Why Is Geographic Mobility Declining? | Hacker News Reader

Why Is Geographic Mobility Declining?

richmondfed.org

26 pointstoomuchtodo28 comments

They need to look at another number - mean time job lasted after move. The cost, both financial and non-financial, of a move is considerable. Moving for a job with questionable job security is high risk. The decline in length of employment affects willingness to move.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has job tenure data back to 2014.[1] Down 16% over that period. I wonder if there's data going further back.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.t06.htm

>> I wonder if there's data going further back

There is: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/median-tenure-with-current....

Job tenure now is higher than it was during the 1980's and 1990's.

The nuance here is that it’s trending in the wrong direction

I don't think it is as simple as that.

On the first hand, if employees have shorter job tenure because they are switching jobs for better pay and opportunities is that "the wrong direction"? For employees it might not be, for employers it might be, for the economy in general? It depends.

And on the second hand, if employees have longer job tenure because they hate their jobs, but can't find new ones so can't quit, is that "the right direction"? For employers it might be, for employees it might not be, for the economy in general? It depends.

And, as an economist, on the third hand...

Interesting. It's been between 3 and 4 years for the whole period, though. It's not like it's halved. I would have expected a long term drop, but no.

Because the benefits of relocating is grossly unjustified today. Why would you sell your family house to move to an even more expensive city where you can’t afford to buy anything?

Why do you assume that the destination city is "even more expensive"? That should only be true half the time (for all pairs of cities, if one is more expensive, then the other must be less expensive).

I think it's more like this: Housing is super overinflated. Either I own or I rent.

If I rent, it may have taken me several local moves to find a situation that is a tolerable combination of price and quality. If I move to a different city, I lose that situation, and I lose all applicable knowledge of how to find another decent one. I have to start over at "low quality and overpriced", and improve my way from there, with several moves along the way. That's a hard psychological pill to swallow.

If I own, moving means paying 6% real estate commission. If housing is extremely expensive, that becomes a big number - though I don't know if that's the critical dynamic in peoples' minds. It may be the same as the renter issue - quality plus a decent price are hard to find.

> Why do you assume that the destination city is "even more expensive"?

It's more expensive because that's where the jobs are.

Telework. A whole class of jobs people don't have to move for, which was enabled by be technologies around the beginning of the study period.

How is it not even mentioned in the article?

By the way, studying geography in undergrad one of my favorite papers in this topic was "Sticky Places in Slippery Space" mostly because of the great title.

Markusen, A. (1996). Sticky Places in Slippery Space: A Typology of Industrial Districts. Economic Geography, 72(3), 293–313. https://doi.org/10.2307/144402

Loosely related:

Abundance Starts with Mobility

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43983297

I bought my house in 2018 for $40k and it's paid off. I used to move frequently (every 5 years or so), but now I'm kind of trapped because housing has gotten so bonkers since then. Instead I'm throwing all my extra money into retirement so I can be done @ 55.

Did your house not also increase in value along with every other house?

Yes, but not having a mortgage is huge. And it's a giant leap from the 90k my house is currently valued at to the $299-350k that a comparable home in a metro area would fetch (I live in the middle of nowhere).

Even if it did, upgrading proportionally went up, too. Let's say that $40K house went to $100K. But the $100K house that OP originally wanted to upgrade to is now $225K. The difference between what they have and what they want doubled, and so did the mortgage payment.

Source: the many times my spouse and I have done this exercise.

We've all simply got more possessions than we used to. It's harder to pack it all up.

Possessions are overrated. Moving sales are a thing. Keep your family teaspoons, and your favorite coffee mug. Sell your Target-made table and your Ikea-made bookshelf. Buy identical (maybe used) on the opposite coast, or anywhere.

(The amount of stuff remains large nevertheless.)

Moving you sacrifice your whole social support network - for dubious rewards.

After half-dozen moves, my entire social network, literally all my old, long-time friends, are now remote. Thanks to the internet, we keep in touch constantly, and my friends are as helpful as ever as a support network. They're awesome, no matter what distance separates us.

This can also happen in the reverse. I didn't move, but my entire social support network did. There is no incentive in sacrificing your own career prospects to stay close to people who wouldn't be willing to do the same.

Geographic mobility sucks. Why change your social network every 15 minutes for a job. If there are opportunities in your locale, why move? The grass probably isn't greener.

My grandfather did this -- chasing the dream at IBM and my father attended 6 different school districts growing up. They lived in mansions in downtown San Francisco and now he doesn't have a long term friend, because friendships and people are transient and you never know when you have to leave town for the next shiny nickle.

Fuck that.

Some people like to see new places, or want to leave their old place.

I feel like this has less to do with moving and more about your grandfather putting his career above everything else.

You're making my point. People, including my grandfather, are moving because they put their career above people, family, friends, and relationships. And when they get there, they're still themselves and the grass isn't greener, but they get a Lexus rather than a Camry -- woop-de-doo.

So like every Bay area tech worker jumping on a bus at 8:00am until leaving the office after 6pm. And those few of us who don't want that are pressured by managers happy unleash a PIP.

On the one hand, we say we want more mobility for economic prosperity. On the other hand, we lament the decline in social fabric and support systems that prevent loneliness and enable young people to have kids by said mobility. We eventually must come to terms with the fact that we can't have it both ways.

We can't have unlimited amounts of both. We can have some of both at the same time, though. You can move and make new friends, and keep some of the old, and have some social fabric and some mobility. You can't have as much social fabric as if you never moved, though.

I think we can definitely have more of both than what we currently have, the primary issue today is mostly political dragons standing in the way of some reasonable economic fine tuning.

Sadly, in the post-WWII decades, it seems that the American Dream has consisted of getting the hell away from your parents, and/or getting the hell out of this podunk rural town and into the Big City.

Now both of those can be tragedies in their own way. In the 1970s there was a notorious upheaval in TV programming known as "The Rural Purge": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_purge

Basically, a lot of TV series which were set in rural or pastoral settings, were outright canceled in favor of urban shows, including "fish out of water" fare such as The Beverly Hillbillies. And prime time TV has never been the same since then!

So it was inevitable that there have been waves of urbanization, and commensurate de-ruralization. As people got into STEM, they needed to get off the farm. If it was no longer possible to make a living on a ranch, then people needed to get into the cities. Including minorities such as Black Americans, who may find more opportunity on the fringes of society, and less discrimination or injustice, after a while anyway.

And there has been a streak of independence as well. American kids are raised to resent their parents and long for something else. Sometimes they don't know what that is, just that they can't find it at home. So an American kid, especially the boys, they're conditioned and poised to leave home as soon as they're 18. Go far away to college and stay away. Leave the nest behind and make it on your own [even if your family already lived in a nice big city.]

Even I was infected with this so-called "American Dream", and not realizing how good I had things at home, I wanted to get out of there, get far away, make it on my own, but I couldn't. I couldn't fend for myself and I crashed and burned; I hit rock bottom without my family's support. I never should have left in the first place, but now the deed is done.

In the 1950s the propaganda supported the "Nuclear Family" concept, and extended families started splintering. It's often not cool for parents to live with their married, adult children, or to have a large family house that fits everyone. The kids go away and they hole up in 1BR apartments alone, to fend for themselves independently, for better or worse. Women enter the workforce, willingly or unwillingly.

I would say at this point, that whoever has purchased a home and the land underneath it, they're done moving. Perhaps fewer are looking to purchase homes far away from where they already are. I myself decided I'd never relocate again, back in 1999, because it just wasn't worth it anymore, and also because I found myself in a really ideal location that offered no reasons to leave.

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