Nobody's Pulling Up Stakes Anymore

Americans used to move a lot in search of opportunity. But in 2024, the share of Americans who moved at all hit a 76-year low. Barely 2% of us moved across state lines. Some of that is by choice: people are more rooted, and that's not nothing. But when workers stop moving, rich cities pull further away from poor ones, wages stagnate, and the gaps between thriving labor markets and struggling ones get harder to close. And when there’s a shock to a local labor market, moving is an important release valve. Fixing a fraction of this worker mobility breakdown could improve the labor market for everyone. Chapters: 00:00:33 Opening 00:01:45 Retcon: Trump Accounts & Career Pivots 00:07:27 Terms & Conditions: Spatial Equilibrium 00:09:55 Big Pilcrow: Does it Matter to the U. S. Economy if We Don’t Move from Place to Place? 00:39:10 Executive Orders: Frances Perkins miniseries; Sleep Shaming; Election Day Weekend 00:43:07 Spiritual Sponsors: The National Consumers League motto ("Investigate, Agitate, Legislate"); ACFC’s winning start READ MORE: The increasingly mobile US is a myth that needs to move on | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/the-increasingly-mobile-us-is-a-myth-that-needs-to-move-on Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home? | Pew Research Center https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2008/12/17/who-moves-who-stays-put-wheres-home/ Job Changing and the Decline in Long-Distance Migration in the United States | Demography | Duke University Press https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article-abstract/54/2/631/167691/Job-Changing-and-the-Decline-in-Long-Distance The Economics of Internal Migration: Advances and Policy Questions https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20211623 Population & Migration | Economic Research Service https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/population-migration Stranded! How Rising Inequality Suppressed US Migration and Hurt Those Left Behind https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2019/06/03/stranded-how-rising-inequality-suppressed-us-migration-and-hurt-those-left-behind-46824 Invest in Optimist Economy: https://optimisteconomy.com Faces visible on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@optimist_economy. We’re also on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy https://www.instagram.com/optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy https://www.tiktok.com/@optimist_economy. Where’s the party? On our Substack chat. https://substack.com/chat/4604257?utm_source=pub-nav-bar Represent your optimist side: https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy Email your economic questions, concerns, or executive orders to [email protected] mailto:[email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

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• 0:24Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

  Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  We pivoted to a growth industry podcasting, getting on the ground floor, but we did pivot.

• 0:36Robin Rauzi?

  You know what? You can name your bookstore pivot, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna name my yoga studio pivot.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm economist Catherine Ann Edwards.

• 0:51Robin Rauzi?

  I'm editor Robin Rousey.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  And on this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time.

• 1:03Robin Rauzi?

  Today on Optimist Economy, we're going to talk about moving, and not just because both of us have moved in the last year or so, but because I think it's really, I think it's interesting, and I think even more than a tax story, I like a demographic story.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:19Robin Rauzi?

  And, you know, they often don't pan out. People make a lot of guesses on demographic stories, but I think they're fun. They're always like, trying to figure out what's, what's happening and why, looking at who's doing what, kind of like economics in general, I guess.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Demography is the study, basically, of births, deaths, and moves. And I, I trained at a demography institute as part of my PhD at Wisconsin, and I remember a really very famous and prominent demographer told me, like, "The fun thing about demography is, you can't be wrong, but you're rarely right."

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Because people, they just do a lot of stuff.

• 1:57Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  So you can almost always get at something not clear it's the thing you wanted to get at. That's our goal today, to not be wrong and maybe be right.

• 2:08Robin Rauzi?

  Excellent.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Before we get to that, announcements, do we have any?

• 2:12Robin Rauzi?

  I don't, I don't have any announcements.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Great, let's go to Retcon. I'm gonna live there for the next 20 minutes or so.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  We like to revisit past shows through retroactive continuity, sometimes making corrections, but often making reflections. I wanted to talk about 530A accounts, AKA Trump accounts. We got two letters about the show that I wanted to share. The first one was from a researcher at the Institute for Race, Power, and the Economy at the New School in New York. And his letter pointed out something that we didn't stress on the show, which is that the idea of like a child-saving account or child-development account that was pioneered by Michael Sheraton is almost like the generic version. Baby Bonds, it's worth emphasizing, are a different brand in that they are a policy

• 3:06Speaker 02

  that is geared more towards countering wealth inequality. So, child savings accounts, when they were originally proposed, were about getting out of the cycle of poverty and offering savings vehicles in a way that our social safety net did not. Baby Bonds, in the iteration that came from the Institute for Race, Power, and the Economy's lead, Derek Hamilton, are about using savings and government policy to address gross wealth inequality that exists between black and white Americans.

