its really hard. I imagine company hiring practices (their growing dependence on recruiting firms) also doesnt help.
For instance, the best way to go to a new geography would be to land a job there prior to moving there. Even in data science, supposedly hot job market, I wanted to get a job in san francisco or seattle, but I was living in philadelphia. you hear stories about people graduating from cali universities and companies jumping through windows to get to them, but even though I graduated with a masters in CIS from Upenn ... crickets. I think because most of them recruit through agencies which filter by geography. I had to reach out aggressively to the recruiters themselves, and bypass a lot of the blockers, which took 2 years. Had I not done that, my talent didn't mean as much as where I was.
Now, imagine a small towner trying to do the opposite, get a job after they make a move to say, one of the urban centers. most people dont have a lot of savings to begin with, and what would last them 6 months where they are would be depleted very quickly in one of the larger cities. even getting an apartment is harder, you dont have a job? reject.
Yes, it is difficult to uproot your family, take a huge risk, and relocate to a place with better employment and educational opportunities.
Just ask the tens of million of immigrants in this country who have done exactly that.
In a sense, it's unfair that native-born Americans are forced to compete with people from all over the world who are highly motivated and have an extremely high tolerance for risk. But it's also what has actually made this country great.
Could you not make the argument that a willingness to stay in a "doomed" city is critical for the re-emergence of desirable cities?
Almost every great city in existence has had at least one awful moment at some point in its history. If everyone took the "times are tough, I'm going to migrate to X place which is doing better" approach, then our urban geography would look so much different.
Ultimately, what gets a city out of tough times is its ability to retain the motivated people you mention. By losing those people, it seems that it's just reinforcing a winner-take-all approach to talent demographics.
What's wrong with winner-takes-all for cities? They're not people so it doesn't necessarily matter if they fail, as long at the people who lived in them end up OK. Maybe the country would be more productive and people more employed (thus happy) if most small towns didn't exist and most people lived in higher density cities. Of course some like the quiet places, but there would always be somewhere left for unemployed, retired, or work-from-home people who want that.
Unless you're an immigrant yourself, it's hard to imagine how big of a deal it is to just uproot your family and go to a different country and start over, often from scratch with no real networks to build from.
One of the greatest stories I ever heard was of my wife's grandfather. He was a Sikh Indian with a hugely prominent position running a 1,000 man unit in the Indian army. Because of weird US immigration laws in the 1970s and his family relations, if his sons wanted to move to the US for a better life, he had to go first. He gave up everything and "restarted" his career as a stockroom boy at a Buster Brown shoe store in NYC, later talking his way into an interview with the CEO of Met Life where he spent the rest of his career. In the interim, he pulled his son from India who became a successful accountant and consultant. I always looked at him with such admiration and said, "now there is the story of a hero". The Sikhs are an incredible people generally. Disclosure: I am 3rd gen Italian-American.
Why is it unfair. Americans are highly motivated too. Or at least they should be. It's much less risky to have to get on the Greyhound back to your parent's house than back to the other side of the world. This is a great country and we are in the perfect industry to take risks.
If you are lucky enough to have that sort of situation available and the money to do so... sure. That isn't all that risky.
Of course, you might not be able to get that far. A greyhound ticket is expensive when you don't have work and are trying to feed children. Or your parents live in the same area. Or they are dead. Or maybe greyhound doesn't serve your area well enough for you to get transportation to the bus stop. and these are just shallow things. Anyone who doesn't have a parent or friend to stay with in an area with jobs is just out of luck.
Not everyone has the money for the bus trip, parents that would have them back, or parents that have a house. A lot of the people on HN come from a background of privilege (nothing wrong with that) but it effects how one perceives risk.
Not everyone has parents that own a house, not everyone has parents that can shelter them. However, a quick check on the Greyhound site shows that bus fare from Washington, DC, to Topeka, Kansas, could be about $120, and from Washington to Los Angeles can be done for $180 to $280.
Yeah right, because the bus ticket is the most expensive cost of relocation.
That's why when a company pays for relocation, they typically pay in the ballpark of $500 to account for the expenses associated with an interstate move for one person.
...which would be a nice narrative if it wasn't an order of magnitude off.
Someone relocating has to pay for:
-transportation of themselves (that's your Greyhound)
-transportation of their goods OR re-purchases of all the basic necessities (something to sleep on, something to cook with, etc) - $1000 conservatively
-transportation or purchase of a vehicle (because you really can't live and work without a car in most of the US), so in fact, let's forget about Greyhound. Throw in vehicle registration fees, increase in insurance (going from Podunk, MN to SF Bay Area will cost you $1000 just there, not accounting for gas/mileage).
Of course, you can save by moving to an area with extensive public transportation networks, but that means you'll pay way more in...
-security deposit AND first month's rent (which, spoiler! is usually going to be much higher in the city that people are relocating to). Again, for the Bay Rea, assuming you are a 20-something single who can live with room-mates (and not someone with a family who needs an apartment), that's around $1000 + $1000 if you are lucky. Add more for NYC where 2x rent is standard for a deposit (remember how you were going to save by going car-less? Put all that money here)
-perhaps you don't have a job offer waiting for you, so a month's worth of expenses while you're looking for a job. Let's say you are frugal, so that's $500, assuming you don't want health insurance and your jalopy made it across the country without needing repairs.
So somewhere around $5K for a single person for interstate relocation, assuming one finds a job within a month.
(I moved with a job offer; typical tech relocation packages are around $5-10K)
To all those looking at Greyhound costs, I need to ask: have you ever actually moved somewhere, tallying your expenses?
I know they sound cheap, but I think you're underestimating how hard an extra $250 can be for a lot of people and how little savings the bulk of the US has (particularly lower income areas/populations, since we're talking in the context of "when their town has no future"). You are also assuming 1 ticket, and if my memory's right then there's a negative correlation between income and family size/age of having first child.
Sometimes its hard to understand the value of something until you see something much worse.
For an immigrant the contrast is very clear. For some one born and used to privilege not so much.
There is reason why so many new millionaires are made, but existing heirs of all those millionaires don't become billionaires. Without any real pressure, a persons efforts will juts wax and wane over time.
The way to make immigration seem less risky is to have others who have done it before you. Minneapolis has a large population of Somalis because word got around that it was a good community for them. The same could happen for groups coming from a disadvantaged area of the US.
You're contrasting the people whose forefathers built the country, with the people who came later, after it was already built and there was no risk to be taken.
How much risk is an immigrant really taking on, when there is a safety net in terms of social services available to them, that pays multiples of their yearly earnings back in "the old country"?
Meanwhile, the native-born Americans have too much assets (even if in a crappy location, it still disqualifies them) to qualify for that same assistance...
