Well, by moving out you hurt/drop family, friendship and community ties, any sense of belonging to a place, the desire to improve where you live (why bother? You might be elsewhere in 5 years), and general stability in your life.
Unless you're some starry-eyed kid that dreams of making it in Hollywood or SV or NY's art scene etc (and the people in those places rarely care for such jobs), you don't particularly like to move.
You might bite the bullet and do it if you're hopeless and jobless, but in order to move, opportunities need to be there for you elsewhere. In an era of increased de-industrialization and crushing of the working/middle class, they don't exist as much.
And I'm not sure about the past being much different. Americans used to be very concerned with getting their house with the "white picket fence" etc to just carelessly hop from one place to another. Besides they used to have jobs for life in decades past (factory, corporate, etc) -- only those that really wanted it moved to make it big, not just because they were forced (talking post-depression era of course).
Also:
"Indeed, it is widely believed that internal migration rates in the United States—that is, population flows between regions, states, or cities within a country—are higher than in other countries. This belief is not exactly wrong, but reality is more complex. For example, the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s were not representative of their time, but rather were an exceptional case during a period of markedly low internal migration (Ferrie, 2003; Rosenbloom and Sundstrom, 2004). While the United States has historically had one of the highest migration rates in the world by many measures, citizens of some other countries—including Finland, Denmark and Great Britain—appear equally mobile. Moreover, internal U.S. migration seems to have reached an inflection point around 1980".
https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201130/201130p...
Unless you're some starry-eyed kid that dreams of making it in Hollywood or SV or NY's art scene etc (and the people in those places rarely care for such jobs), you don't particularly like to move.
You might bite the bullet and do it if you're hopeless and jobless, but in order to move, opportunities need to be there for you elsewhere. In an era of increased de-industrialization and crushing of the working/middle class, they don't exist as much.
And I'm not sure about the past being much different. Americans used to be very concerned with getting their house with the "white picket fence" etc to just carelessly hop from one place to another. Besides they used to have jobs for life in decades past (factory, corporate, etc) -- only those that really wanted it moved to make it big, not just because they were forced (talking post-depression era of course).
Also: "Indeed, it is widely believed that internal migration rates in the United States—that is, population flows between regions, states, or cities within a country—are higher than in other countries. This belief is not exactly wrong, but reality is more complex. For example, the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s were not representative of their time, but rather were an exceptional case during a period of markedly low internal migration (Ferrie, 2003; Rosenbloom and Sundstrom, 2004). While the United States has historically had one of the highest migration rates in the world by many measures, citizens of some other countries—including Finland, Denmark and Great Britain—appear equally mobile. Moreover, internal U.S. migration seems to have reached an inflection point around 1980". https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201130/201130p...
And: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...