white flight": moving to the suburbs to get away from the problems in inner cities, thanks to the rise of the automobile.) But these days, white people are no longer a huge majority, in fact they're almost a minority (but the largest one of many), and a lot of different people from very different cultures have moved in, and white flight no longer works (all the minorities have followed them to the suburbs), so it's understandable that many don't feel like there is a common American culture/identity any more. But I really don't see how this is keeping anyone from moving around; I think it's entirely economic.
the rise of remote working might be one reason. The commute to work is one less thing remote workers and hybrid-workers have to worry about.
personally, the amount of quality and human-friendly housing is getting more rare than I'd like. Newer apartments feel cold and unnatural, it almost feels like paying a lot of money to rent a prison cell. Renovated or flipped houses also seem to use the same material: lots of grey and white, and that infamous grey-ish/black-ish vinyl faux-wood flooring. No trees. What vegetation I see is well kept grass.
Housing in general, while it maybe a good investment if you own it. To live in a rented or owned house alike feels like entering into a long term contract with low return on investment.
I fear this would get only worse, because the government will build lots of new apartments and incentivize builders to build lots of cookie-cutter houses.
If you have safe and secure housing and you're ok with your commute and job-search situation, there isn't much reason to move unless you're building a house or you're lucky enough to find an HOA-free community.
Boomer parents spoiled their kids, and Gen X parents spoiled their kids even worse. Now few people under age 30 know how to work hard to get what they want, or have any drive to do it. They just expect it. They think their parents must have been given their houses and jobs, because that's how they got everything in their lives.
That’s just so untrue I don’t know where to start. Our boomer parents invented the latch key kid, we were often basically thrown to the wolves at 18. Now as a Gen X parent, I’m not sure if I’m spoiling the kid or not, he is only 7.
Imo having people stationary in their community for longer timespans contributes to greater community cohesion and health. Most places in the us have a transitory feel to them because people move so often, which contributes to shitty levels of care for infrastructure and other aspects that make a place nice to live in. Why would you work to improve a place if you plan to leave in a few years?
As an EU citizen I suggest a note: some EU countries have HIGH succession taxes, some have NONE. Those with high succession taxes historically have a much moving population than those who have none, historically, not anymore.
The world change and it's not taxes making people move, I think it was Churchill who say taxing is like putting feet in a bucket and trying lifting alone pulling the handle, that true. To have a dynamic economy we need an evolutionary mood. We need tech changes, and INDIVIDUAL ability to change.
In a world where few big actors own anything and all others essentially conform to their offer or die they can't be no mobility, the economy can't work for long.
I've moved because I've look for something else, in a world where anything is the same and from Tokyo to New York you see the same buildings, brands etc, why moving? In a world where anything is decided by giants why moving, I can't create anything or at least creating small things that work demand much effort for little results with a looming Damocles sword of some big who might want to erase or not my creation.
Without a middle class, rich enough to have margin to move autonomously experimenting, falling and still being afloat without having water up to the throat there is no dynamism. It's the very opposite of the current economic vision, people do not move effectively because they are forced by the economy, people move because they want. Forcing means just trying to replicate a phenomenon without having a clue about it's nature.
54 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadNursing’s the better of the two from that perspective, but re-licensing as a teacher in a new state is usually not that bad, and once you’ve got that you will find a job if you’re anything but terrible at it.
Her income is a lot less than mine, but the extra cash is nice. We've set up our life so we don't NEED the money she brings in so if it ever goes away we'll never panic.
(I can't remember the criterion otherwise I'd search it here)
While the number are out there, I've always found the below story (to the best of my recollection), illustrates what life was like for someone born in the early 1950s:
- "I went to brand new schools built during the start of the baby boom. All of the teachers were excellent b/c this was before women started entering the workforce"
- "I got into an Ivy League school b/c acceptance rates were around 50% due to the Eisenhower funding getting cut so the schools needed more students to cover the lost funds"
- "I got a job from looking in the paper and started a few weeks after graduating from college"
- "Six months after I started, my boss retired at 55. So there I was at age 22 with a management role and a secretary"
I think about this story often whenever someone mentions demographics and/or the economy and why young people are spending more time living at home after college.
This is what life was like for privileged white men born in the early 1950s.
Pensions were magical and housing was cheap. Powerful combo.
OP is saying that teaching (at primary / secondary level) was one of the few professional jobs available to women so women teachers in that era were more likely to be overqualified.