You don't get credit for what some ancestor did; you get credit for what you do. I'd say that trying to lean on your ancestors is 'un-American'; earn your own way.
Also, the U.S. has been 'built' continuously and it continues today. The work and progress didn't stop in 1776 or 1930 or whatever date the parent is assuming. The question is, what are you going to leave for the next generation?
> How much risk is an immigrant really taking on, when there is a safety net in terms of social services available to them, that pays multiples of their yearly earnings back in "the old country"?
This comment ignores the great burden of most immigrants: Leaving your home, moving to a foreign culture where you don't speak the language, where you have no contacts or network, and bringing few resources. I'd like to see most Americans pick up and move to a non-English speaking, completely foreign culture, with no money and no contacts.
It also assumes a decent quality of life in the U.S. 'social safety net', which is pretty awful, especially compared to other first world nations. No health care and terrible education, for one thing. Even people with jobs have a tough time, and need several of them just to get by.
Although the USA has problems, it is a "no-risk" to "little-risk" proposition provided you make it to the USA. (I am talking about the legal routes.)
I can't quite articulate it, but I have a serious problem with the attitude that seems to say "well yes, your family for 5 generations struggled to clear the land, make it productive, worked in factories, sent sons off to die in wars, but, if you aren't being 100% economically productive RIGHT THIS MINUTE, just get out of the way already and let immigrants take your place..."
> it is a "no-risk" to "little-risk" proposition provided you make it to the USA. (I am talking about the legal routes.)
That's just absurd. People who were born in the U.S. face many risks.
> get out of the way already and let immigrants take your place
Nobody is taking anybody's place. Economics is not zero sum; the better your neighbor does, the better you do. Your successful neighbors are your employers, customers, taxpayers, etc.
> if you aren't being 100% economically productive RIGHT THIS MINUTE, just get out of the way already ...
That's not a problem with immigration; it's a problem with U.S. government policy that doesn't educate, provide health care for, feed, or house its citizens, and concentrates economic opportunity in the hands of a very few. Those things are clearly doable, because almost every other wealthy country does them much better. And the political leaders who oppose such things, and continually try to 'shrink' government, try to distract attention from their responsibility (and the responsibility of their wealthy constituents who try to avoid paying taxes) by blaming immigrants.
Which social services to use as a safety net are you talking about? Because it is not Medicaid:
"In order to get Medicaid and CHIP coverage, many qualified non-citizens (such as many LPRs or green card holders) have a 5-year waiting period. This means they must wait 5 years after receiving "qualified" immigration status before they can get Medicaid and CHIP coverage. There are exceptions. For example, refugees, asylees, or LPRs who used to be refugees or asylees don’t have to wait 5 years."
I find this pretty upsetting to read. Moving country has significant risk and difficulty, have you tried it? I have. The challenges today are not about finding clean water or basic shelter no, but if you have ever had to figure out healthcare, ID cards, banks, tax and find a job while managing a family? I’m sure you would might consider that it’s not easy after trying it.
That is great, so you should be able to somewhat relate! I think we should just all have a little more empathy. There is a lot of hate going around and somewhat like in the tech systems many of us work on daily, even problems that seem simple are very difficult in complex systems. Countries, the US in particular, are very complex systems and the issues that are imposed on those moving around western nations are not simple to navigate. I'm not a visible minority, but i still ran into many roadblocks, I'd hate to be easily singled out visually or have a language barrier, and have to deal with the issues I had to deal with.
Off-the-wall idea: pay out Unemployment in multiples of the cost-of-living of whatever area you’re in, rather than in multiples of your previous wage/salary. Worked at a factory in small-town Michigan and qualify for six months’ “runway”? Move to SF and now it’s six months of SF-cost-of-living “runway” instead.
(Would this be abused for nice vacations? Almost certainly. But maybe there’s a better version of this which couldn’t.)
Thus, if you got paid the going rate for a factory-worker in Michigan, and you moved to SF, then you'd now be getting the UI that a factory-worker in SF would be receiving if they had been getting paid the going rate for factory-workers in SF. So you could afford to "switch" to the SF jobs market, or any other jobs market, and compete for jobs with the unemployed factory-workers currently living in the SF area: you'd be able to afford to live roughly where they live, feed the family you moved with to the same standard they were used to back home while you're job-hunting, show up in clothes of the same quality they show up in, maintain your car as well as they do to get to interviews at roughly the same time they do, etc.
But that assumes that there are factory workers in SF. There aren't—running a factory in SF is an unprofitable proposition. Whether or not you could come to the area and job-hunt, supply of your job (or any job at your pay-grade) might just not be there to meet your demand.
And that's not even accounting for the second-order effects: decreasing friction of movement between jobs markets would cause everyone else who ever wanted to live in SF to also come there to job-hunt. So, even if there were some factory-worker openings right at the beginning of this policy, they'd quickly be filled, and the markets in cities like SF would come to resemble Hollywood: a place where you have to put up with unreasonable amounts of shit to get anywhere, because there's so much more talent who has come from all over to vye for attention, than there are productions needing talent, that the productions take absolutely no care in how they treat their talent.
In other words, at equilibrium, you'd just be back to where you started as far as "number of people employed" goes, at most levels†; and you'd also not see any change in the population density, demand for gentrification, or any other such thing in these cities, because Unemployment only lasts a fixed amount of time—you can't afford to stay if you don't succeed in finding a job. The one thing that would change is that companies the nation over would be seeing far more "talent liquidity", and thus thinking of employees as even more fungible/replaceable than they do now. (But, the flip-side of that statement: an individual new hire at an SF company would now have much more even probability of having originated anywhere in the country.)
---
† Maybe you'd get more startups, from several people coming to SF (or other expensive cities) and deciding to spend their UI as initial runway to form a company together. But that'd be the exception, not the rule, I think. (Might still have nice knock-on effects for employment if those companies need to grow by hiring later on, though.)
Most US immigrant visas (h-1b etc) are conditional on not becoming "a burden to the state" so you would be deported if you tried to claim unemployment etc.
The only relation it had to immigrant visas is that, as a dual intent non-immigrant visa, it's not illegal for you to enter on an H-1B with the intent of applying for an immigrant visa without departing in between.
> are conditional on not becoming "a burden to the state"
That's not exactly true. The condition that actually exists in law relates mostly to the future likelihood at time of admission of becoming a “public charge”.
> so you would be deported if you tried to claim unemployment etc.
No, but your I-864 sponsors (whose income and assets are considered in making the public charge decision at admission) will have to pay back any payments you get from certain federally-funded public benefit programs. You can be deported for you not paying back your debts for certain other benefit programs in a specified time period, but very few benefit programs create the kind of debts that relate to that.
Unemployment, as an earned benefit, isn't actually an issue at all.
