A settled nation

It’s not uncommon to hear social critics complain about Americans’ “increased geographic mobility” as a cause of our supposedly ever-increasing social atomism. Frequent moves break up families and communities, leaving a nation of footloose individualists in its wake.

The problem, according to an article in the April issue of Reason (not yet online, alas) by Alison Stein Wellner, a former editor at American Demographics magazine, is that increasing geographic mobility is a flat-out myth:

If anything, Americans are more likely than ever to stay put. You might think that basic fact would give the social critics and policy makers pause. But it hasn’t stopped them from asserting that rampant mobility is destroying the environment, undermining the family, and increasing anomie. More important, it hasn’t stopped them from proposing intrusive, coercive, and expensive measures to curb a problem that doesn’t exist.

In 2004 less than 14 percent of U.S. residents moved–the lowest figure since the Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1948, when the moving rate was 20 percent. What’s more, the movers aren’t going very far: Fifty-eight percent of people who moved in 2004 moved within the same county, while 20 percent moved to a different county within the same state. Nineteen percent of movers (less than 3 percent of U.S. residents) set off for different states, a bit lower than the interstate moving rate during the late 1940s. And those who move usually aren’t in hot pursuit of economic opportunity: Just 16 percent of all moves are work-related. (Most people move for reasons related to housing: to shift from renting to homeownership, to find a cheaper or more spacious place, and so on.)

In fact, she says, Americans are less mobile now than in the 19th and 20th centuries when “economic depressions, farm failures, natural disasters, and wars” crated a series of shocks that forced people to move. Our more recent settling down, on the other hand, is attributed to increased homeownership, two-career families (two careers, Wellner notes, “are less portable than one”), and that scourge of rootedness, the car. Having cars actually enables people to avoid having to move in order to be closer to work.

The interesting question is why so many of us find the mobility myth so easy to believe. Is it because we want to imagine some golden age of rootedness and community that would solve many of our social ills if we could only return to it? Do we think people of ages past had more certainty, more connectedness, more stability than our ever-changing world seems to offer?

One plausible suggestion in the article comes from historian Stephanie Coontz, who points out that the people who complain about mobility – academics, journalists, pundits – are part of a socioeconomic group that actually is more likely to move farther and more frequently than less-educated people. “It is very common,” she says, “to believe that your particular, narrow slice of the socioeconomic strata is totally representative of the population as a whole.”