Underpaying when you have many excellent applicants may be a problem for the employees, but not for the organization. If you get used to underpaying and the supply of excellent candidates dries up, the organization has a problem.
The teachers weren't men, they were all women. Back in those days, educated women had only 2 professions available to them: nurse or schoolteacher. Anything else was basically off-limits. So schools were full of very smart women who didn't want to be a nurse and didn't have any other career opportunities.
Additionally and probably more important it was before the takeover of the teaching academies by political activists who have turned these institutions away from a) teaching and b) subject matter into activist training camps churning out missionaries for the cause. It takes a strong character to survive there without being turned into a minion.
Then they moved from rural communities to cities around the beginning of the 20th Century. Jobs were plenty in the cities and perhaps they had no desire to continue farming like their parents.
Post-WWII there was some migration westward (California, etc.). Perhaps the jobs and lifestyle appealed to my midwestern relatives. No doubt the interstates and car proliferation contributed.
But college, jobs, and opportunity have continued to send myself, my father, mother, sister to the four corners of the U.S.
Recently I am aware of relatives moving from places like California to places with more affordable housing.
I think it is also that making a living in farming became harder. I had an ancestor who was a small farmer in the 1880s-90s, and his career was one of increasing prosperity. His son worked just as hard but it was a struggle, and he eventually lost the farm in the late 1920s and went to work at a factory.
Between counties or states? Yeah, transport is for sure costly then. But apparently that's not where the decrease is (and may even be increasing). [1]
[1] https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
The solutions there are extremely straightforward and uncomplicated in a technical sense (such as overriding local zoning and permitting to allow hihg-density construction everywhere). The barriers to it are purely political.
- Dual incomes. It was easier to move when only the father worked.
- In the 1960s (which this article uses as a baseline) 70% of households had cars and this number was growing. It is 90% now and is stable. Everyone getting a car made previously unlivable spots livable (and cheap), but there haven't been as many innovations since.
- Laws like prop 13 in California gave people incentive to stay in their abode or face rising tax rates. In California that was passed in 1978, but other states have similar laws.
- Measurement error. The stat of Americans "living at home" includes students who live in dorms 6 months a year. 50 years ago these young people maybe moved to a city and waited tables. I'd argue that going to college could at least sorta count as moving. At the very least, more people going to college skews the results.
There's still some of that, but everything is much more mixed - you can get a quite decent "tech job" in almost any city now, and that's not even counting remote work.
No, you moved to Boston.
This is the biggest one. IBM, for example, used to be a moniker for "I've Been Moved". What the wife did simply wasn't considered.
> In the 1960s (which this article uses as a baseline) 70% of households had cars and this number was growing
70% of households had a single car. People have forgotten what a pain coordinating around that was.
> Laws like prop 13 in California gave people incentive to stay in their abode or face rising tax rates.
Not really. A person only lives so long. In addition, houses were turning over at a decent rate in California as people tended to use the previous house to afford the next house.
The real problem with Prop 13 is on commercial real estate because ownership can outlast human lifespan. When I was in the Bay Area, commercial real estate would have something like 15+ layers of subleases in order to get around Prop 13.
If you bought a house in California in 2000 for $250,000 you are only paying taxes on it as if it is worth $360,000, due to prop 13, even though it may be worth closer 1M.
If you want to move to a different equivalent house that is the same market value, your monthly tax payment would triple so you probably just dont move. If you want to downsize your tax rate would still likely go up.
Even if you bought a house five or ten years ago the same general pattern disincentivizes moving quite a bit.
This lock in effect was not present in California in the 1960s.
Source:https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CASTHPI
Not saying that isn’t significant but there is likely other more costly considerations.
California is pretty unique with prop 13. No other state will as drastically limit property tax increases except maybe in very niche cases (eg elderly who are not rich).
I always thought it was preposterous. Why should people (workers) be uprooted and move, rather than capital (money)? The latter is supposedly much easier to move around.
So, I am glad Americans are finally coming to some common sense.
A financial economy, or an IT based economy can be more centralised and can be located wherever the talent is.
My point is this. Of course, for mining and heavy industry, it makes sense to build factories in a given place, and move people to them, everybody does that. But the Czechia underwent deindustrialization in the 90s, and the moving was touted by economists for the so-called "service economy" (which we were supposedly moving to after liberalization). So I am talking about the idea that people have to move on the whims of the financial capital, the modern ruling class. That's insane, and you still see it, for example, everybody is investing in Sillicon Valley, despite high living costs for the working class there. There are also negative examples, where factories (supposedly hard to move) get suddenly moved because of the tax or other incentives, which don't favor the investors.