I feel like recruiters filtering by geography is a big issue at times. When I lived in Florida, I felt like I was invisible to potential employers. There were a handful of local options that didn't bite, and remote options never paid any attention to me.
The moment I relocated to Silicon Valley, I began getting bombarded by recruiters.
At my current job, I have a co-worker who told me that his classmates would often fake a Silicon Valley address (and stomach travel expenses for interviews), and it made a huge difference in the rate of companies contacting them back.
Of course most people who live in those dead towns aren't necessarily like us, and may not have degrees or experience in demanded fields. So I'm not sure our stories are applicable to the conversation.
I think changing your LinkedIn location to San Francisco Bay area and explaining during the first call you intent to move there when you've found a job is acceptable to most companies. BTW we hire in 90% of the world at GitLab
I believe you that this is true for GitLab but I’d also imagine many companies getting somewhat pissed off about that disclosure on the first call. Interesting idea though, I may try it in the future just to see what happens.
On the contrary, I've seen and heard of a lot of companies that will not hire if you're not in the same city. They specifically say that you need to be in the city for interviews. They get too many applicants fishing for positions when there is no guarantee that the applicant is actually committed to moving.
Offtopic: are developers with no ruby experience considered @gitlab? I've been thinking of applying for a long time but have no ruby experience at all.
We have vancancies for site reliability engineers and Go programmers. We used to hire people without Ruby experience to work on the Ruby codebase but it took significantly longer for them to be effective so we stopped doing that.
FWIW, my brand-name SF employer believes that essentially all feasible Bay Area candidates have already been through its pipeline, and that future headcount growth will have to be elsewhere. Unfortunately it’s still not willing to consider remote, or to look anywhere between the top 3 most expensive US cities and the third world. At least the worldwide offices are first-party and have essentially the same people as work in the US, minus visa-related stress.
You could say “pay more” but housing is a positional good - that strategy doesn’t scale.
Just anecdotal of course, but I live in a decent-sized-but-unimportant city and Bay Area recruiters have been hitting my LinkedIn inbox quite a bit in the last few months, when the last time I heard something from them was when I graduated university 6 years ago.
My LinkedIn page is just a straight up listing of previous jobs, no descriptions, so I've found that kinda interesting.
And if they can't, somehow they'd rather recruit globally and play the visa lottery instead of simply recruiting from elsewhere in their own damn country.
Going through this myself at the moment. Would love to move from the small city I work in remotely now to a larger city for more tech opportunities. But even within the same large multinational I work for if there isnt a sufficient salary bump compared to cost of living with no relocation leaving my small suburb I come out worse off then I started.
I was struck by the family that moved back in the article. They had a good job in the new location. What they didn't have was extended family or a community.
The pure financial impact of extended family childcare can easily eat away a step up in earnings for those with young children. Then the intangibles of not getting them to know your parents or the close friends you grew up with, those don't even have an exact market substitute. Frequent travel I guess?
It's not easy.
From the econ perspective I can't help but think that greater labor mobility would make things so much better, but as a new parent it's becoming obvious these are not trivial behaviors to shift at all.
It's hard to move to a new city and leave your friends, and often family, behind. Not to mention the lifestyle change, from rural to city, which will often entail giving up hobbies and pastimes.
I'm really trying hard to get inside your head! There is definitely an "Americanism" here somewhere, which you take for granted but I have to tease out. I will probably get it all a bit wrong (despite having a fair few US relos) but I will do my best.
On top of being from a very different culture and trying not to say anything or have any mannerisms that may give the recruiter the impression that you're a back woods hick.
The tech industry as a whole has a really severe class problem. There is a really terrible negative attitude towards the poor and the rural. We as an industry focus a lot on race and gender (and not in that order), but the real taboo subject that makes everyone uncomfortable is talking about what it's like to be poor.
It's especially bad here on HN where often the conversation devolves into people telling me that I'm wrong about my childhood where I grew up poor...or how poor people are a blight on society.
The single topic that I find in my career people insist on secrecy is about poverty. I continue to be open about it so that others are willing to talk about it to someone, because otherwise you just can't.
That is so abundantly true on HN[0]. Nearly any thread about poverty, money, or credit will be full of examples of people who don't understand what it's like to not have money, and it is strange. It's not usually the "American Dream" types who claim that anyone who works hard enough will be able to escape poverty. It's usually the, "have you tried not being poor?" types. Who the hell has money to pay for a house, car, and higher education outright? Those people certainly exist, but it's not the majority.
I grew up in nowhere Illinois with a blue collar family. Honestly the values my family had growing up align pretty spot on with blue collar workers I’ve met in the Bay Area.
The problem with tech is the self centered elitist culture. The job filtering is extremely narrow and you need a specific background to get in the door of most places.
Blue collar workers are suffering everywhere (cities, rural) and it’s obvious the rest of America doesn’t care. When these workers turn to alternatives they’re dismissed because they weren’t lucky enough to be born with more opportunities.
Also, if you ask me what it was like growing up poor in NYC in the 80s, I'm going to give you a very evasive and superficial answer, because it's better than talking about dozens of my childhood friends who are now dead or worse.
You're not prepared to talk about it and honestly neither am I.
I grew up poor in PA. People who have never been poor are not prepared to hear about it. My wife doesn’t even want to hear about it. She’ll roll her eyes when I talk about it. The fact is that people can’t relate to an empty refrigerator or to not having money to buy a gallon of milk.
Poverty is soul crushing.
I have had a very successful and influential engineering career but I can look back at single decisions I made that could have sent me the other direction. It’s easy for people to say that the decision I made was obvious but it absolutely wasn’t at the time. I took huge risk being the first in my family to go to a prestigious University and double major in physics and mathematics in the early 90s(I was no prodigy); let alone go to graduate school.
One decision different and I’d be driving trucks in West Virginia.
I think this thread overestimates how much people care. Social and virtue signaling mean people have to be sympathetic when it's brought up, but I don't think most people actually care. Anyone who struggles wants their struggles to mean something, but the world doesn't care.
> I think this thread overestimates how much people care.
I think you have it backwards. People are not naturally sociopathic; psychologically healthy people naturally care about other people. They may have limited resources to act, but that's a different issue.
As evidence of caring, people widely support social welfare programs. In most wealthy countries (and some others), everyone has healthcare on the taxpayer's dime, as well as other services such as housing. Even the U.S. spends vast amounts of money on these things. People also care about the rights and wellbeing of others worldwide; the trendy nationalism may try to argue against it, but Western democracies have been spending blood and treasure on others' freedom and prosperity for generations. (They spent those things on many sins too.)
People support social welfare programs, but they usually don't want it in their face. Given the opportunity to do something in person, most people crumble and go about their lives as usual. It's a very rare person that takes action.
