Stay put, young man.

• Author: Noah, Timothy
• Position: OPPORTUNITY IN AMERICA

AMERICANS USED TO BE EXCEPTIONAL FOR HOW OFTEN THEY MOVED. BUT THAT ONCE-POWERFUL SOURCE OF BOTH EFFICIENCY AND UPWARD MOBILITY IS NOW IN STEEP DECLINE.

ANCHORAGE avg. wage $25/h

If any young man is about to commence the world," a reform-minded New York journalist wrote in 1838, "we say to him, publicly and privately, Go to the West." Today, Horace Greeley's advice comes down to us as "Go West, young man" and has been mythologized into a slogan of Manifest Destiny. But at the time Greeley wasn't expressing any messianic desire to tame a savage continent. Rather, he was alarmed by how terrible economic conditions had become in New York.

The Panic of 1837--American history's worst financial calamity until the Great Depression--had put one-third of the city's labor force out of work. Greeley ran poor relief in one of the city's wards, but available funds were meager and people were dying from lack of food and shelter. An angry mob became so enraged by the high price of bread that it rioted and looted the city's flour merchants. Witnessing all this suffering and rage, Greeley concluded that the best solution would be for new entrants to the workforce to move someplace--anyplace--else. "Fly, scatter through the country, go to the Great West," Greeley wrote. "Anything rather than remain here."

Eventually, the economy improved in New York--in no small measure because so many people did scatter to other parts. Indeed, until quite recently, what most distinguished Americans from other peoples was the high percentage of us who were willing to move from anywhere to anywhere to seek a better financial toehold. The original Pilgrims and Utah's Mormon settlers migrated for religious reasons, but they were exceptions; most American migrations have been driven by economics. Already by the mid-nineteenth century, the descendants of Puritans had abandoned New England's played-out farms in such numbers that the forests were dosing back in, prompting Herman Melville to compare the landscape to "countries depopulated by plague and war."

Similarly, after the Civil War, huge, downtrodden populations left mid-Atlantic dries like Philadelphia or Baltimore to seek the living wages offered in then-frontier cities like St. Louis and Chicago. For others, even the prospect of busting sod on a homestead in the Oklahoma Territories beat trying to make a living in New Jersey.

In the early- and mid-twentieth century, the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South was a movement of tenant farmers fleeing dim Crow for a chance at menial factory jobs in places like Cleveland and Detroit. More recently, the great flow in the opposite direction, from Rust Belt to Sun Belt, has seldom been motivated by any utopian political-religious dream; far more often, it's been the desire to escape difficult economic circumstances.

This feature of American life has served the country's economy well, if not always its culture. Writers from Henry David Thoreau to Theodore Dreiser to John Cheever may have decried the rootlessness in American life, but at whatever the price in urban anonymity or suburban anomie, the high mobility of American labor meant that a comparatively high share of the nation's workforce migrated to wherever it could add the most economic value. As the population reduced its concentration in lower-wage areas and increased it in higher-wage areas, the effect was to gradually reduce inequality of income and opportunity, until something like an "American standard of living" emerged in the twentieth century. All told, according to a 2013 paper by Harvard economists Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag, approximately 30 percent of the drop in hourly wage inequality that occurred in the United States between 1940 and 1980 was the result of the convergence in wage income among the different states during this period.

In our own time, though, all of that has changed. Americans are moving far less often than in the past, and when they do migrate it is typically no longer from places with low wages to places with higher wages. Rather, it's the reverse. That helps explain why, since the 1970s, income inequality has gone up and upward mobility has (depending on who you ask) either stagnated or gone down.

When people move, it's usually not very far--as when, for example, a young couple moves to an apartment with an extra bedroom in a nearby suburb after...