The difference is, investors (people who make decisions where to put capital) try to externalize the negligible cost (if any, sometimes it's simply a herd behavior) of investing at different places onto society, where it becomes a pointless but large cost of moving labor around. But a sane society, in my opinion, should rather let people live where they live and let the capital chase them (which is, with the exception of heavy industry, and possibly some intelectual endeavours, Akademgorodok comes to mind, what communists did). It is a choice every society can make. And as I mention earlier, the sanity check is, if you truly move people around only as much as is necessary from the production point of view, then the wealth should appear in the regions based on industries which are not easy to move (because of the additional incentive for the workers to move).
Second, there was never really a need to rush to move to another location offering better opportunities. As consequence of the 1990s policies the local capital vanished into the hands of western entities and with it the opportunities worth moving for. The post 2000 capital which moved to the region just found spots with cheap labor to build new factories or logistic centers to keep the German powerhouse running. With an unfair advantage of cheap eastern energy, cheap eastern workers across the border and cheap euro currency as a result of sharing it with the unproductive european south.
Jobs are getting more and more concentrated in large metro areas, leaving smaller cities to whither.
And once you're in a large city, you have fewer reasons to move. Jobs are there, and likely close to each other. So even if you change a job, you probably don't _need_ to move.
This, of course, drives up the price of real estate. People want to be close to there the jobs are, so they compete for the limited space in proximity to large metros. Thus making companies more likely to relocate (or open) their businesses there. Rinse, wash, repeat.
This is not healthy. We are again nearing the historical record for the number of housing units per capita or per household, far more than in the 80-s or 70-s. Yet we're somehow in a "housing crisis".
The lack of common culture or identity is real, I think, but it's always been there: black people have always had a very different culture and identity than white Americans, most notably. What's different is the proportions: 60 years ago, racial minorities were small minorities, numerically, so white people could basically ignore their cultures and issues. (Of course, many times this involved "white flight": moving to the suburbs to get away from the problems in inner cities, thanks to the rise of the automobile.) But these days, white people are no longer a huge majority, in fact they're almost a minority (but the largest one of many), and a lot of different people from very different cultures have moved in, and white flight no longer works (all the minorities have followed them to the suburbs), so it's understandable that many don't feel like there is a common American culture/identity any more. But I really don't see how this is keeping anyone from moving around; I think it's entirely economic.
personally, the amount of quality and human-friendly housing is getting more rare than I'd like. Newer apartments feel cold and unnatural, it almost feels like paying a lot of money to rent a prison cell. Renovated or flipped houses also seem to use the same material: lots of grey and white, and that infamous grey-ish/black-ish vinyl faux-wood flooring. No trees. What vegetation I see is well kept grass.
Housing in general, while it maybe a good investment if you own it. To live in a rented or owned house alike feels like entering into a long term contract with low return on investment.
I fear this would get only worse, because the government will build lots of new apartments and incentivize builders to build lots of cookie-cutter houses.
If you have safe and secure housing and you're ok with your commute and job-search situation, there isn't much reason to move unless you're building a house or you're lucky enough to find an HOA-free community.
That’s just so untrue I don’t know where to start. Our boomer parents invented the latch key kid, we were often basically thrown to the wolves at 18. Now as a Gen X parent, I’m not sure if I’m spoiling the kid or not, he is only 7.
The world change and it's not taxes making people move, I think it was Churchill who say taxing is like putting feet in a bucket and trying lifting alone pulling the handle, that true. To have a dynamic economy we need an evolutionary mood. We need tech changes, and INDIVIDUAL ability to change.
In a world where few big actors own anything and all others essentially conform to their offer or die they can't be no mobility, the economy can't work for long.
I've moved because I've look for something else, in a world where anything is the same and from Tokyo to New York you see the same buildings, brands etc, why moving? In a world where anything is decided by giants why moving, I can't create anything or at least creating small things that work demand much effort for little results with a looming Damocles sword of some big who might want to erase or not my creation.
Without a middle class, rich enough to have margin to move autonomously experimenting, falling and still being afloat without having water up to the throat there is no dynamism. It's the very opposite of the current economic vision, people do not move effectively because they are forced by the economy, people move because they want. Forcing means just trying to replicate a phenomenon without having a clue about it's nature.