We don't have a basis for talking about motives. I'd say people are scared and uncomfortable with what seems foreign to them.
> Given the opportunity to do something in person, most people crumble and go about their lives as usual. It's a very rare person that takes action.
Many people give money to those asking for it. Many will say that they are overwhelmed and feel like they can't help everyone (tip: don't let the great be enemy of the good: don't worry about helping everyone; if you can, help someone). Many have their own problems and reasons.
I can't remember speaking to someone who says they just don't care.
Yep completely agree. Had spent time "homeless" as a child, middle class as a teen, and then actually homeless during (very) early adulthood. Additionally some of my best friends parents are multi millionaires so I've seen the range.
Most peers talk a good game but they can't relate and don't truly care. Its hard for me to at times as well...
Of course I would never even bring any of this up IRL, not worth the conversation.
They don't care. I'm going to destroy them and laugh. And then help them rebuild their lives because I'm a nice person. But sorry, they need to suffer, even just a little.
To clarify I'm only going to destroy them because they coast. You can't coast when you're working for that milk money. God having milk is so good.
A nicer take: there should be mandatory class mixing. Rich kids should have to spend a few months being poor as part of their education. I'm not sure the other way around really helps anything but it'd be a nice break for the poor kid.
One thing that is interesting is the whole hipster "lumbersexual" fad has made knowledge of "rural" things pretty cool in those circles.
Don't fall for the trap to think this means you can admit you were poor once too. That negative attitude will still turn towards you. You will be judged and it will be remembered. You'll get a little bit of "Other" on you and everything will get a little harder. Just consider yourself lucky that unlike most race and gender concerns you can pass very easily, so do it.
I'm impressed you are committed to being open about it, but I hope during that talk you tell them to start passing and help them learn how to if they need it.
> I'm impressed you are committed to being open about it, but I hope during that talk you tell them to start passing and help them learn how to if they need it.
It comes with a social cost, but I'm enough of a "personality" that who I am is going to come out regardless. There's no point in being anything but honest, but it (being too different) has cost me my job two times. If you're at a good place around good people it's not a big deal.
As for the whole "lumbersexual" thing, it's sort of like putting on blackface, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm conflicted about the appropriation aspect of it. This whole rural aesthetic fashion is obviously coming from modern young men being confused about how to be masculine now as well as a generic naivete about rural life and nature in general that make them see their escape from stressful office bullshit through rose colored glasses.
Mostly though, part of it is just a return to valuing the different types of skills necessary in that setting. This is great, and it is great for their perception of rural people in general, because they are bad at something that people who they look down on find easy - and it changes their mind.
It is a mixed bag, and seems like an overall good to me.
And it's funny, because I generally find that the truly wealthy, silver-spoon/old-money type of people do not do this and they generally don't care about it if they like you...
> We as an industry focus a lot on race and gender (and not in that order)
As an aside, I've noticed that the American women in tech to be much more diverse in terms of background (including economic or social class) than the American men. Based on what I've learned through casual conversation I think that the various efforts to increase gender diversity have the positive side effect of catching a more diverse cross section of the population.
I came from the dirt. I worked hard to make it sure, but so did so many of my child hood friends. They didn't make it. It's sad. We can't all be top 10%, by definition.
“A big factor here is a loss in self-confidence. It takes faith to move.”
When I first started dating and generally getting to know other American families on a more adult and intimate level, it often shocked me how low everyone's confidence and motivation levels were. There was always some looming fear of failure, of being wrong, or getting hurt, it was paralyzing.
Our culture, the media, the education system, it all cultivates fear, doubt, helplessness, and dependency. Without exceptional influences, we generally produce scared consumers.
My parents are both immigrants, and it's had a substantial impact, good and bad. Confidence, motivation, willingness to take on challenges and risks, are not problems for me. But the flip side of that is I'm often quite frustrated by my contemporaries, as I tend to expect the same. These traits seem like part of the bare minimum of being an adult from my perspective, and the average American just seems like an overgrown child in this context. It's quite frustrating.
edit:
Just wanted to add; one of the things I've most enjoyed about working at tech startups is how effectively they tend to filter out these people.
This made me chuckle. There are a lot of countries where this is true, but the US is generally not one of them. Sure you might end up loosing all your assets and living in a homeless shelter, but at least we have homeless shelters. Yea, you're probably better off indigent in much of northern/western europe, but the social safety net here in the US, while imperfect, is a heck of a lot better than much of the rest of the world. A big part of why immigrants "fearlessly" launch themselves into the unknown and immigrate is because where they're from, if you fail you actually do die. Soon. Painfully. There may be instances of that in the US, particularly in cases involving drug use and.or mental illness, but it's hardly the norm. Moving for a job you don't have yet to escape an economic backwater is certainly a huge financial risk, but it's hardly a life and death risk.
Ok, completely discount my experience. Thanks. I've been to other countries too. Yes we are lucky there isn't a war breaking out right now. It's not funny. It's real and raw suffering.
My armchair guess would be that debt is keeping people chained to particular locations. If you live in a town that no one wants to live in, who will buy your house?
If you go bankrupt or have a foreclosure on the record, it can be hard to move to locations with better opportunities. Many jobs require credit checks, so leaving the job you don't want can be a hassle.
Despite popular myth, US households are in good condition when it comes to debt.
The US household debt to income ratio is far lower than in nations such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, Australia, South Korea, Britain and Canada (see: [1] [2]).
US household debt service payments as a share of disposable income, are near a 40 year low. [3]
You can have bankruptcy and have little to no debt for years. A foreclosure, repo, or eviction can happen for various reasons. Maybe you simply got sick and were missing work. You can owe money on your house - a reasonable amount - and be stuck because you can't sell your house nor afford to both pay the current house mortgage and live somewhere else.
Some of the "debt" things are special to being poor. Lose your job and can't pay the final cable bill? Collections. Can't pay the $600 hospital bill? Collections and eventual judgement. It doesn't take a large amount of debt to have it affect your life negatively when a flat tire puts your electricity at risk of being turned off.
I wonder if there's a correlation between American debt decreasing due to poor support for retired workers. Americans are wising up to the fact they need to save for their retirement since pensions are rare nowadays.
I'm not familiar with the work structure in those other countries, but guessing there's a far better support structure for retirees compared to the US.
I wouldn't have thought that but we're talking about smaller, "dying" towns here. Their financial/economic circumstances are going to be much different.
Maybe because it actually makes economic sense to stay. Cost of living, mainly for housing, in high-paying regions means that after a certain age you won't realize the benefits of the higher wages since you won't be able to pay off your mortgage before your career ends. In fact rent or mortgage interest may capture all of the salary bump and more.
Working a menial job in a depressed area makes a lot more sense when a house there only costs $125,000.
I understand that those open to education can have a life transformation in a new city by acquiring new skills. But that's a small number of people.
