Don't worry, honey, you'll make new friends: inside the new class of serial relocators.

AuthorTaussig, Doron
PositionNext Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class - Book review

Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class

by Peter T. Kilborn

Times Books, 272 pp.

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It may not be the best time to bring this up, just when we're all hoping no other sector of the economy proves to be a house of cards, but, well ... we may have another problem with American capitalism. It may be slowly eating away at the traditional concepts of community, place, and the extended family.

Americans, we know, are an adventurous and mobile people. We like to push frontiers--move to the Big City, or Go West. But this mythology, at least in my understanding, has usually involved one, maybe two big moves. You went, you tried to make it, and eventually you settled somewhere. The class of people who kept moving--military, government, employees of a few major companies--was small.

Today, this (completely reasonable) limitation on mobility is fading: more and more Americans are jumping from job to job and state to state, moving their families at the drop of a hundred thousand dimes. They call themselves Relos, short for relocators, and in a new book called Next Stop: Reloville, former New York Times reporter Peter Kilborn says that they matter, a lot. Kilborn happened upon Relo culture a few years back, while working on that massive series about class we all read part of. He can't give us a precise figure, but he estimates that the expansion of the American economy, and trade in particular, has increased the number of serial relocators from a few hundred thousand thirty years ago to around ten million today. (He draws these numbers from stats from the Census Bureau, moving companies, and the Worldwide Employee Relocation Council, the trade group for corporate relocation managers.) Whatever their numbers, he says, the demographics of Relos give them a disproportionately large social influence.

Kilborn doesn't intend his book as a warning--he means it as a thoughtful exploration of an important phenomenon. And it is. We meet a lot of people in the Relo world and see things from a lot of different perspectives. Some of them are positive. I don't care. I still took it as bad news.

Relos are mostly white, graduates of state universities and sometimes graduate business schools, and largely Republican (though not as overwhelmingly in 2008 as in previous elections). They range from middle to upper middle to upper class, and the way they get themselves to their preferred portion of that range is by moving. Sometimes this is because they get promoted within their company: UPS, for instance, moves 1,200 to 1,300 of its 30,000 managers every year. "Relocation is just a tool of our...

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