• 3:35Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Rich and poor Americans, but also black and white Americans. I put them all together as the same evolution, but they're different shades.

• 3:44Robin Rauzi?

  Different ideas at their heart, okay?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. The other letter we got was from Michael Sheraton himself, who said that he liked the show, he appreciated our conversation, and to leave you with a little bit of optimism, he said, "We are working diligently to make the design of the quote-unquote 'Trump accounts' as effective as possible, including what you mentioned, the most important part, auto-enrollment."

• 4:09Robin Rauzi?

  Great.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  So like, teacher's pet right here, I'm dying.

• 4:18Robin Rauzi?

  Excellent, excellent.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Very happy about that. So we should wrap. I don't think the show can go up from here.

• 4:26Robin Rauzi?

  Well, I wanted to add on the Trump account front that I did read this story yesterday that for all of you that are concerned about whether wealthy people are going to game this system, you'll be happy to know that there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal on exactly how to max out this entire thing. If you're rich enough to put in $5,000 a year and then convert it all to a Roth when your kid is in their twenties, that basis of the $5,000 a year will turn into over $3 million when they turn 59 and a half. So, you know.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  It read like a how to.

• 4:57Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, it was a how to. It was 100% a how to and how to avoid being, you know, making sure that you do this when your young person is at an age where it's their tax rate, not your tax rate, that gets used, you know, when the penalties will be lowest. I mean, it was, um.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  I had a thought.

• 5:15Robin Rauzi?

  Rich, rich people gonna rich.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Rich people gonna rich. Rich people gonna rich. That's, that's very true. We could put that on a t-shirt. Rich people gonna rich. It's funny. I had a conversation with a mom about the Trump accounts who had listened to the episode and she was like, but none of us would tell our children about them. Well, we, we don't want to, I wouldn't want to tell them that they have money because we were talking about how we both need to set up the accounts for our children who are eligible for them, especially my youngest who's going to be eligible for the $1,000. And she's like, yeah, but I'm not going to tell them I did it. I don't want to tell a teenager that there's money when he turns 19. That's a terrible idea. It made me think about what we talked about in the show about how there's like a culture around savings and there is something really funny about

• 5:59Speaker 02

  like, you don't want to actually give cash to children.

• 6:04Robin Rauzi?

  Exactly.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Speaking as a mom here, do not tell them I have saved for them.

• 6:10Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  All right. Second retcon had to do with our AI episode where we talked about the impending job loss and what it means. And, you know, that show was less about AI and more about how do we deal with job loss throughout our careers. And we spoke a lot about pivoting. And I think another listener pointed out in a way that was kind of hilarious of like, how are you talking about career pivots between you and Robin and not bring up that you have both pivoted like in the last two years? To doing this podcast? To doing this podcast. Yeah, the journey. Yeah. She was like, it was right there in front of you. But the Wall Street Journal had a

• 6:56Speaker 02

  piece on pivots from black women in finance, information, professional business services, your typical white collar jobs, that these black women are leaving, kind of in the anti-DEI world that we're in now. Promotions and hires for black women in those jobs are down from 2019. So we're, we're living in a world in which it is, it was already hard to be promoted as a black woman, but it is now markedly harder. And they're leaving to start their own businesses. And I think the point that we didn't make that I, it was like, right there in front of me, was it's not just job loss that makes you pivot. It's also job dissatisfaction,

• 7:40Speaker 02

  career dissatisfaction, seeing the writing on the wall and thinking, I don't want to be here in five years. People pivot in their career all the time. And embracing that as like a salve for when job loss does occur is something that we don't do well in our labor market, or our economy, or policy, but we could do well. And that starts with embracing the pivots that we have made and that others make. Yeah. Okay, next chapter, terms and conditions.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  I have a real small one.

• 8:07Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  British listener wrote in to say chuffed. We used it correctly. Happy.

• 8:15Robin Rauzi?

  Thank you.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  We said dead chuffed, which he says is allowable, but it's not as delightful as I'm chuffed to bits.

• 8:22Robin Rauzi?

  Chuffed to bits.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Which is, which might be the most British thing I've ever heard. So my optimist goal for the day is to try to be chuffed to bits at some point.

• 8:33Robin Rauzi?