Most people work to live and not the other way around. Some just want three hots and a cot, family, and friends. And that is perfectly alright.
Just for fun I searched Bloomberg for this phrase: "why do upper middle class people continue to live in overpriced cities despite having all their needs met". The second result was this one: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-12/only-45-p.... Maybe we are more alike than we realize...
> Just for fun I searched Bloomberg for this phrase: "why do upper middle class people continue to live in overpriced cities despite having all their needs met". The second result was this one: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-12/only-45-p.... Maybe we are more alike than we realize...
The article is paywalled, but AFAICT it's not particularly true or relevant. The article you posted is from 4 years ago, and is based on the Fed's annual "Economic Well-Being" report. The most recent one was just released (https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-repor...), and it shows that ~40 of non-retired adults think
that their retirement savings are on track. This comfortably encompasses the upper-middle class.
The 2014 report is here (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/2014-report-econo...) and shows worse numbers for savings (the metrics seem to have changed, so I can't make a simple apples-to-apples comparison). AFAICT, the main changes have been to economic optimism and liquidity, both of which are better indicators of the contemporary economy[1] than they are of actual financial stability or level of savings. This is hardly surprising, given that we were still not that far out from a shaky economy in '14.
As a broad response to a lot of comments here (and the HN perspective in general), there are many dozens of thriving cities in the US that are not San Francisco or New York City. Moving to a city for opportunity does not mean moving to one of the 10 most expensive cities on the planet.
It doesn't even necessarily mean moving to the trendy, increasingly expensive cities, like Portland or Denver or Austin.
It can mean moving to places like Charlotte, Nashville, Madison, Lawrence or Savannah. Or maybe Santa Fe, Columbus, Provo or Bend.
For most Americans, there is a growing city with colleges, trade schools and unemployment rates below the statewide level within a couple hours drive.
Chicago. Chicago is an honest-to-goodness world city with skyscrapers and trains and everything. A luxury condo in one of them can run you less than be down payment on a rundown shack in a far-flung Bay Area suburb. Unfortunately the tech scene there is mostly in the old-school business IT tradition and in suburban office-park hellscapes.
The winters are also... bracing, to say the very least. If you like feet of snow, it’s great, otherwise maybe not so much. I love to visit, but I wouldn’t last a year.
Winter is a tooling problem. The tools are straightforward and Chicago is well-practiced in their use. You put on a coat. The city plows. You drive a 4WD car carefully. It works out.
Compared to paying half your “upper middle class” salary for living conditions that most Americans would identify as poverty (roommates, paper thin walls, 1970s fixtures, no dishwasher, garbage disposal, laundry, or parking, etc) due to game-theoretically intractable politics, it’s nothing.
> You spend as little time outside as possible for several months.
That’s a big fuckin’ problem for me. In fact, it’s the exact same reason I can’t live in the south. Y’all have heaters; they have AC. It all still means I’m trapped indoors and miserable much of the year. No thanks.
Proper winters are AWESOME. Skiing, winter hiking/camping.. Lots of things to do.
Year-cycle puts a nice rhythm in life. November is time to bring out tea, books, warm socks and reflect the year that is about to pass. Then first signs of spring comes, everybody is out celebrating and there's a deep-rooted feeling that rough time has passed and now you can relax for a bit.
I couldn't live somewhere without proper 4 seasons. I did stay in non-snowy areas for extended period of time more than once and it's just.. sad. On the other hand, it's probably upbringing&culture.
Moved to Montreal from Vancouver and this is exactly what I noticed. There's something the seeps into the people that live in regions with a proper 4-seasons that doesn't happen elsewhere.
> > You spend as little time outside as possible for several months.
> That’s a big fuckin’ problem for me.
Dunno about the GP, but I live in Cleveland and I spend plenty of time outside in the winter. Even here, skiing (downhill and XC), sledding, hiking, camping, and ice fishing are all doable in the winter.
If you want to pay at least double (if not triple) digit dollars per year to avoid significant snow, that is of course your choice. But there shouldn't be any expectation that everyone should be be able to do so. (Or that such would even make sense in the aggregate--not everyone can live in California.)
That's changing. My wife made me go to a restaurant in the western part of Chicago and i remember looking around at all of the names/types of stores and saying "something about this feels Silicon Valley like pretentiousn..." and the advertised apartments were expensive as hell by most people's standards..
Sure enough Google and some other big dotcoms were building or moving into the area. I want to say the Morgan area?
Pretentious shopping is not a new phenomenon: see the Magnificent Mile. But yes, there is a tech cluster starting to appear in the West Loop (not to be confused with the much larger poor Hispanic West Side).
Part of it stems from the meaning of the term, "city." While they may be incorporated as cities, three names that jumped out at me from your list are Lawrence (KS?), Santa Fe, NM, and Bend, OR, each of which has a population of < 100,000.
By comparison, Sunnyvale, CA, which feels distinctly like a suburb, has a population of close to 150,000.
One downside of moving to a small town for an opportunity is that, if that opportunity flops, it may be much harder to find the next one without having to move again. Whereas in the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, etc., the next opportunity is likely in the office park next door, where they want you to start "yesterday"...
No. I don't know what list you looked at, but Lawrence, Kansas is not a place with job growth or much opportunity that doesn't involve driving to Kansas City every day or working for the university in some capacity.
Well, okay, sure, but then you're in Kansas City. And KC certainly isn't expensive, of course, it's dirt cheap. But even Kansas City is really thin on the specialized jobs which people typically move to big, expensive cities to get. Unfortunately, it missed a handful of really critical opportunities that would have given it a better technology sector. But most of those misses weren't the city's fault. I I mean if you weigh it against Wichita or OKC or Omaha or Saint Louis, Kansas City is one of the best in the region. I think it doesn't hold a candle to Denver, but it's a good city. If I had to live in the middle third of the country, the KC area would be one of my top choices. I like to compare it to Nashville, because if you look at it through a layer of abstraction, it's got similar cultural form and character. Anyway, that went sideways. But yeah, if I was going to be working in KC, I would drive from Lawrence, because otherwise Lawrence is a phenomenal town. It's hard for people living there to see it with objectivity, but it's one of the best cities I've ever spent time in.
I have family in this situation, of all ages, and I think it's a lack of knowledge about what exists out there. It takes a lot to break with family, tradition, history, and everything you've known, to go to a new place.
> According to a new Brookings Institution report, the largest metro areas—those of 1 million or more people—have experienced 16.7 percent employment growth since 2010, and areas with 250,000 to 1 million have seen growth of 11.6 percent, while areas with fewer than 250,000 residents have lagged far, far behind, with only 0.4 percent growth.
So, clearly most Americans don't stay behind when their town has no future. The article should add the qualifier "Some" Americans to avoid a misleading impression.
Well of course employment growth increased since 2010, since the 2008 crash caused greater unemployment. That doesn't mean that people moved to find work, rather they stayed and waited for jobs to open again.
I'm not from around there but this sounds like a sense of place or a feeling of belonging, perhaps tribalism. From the outside this phenomenon looks a bit odd and will need some explanation from the locals.
Some people are content with what they have in life and are not driven by a need to always strive for more. For these people, feeling like you "belong", in a place with your family and friends are nearby is more important than better career opportunities. I don't know why this is regarded as such a mystery.
If you read the article, one of the primary things it focuses on is: to what we should attribute the _decline_ of geographic labor mobility. If you're going to claim that it's obviously "wanting to feel like you belong", you need a simple theory for why the desire to stay put would have increased, especially during a period when the incentives to move have grown dramatically (i.e., the "opportunity gap").
In particular, the article quite obviously isn't wondering why every single resident of rural Ohio hasn't packed up and moved to Manhattan. They're wondering why (to take the county they focused on), a smaller chunk of the 64% of unemployed adults in Adams County, has left than would have in the past.
Not to mention the fact that we're not talking about striving for more: in most severe cases, the individual economic issues aggregate to municipal ones, which can affect quality of life fairly significantly. Just off the top of my head, the article mentioned increasingly understaffed gov't, plummeting school funding, and an increasingly strained law-enforcement and judicial system.
Again, if you actually bothered to read the article, it's not a question of why people aren't striking out from their cozy suburban life to take their shot in the big city. It's focusing on why the number of people willing to leave dying local economies has declined so sharply. As part of the article puts it, there's been a reversal in the correlation between poverty and geographic labor mobility, from positive to negative.
Again, I recommend reading the article posted (it's the link at the top of the comments page), and maybe you'l understand a little better what's being discussed here and what the "mystery" in question is.
I grew up in Adams County and our family has been there since the 1860s. Leaving is a big deal you'll be treated like you're abandoning the family or community. I feel like this isn't unique to the AC but just part of Appalachian culture.
Seeing the photos of the hills, river and Gios sure made me miss the place.
I grew up poor, but I was able to move away to San Francisco and get good jobs in tech, and ultimately became successful, and by some standards here, even “rich”.
But you know what? The relationships with friends and family I left behind definitely suffered. I now feel distant from everyone, and unfortunately some of my best memories are still from old times when I lived close to these people. I have very few friends here in the city, most my interactions day to day are simple and transactional. I wouldn’t blame anyone for staying behind in their town. I’ve always figured I could move back when money was no problem anymore, but I don’t think that day will come soon, and sooner or later I’ll have to decide where I want to plant roots and start a family, and I doubt any woman here will want to go back to my old town after living in SF. Don’t know what to do really, just hanging on.
I'm sorry to hear that; I was in a somewhat similar position for different reasons some time ago. The bright side is: because of the large number of transplants, this is probably one of the easiest places to make friends. It's not a skill that's particularly natural, since most people are used to having a community instead of having to build one from scratch, but it's pretty vital in an increasingly socially-atomized world. I don't want to be bossy, but I really really really recommend investing actual time in it. I can tell you from experience: it's just not healthy to not have a social group around you.
I moved to San Francisco with a handful of friends, but I had a facsimile of your problem due to some unrecognized health issues that made my social life wither away, along with some bad luck with the timing of people moving away. I had to start from scratch to build a friend group here, but it turns out there are tons of people doing the same thing, and it couldn't be easier. Even if you just go to social Meetups to meet people, it can be very easy to get a good group around you just by repeatedly putting yourself out there. It does take work: there were times when i felt lazy but would force myself to go to some random outing to foster a friendship with someone who I got along with, or saw movies that I wasn't all that crazy about, but it really paid off in spades.
The closest friends from the group I've built up over the last three or four years from nothing are basically like family to me at this point, and the feeling is mutual. They're the kind of friends whose house I can drop by on a weeknight more or less randomly (assuming they're not out), and just hang out until everyone falls asleep/I go home.
Even if you decide that this is not where you want to put roots down, having a more casual group of solid friends is really valuable, at the very least so you have people you can depend on.
“The American dream is kind of to stay close to your family, do well, and let your kids grow up around your parents,” he says.
This, I feel, is telling. The dream is becoming the hope that your children can live as you did. It's not about each generation doing better; it's about not doing worse. It's about maintaining.
Can't win with this one. Either you're the modern day segregationist for wanting to live in a nice neighborhood, or you're gentrifying by not doing that.
Fortunately there's also a large number of people, probably a majority, who don't give a shit about this political nonsense and just want to go on with their lives.
I looked through the comments, and a lot of interesting ideas are presented, but I have to speculate about two additional issues:
1. A lot of people are tied down by responsibilities to others, such as parents and relatives who need care.
2. If a young person from a rural town has acquired a portable skill such as programming, it's quite likely to be because they already left that town -- to attend college.
In times past and in other cultures, someone might migrate solo and later bring their family over. I've read stories of European migrants doing this to Australia. Sometimes, it would be years later.
Were people then more willing to leave partners or kids behind? Or elderly parents?
I don't think I'd ever entertain the idea of moving without my partner and children like that.
Even in a very connected world, my partner is not interested in being away from her circle of friends for any serious length of time, let alone a major career/lifestyle move.
Community is important. Friends, way of life, values, food, out doors living, fishing, hunting, days at the river drinking beer, a support system in place with neighbors helping out. So there are good things that can keep you in a place. But there is also that when you have little, all those things are harder to give up. Find yourself in a city where no one knows you, no one cares, and the things you found easy before, aren't easy anymore. Poverty presents so many barriers that it really hard to see the inertia it presents.
Given the sort of value judgements on this list, one might expect that a boom town will be over-represented with a mix of people who have no fear, nothing to lose, or no strong attachments (a superset of “people who don’t give a shit about anybody else”).
Some of those traits are maladaptive for long term stability of the town and its industries. Now I wonder how this feeds into the boom/bust trope...
Isn’t it pretty normal to have “no fear, nothing to lose, and no strong attachments” as a fresh college graduate? Those are more phases of life than character traits. Graduate, explore, slowly put down roots, then stay rooted until your own children leave the nest and start to do the same.
No, it is normal for graduates with rich parents as a safety net to play act these traits. I think the comment mean actually having no fear, nothing to lose and no strong attachments.
Is having a 22-year-old living at home any more expensive than having a 17-year-old? Presumably their bed is still there, the marginal cost of an extra portion in each recipe was already accounted for, and they don’t outgrow clothes as quickly. The safety net of moving back in with mom and dad does not require mom and dad to be rich.
Incidentally, the recent tax cut bill removed the individual deduction for moving expenses when moving to a new job. So the financial costs of relocating have increased.
You have to account for the different brackets and larger standard deduction.
People that would have deducted high bracket income using the moving expenses see increased costs. People that probably weren't itemizing will see decreased taxes whether they move or not.
The other thing the tax bill removed was the exclusion of employer provided relocation support from taxable income. So even if an employer is willing to pay for relocation, that support shows up as taxable income.
The new standard deduction for single filers maxes out at somewhere below $43k. So if your income is anywhere above that, you'd get a tax hit for moving. But even the thought of that hit is a possible disincentive.
Couldn't you just as easily spin it the other way? Moving is now feasible because of more total spendable dollars in my pocket, the relative tax savings are irrelevant?
I can't speak for everyone, but that maps much more closely to my personal decision-making, which is in terms of absolute dollars, than your formulation.
Is it even worth it to post now that this article has been up for a few days? Funny how all of these comments just sit there on a server somewhere. Produced. But what value does it add? Will anyone even look at this?
For me it's about the job but I'm sure everyone has their own reasons. I'm secure and don't have to struggle. I apply for jobs and don't hear back, interview and don't get the job, etc. I'd be willing to move somewhere new if I knew I had a job lined up. While savings is good, it's stressful and scary to have no income. It's like holding your breath and eventually panic sets in. Doesn't feel good. I'd love to move to a bunch of different cities but many of those places don't seem to have jobs that fit my background. I'd jump to a new career but not sure I could float the expenses while also saving for the future.
Maybe these people don't want to leave their families & communities and be complicit in destroying their home town just because they can make some more money by doing that, and some economists and journalists they don't know insists that they all have no future.
The elephant in the room here is politics. A better chance of employment is a lot less appealing if it's in a city where you know nobody, there is no sense of community, most people are not at all like you and think people like you are backwards hicks.
There is truth to this. As a rural Illinois boy I traveled to Chicago to intern and it just wasn't my cup of tea...plain and simple. People are different, culture is different. In my town in the "sticks" we have brown people and immigrants--plenty (will come as big shock to some who think we're all just inbred corn eaters out here). That is not the difference...to get that mandatatory political correctness dance out of the way. Rather it is simply the way people relate to each other, attitudes, community or what passes for it.
If you grew up in a town, and maybe have seen a couple of cycles of better and worse, growth and decline, it's hard to really believe that this time is different. You think, "This will be kind of bad for a while, but we've been through that before. We'll be all right" - because that's all you've known.
A lot of similar things were said about San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.
This is one of the reasons behind the rise of Los Angeles in the early 20th century. Also of note is that after they (temporarily) figured out the water problem, they were able to lure movie investment seeking to escape Edison’s patents on the east coast.
I have lived in several countries and I know I would have a terribly difficult time emigrating from the US and living elsewhere, even if things got really bad. It’s probably the local version of the same thing.
Judging from the comments here, there is a real US ism which I find fascinating. It looks like one that is so obvious to the locals that it is err obvious.
Yeah, Europe is established. The US is not. I have a German friend whose town (Liepzig) celebrated it's 1000th anniversary recently. It has a book fair that is 400 years old. The city that I live in (Portland, OR) was a forest 150 years ago. We're still figuring out where all the permanent settlements are going to be and how many people will live in each one.
I don't think it's a USism, similar stuff is happening in rural France, Britain, Australia, Japan and probably most of the west. Rural areas areas are slowly dying and cities are thriving, perhaps thriving too much.
True. Rural areas though? Try suburbs. People are moving just far enough away from the downtown core so they can afford a modest house. Let's not give anyone the impression that Canadians are abandoning the cities to reconnect with mother nature.
That is what the data suggests to me. The very rural farming community I grew up in, for instance, that is well outside of any city, several hours away from a major city, has seen 17% population growth (the country grew by 5%). Along with that growth, the value of the average home has increased by 50% in the last two years. This region has the lowest unemployment rate in the province, and the median individual income is now $10,000 more per year than in Toronto.
And anecdotally, it feels like it is booming. New businesses are popping up left and right. The main street is packed full of people, something that you wouldn't have seen a decade ago. It's a complete turnaround to what I grew up with. Thriving leaves room for subjectivity, but it certainly is in my opinion. From population growth to relatively higher incomes, it all seems quite favourable by the data, and the visit leaves the same impression. I am starting to look to moving back there myself!
The people leaving Toronto are going somewhere, and everything points to this being one of those places. According to Statistics Canada, communities of 1,000 to 29,999 people were the fastest growing community type from 2011 to 2016. Communities with 100,000 people or more have started to lose share of the population.
I do not think anyone should see this as people reconnecting with nature. They are almost certainly following the money.
That picture doesn't really fit with what I've read; or the stories I hear from everyone around me (I live in downtown TO). But in that case I hope I'm wrong – the story of your hometown is heartening!
Now you have me curious about what you've read. For what it is worth, all the numbers from before are from Statistics Canada (and CREA for housing data). A few data points can never tell the whole story, but they seem like very pertinent indicators.
Understandably rural is pretty vague. Almost the entirety of the country is rural, and like not all cities are booming, not all rural areas are either. I want to be clear that I am speaking about a set of rural regions within the country.
I vacation in Toronto a few times a year, and keep in touch with residents there, so I feel I have a pretty good idea of what the people are saying. Their stories are usually on point if you consider them to be several years out of date. That is the impression I get, at least. If we were to select a rural location at random, the average person would have no idea where it is and I feel that due to that there is some inherit information lag. It is not like these places are in the news every day, so most people just don't know.
Cost of living due to rampant NIMBYism in the most economically dynamic cities, as well as the feeling of community that would disappear if they were to move.
They gave an example of the coal plant worker who found a high paying job at a somewhat isolated dam in Washington state but moved back to Ohio for a much lower paying job because he, his wife and kids missed their relatives and had trouble making new friends, so it was only the community if one can call it that and more a trouble with adapting to a new place that would happen with any move. It feels like if that family had help with adapting that move could have stuck permanently.
> The landscape of central Washington state was more desolate than they were prepared for. The nearest Walmart and McDonald’s were almost an hour away. Flights back home were expensive. Tiffany had almost no contact with other adults when Randy was at work.
To me, that sounds more like the high paying job was in the middle of nowhere.
It also seems she is used to the sort of place where it is normal for one income to support a family. There, she'd have neighbors to visit with during the day.
But they blame other people for pulling up the economic ladder after climbing it. And they consider economic inequality in some cases but not in, say, accessibility of job opportunities in downtown SF or NYC.
Really good article - didn't come across as preachy and condescending as a lot of "big media organisation interviews poor white people" stories tend to go.
I myself would love to buy a house in a small town. It's a much more realistic option for me than buying in a city. And I'm sure as a programmer I could find a job. But then what happens when - or if - that employer shuts up shop? It's a massive risk.
I’ve spent my almost 20 year career as a developer in a rural area and found that there are plenty of places trying to hire developers, not to mention that remote work is also available. I personally have never seen it as being all that risky.
The very worst case is that you move back to the city, which is exactly where you’d be if you never left.
There are lots of tech companies, relatively speaking. But also I've found software developers in some less obvious and surprising places. For instance, the mom and pop funeral home in town maintain their own software. My first development job was at a warehousing business on their inventory management system.
I moved to a small town in Middle-of-Nowhere, MN last year. It's great. My wife and I bought a small house for $40k. Our house will be paid for in no time, then it doesn't matter what we do. We do miss some things about living in the city, but having nature so close and neighbors who can keep an eye on things for us is fantastic.
Even though we're making less than we were in a bigger metro (St. Louis) we're saving a lot more and our quality of life is much better.
I fantasize about doing similar, but I live in NZ, so even if I branched out to somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Australia I'd probably be looking at at least 100k USD for a decent place. Still, sure beats 300k USD minimum for a place in a city.
No. I'm a librarian that teaches computer skills to the elderly, so I'm actually in pretty high demand in rural areas. My wife works in an office doing invoicing. Childfree, so that helps quite a bit.
Worst case: You move again. Sure, that sucks, but you moved there in the first place. You can move again. It's not that big of a deal, and that negative is balanced off by all the nice things about being out of the urban environment.
If this article had been published in 1992 when NAFTA, free trade and immigration were actually being debated, it would have been ridiculed by the establishment as backwards and probably racist anti-globalization propaganda. Even now, questioning the govenment economic policies that directly resulted in this mess lands you on a professional blacklist at 'respected' publications.
That's not what the article is about. Its about whole cities becoming unemployed as a result of factories moving overseas, and unfair trade deals signed in the early 1990's. The people in that figue moved because they found work somewhere else, not because their entire community was terminated overnight.
The decline of the Rust belt began in the 1970s, and by the 1980s you already had movies like Gung Ho
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(film)
dramatizing existential crises of factory towns in the face of manufacturing off-shoring.
Factory towns are nothing new, and neither are factory towns disappearing overnight. What's relatively recent in modern American history is the reticence of Americans to move, thus the title of the article. But this reticence is probably a regression to the mean, much like everything else about the post-post-WWII economy.
I can leave cheaply, hustle remotely, and use my (technically - thanks, Solo 401K!) low AGI to go on Obamacare. Why should I get a "career" in a major city and live hand to mouth while never being able to afford real property?
If you're in tech there is no reason to live hand to mouth in a major city. Maybe in San Francisco that's the case, but I make a very decent living in Atlanta (not suburbs) and save a huge chunk of my income. I'm sure I'm not the only one and that this isn't the only city.
I'm a cowboy. Hence the hustle. Even if I passed a corporate sniff test, could I put away 60% or more of my income every year? And why would I want to live in Atlanta or someplace like it? I hate commuting. That's a major reason I work from home in a small city and take whatever remote gigs I can wrangle.
Fwiw, this is definitely possible. I've saved about 80% of after-tax income for the last decade or so in SF. I don't consider my life very ascetic either; in fact, it's pretty awesome. If I wanted to cut down further for some reason, the number of wonderful free/cheap things you can do in popular cities is insane.
(Though bear in mind that I'm not yet in the phase of life where I have a kid, where this stuff gets a lot more complicated)
So... you'll forcibly move a 20-year old that grew up in the area? It isn't like they chose to get poor education nor chose to grow up somewhere without opportunities. Generations that have passed didn't go there because of lack of opportunities or education: In fact, I'm going to guess they were there because opportunities were there at one time.
It seems really weird to imagine all these people are there through a particular choice instead of simple circumstances.
No, why would anyone be forced to move anywhere? I'm just not convinced it's morally appropriate to live somewhere with no economic activity and expect others to pay for you to live there
I attribute the loss of confidence and the old "get up and go" attitude of our ancestor Americans to the complete failure of the culture and the K-12 education system in most rural counties around the country.
This trait is now more commonly found in immigrants coming into the United States.
>> This trait is now more commonly found in immigrants coming into the United States
This is so true. The immigrant friends I have have moved around so much in the time they have been here. While people I know who aren’t doing well have lived in town their whole lives, never finding a worthwhile job. Too many excuses not to move.
Agreed, I think the population sample is biased- inmigrants are by definition people who got and and left a place in an attempt to find a better one, and most current USA ancestors were immigrants.
Naturalized and 2nd generation immigrants overwhelmingly vote for Democrats across all income lines and ethnic backgrounds, so that clearly doesn't hold water.
Noticed, recently state or fed money was given to tear down old abandoned factories in small towns in PA. post election. I believe they are trying to bring work in. However, I also believe they don't want the middle age people telling the younger generations that's where gramps worked and earned a livable wage back in the golden era ( Demand Side Economy ). I caught the tail-end as a kid. The factory towns were nice then. I have family members who won't even visit their hometowns, they get sad at the run down appearance and hopelessness 40% unemployment for working age men , tend to believe it's higher. A good job is with a gas lease, timber but not much else.
These are mostly elitist concerns. The ordinary folks on the ground often turn out to be pretty happy. They have a routine life, friends and community and they simply dont care about opportunities at that point.
Ideally we'd have more granular data. Not all of Ohio is dead--it has several major metropolitan areas. And, likewise, the Central Valley in CA probably isn't doing that great, but it's outweighed by the California cities.
They care about their routine more than jobs and economy. Suicide rates may not be correlated (or causing) with jobs and economy. Else India and China should have had big sucide rates.
That is how it works out in most cases. So many women having fatherless children and then complaining that government is not giving them child care benefits. People not taking care of their health when young and then demanding government pay for their electric scooter, millennials demanding government should pay their edu bills so on.
For instance, the best way to go to a new geography would be to land a job there prior to moving there. Even in data science, supposedly hot job market, I wanted to get a job in san francisco or seattle, but I was living in philadelphia. you hear stories about people graduating from cali universities and companies jumping through windows to get to them, but even though I graduated with a masters in CIS from Upenn ... crickets. I think because most of them recruit through agencies which filter by geography. I had to reach out aggressively to the recruiters themselves, and bypass a lot of the blockers, which took 2 years. Had I not done that, my talent didn't mean as much as where I was.
Now, imagine a small towner trying to do the opposite, get a job after they make a move to say, one of the urban centers. most people dont have a lot of savings to begin with, and what would last them 6 months where they are would be depleted very quickly in one of the larger cities. even getting an apartment is harder, you dont have a job? reject.
its not impossible, its just really difficult.