  I think that's good. We should all try to be chuffed to bits. Every day for a little bit.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Chuffed to bits goal. The C T B. Chuffed to bits. That's my M O.

• 8:43Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, I like it. I actually looked up-

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Did you look, did you look up a real one?

• 8:46Robin Rauzi?

  I did.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  You looked up a real one? Yeah.

• 8:48Robin Rauzi?

  I did, yeah, sorry.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  About the economy? Sure. Okay.

• 8:50Robin Rauzi?

  I looked up spatial equilibrium, which I came across in a paper I was looking at, which is apparently, I don't know, it's like, it's like water spreading evenly across the floor, right? It's, it's that all the places have the workers they need and the workers have found the best place for themselves.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Trying to think of the best way to, to phrase it. Spatial equilibrium and the study of spatial equilibriums is almost like the steady state of where people live. So why do some people live in some locations? And why do some locations grow and others not? And it's looking at like the whole board. Like, I want to understand on net why everyone lives where they do. The contrasting area of research is why people decide to move or not move. So one way of thinking about Americans packing up and moving is thinking about this decision on a personal level. Like, why did you pack up and move? The other way to think about the economics of moving

• 9:55Speaker 02

  is seeing the whole board, the location of where everyone lives and why they're in those locations. It's a very subtle difference, but it, it's subtle on the outset, but then the deeper you go, it's, it's very different questions of like, well, how much is moving cost?

• 10:11Robin Rauzi?

  What attracts you there?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, versus like amenities in a location relative to others. It just leads you down a very different line of thinking. This idea of individual optimization versus the spatial equilibrium.

• 10:24Robin Rauzi?

  All right, we'll be right back in a second for the big pill crow.

• 10:30Robin Rauzi?

  Can I give a little note here at the top about why I wanted to do this?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:36Robin Rauzi?

  Okay. It had to do with something that a demographer told me, gosh, it's gotta be 10, 15 years ago now, about what he called the great settling in. That it's almost a myth that Americans are so mobile. And that, in fact, we have been moving less and less and less and less for, at that point, you know, decades. So just to set a little context here, in 2024, according to the American Community Survey, only 11.8% of people moved at all. And that was a 76-year low. And only 2.1% moved to a new state. Most people moved within their state or even within their community. Anyway, so we want to talk about why that is, and is it a problem?

• 11:20Robin Rauzi?

  I think there's certainly swaths of economists who think it's a problem.

• 11:27Robin Rauzi?

  Catherine is waving. So anyway, do you think it's a problem? And if so, why is it a problem if Americans are moving less?

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Hmm, okay, is it a problem? I think it is the symptom of a problem, but not necessarily a problem

• 11:42Robin Rauzi?

  The problem itself.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  In and of itself. It's worth noting that, like, America is special in so many ways. We have such an awesome, crazy country. But moving across the country, it's a very American thing. Like, we have periods in our history where you'll just see, you know, mass migration to other states. So you can think of, like, the California Gold Rush, the Homestead Acts, and the settlement of the West, the great migration from south to north of Black Americans through the two waves of the great migration that ended around 1970. I mean, we are people that, like, pack up and go, which is special. There are lots of countries aren't like this.

• 12:21Robin Rauzi?

  But are we people who pack up and go? I mean, I think that's a fundamental question here.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  So we're still people that pack up and go. But I think the fact that we're moving less would not be a problem. Let me answer it this way. Economists think that the three biggest components of why someone moves would be preferences, economic opportunity, and then net of cost. So you want to move for some reason. You have economic incentives to move for some reason. And the cost isn't too high, relative to what you think you'd gain. So the preferences one, I mean... Shoot your shot. If people don't want to move as much as they used to, it's not clear we should care.

• 12:59Robin Rauzi?

  Right. If they're happy being settled in wherever they are.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're happy and you like where you are, there might be something to gain from moving to another city, but who cares? If you're happy, this is why we have an economy is for you to live your best life and not for like worker bots to be assigned to their most productive place. But moving for economic opportunity,

• 13:21Speaker 02

  that has fallen a ton and that is a problem. Because the number one reason that people move is to take a new job and the decline in moves that we've seen are really reflecting a decline in job opportunities writ large. At the US labor market, not just these past couple of years, but slowly since probably around 1990, we've had fewer and fewer job opportunities within our own life. And the lack of mobility in the labor market hurts wages. It hurts growth. It hurts innovation. It hurts development. It hurts our incomes. And not moving is like just reflecting back out that the labor market is not as mobile as it used to be. Not mobile as in you move to another city, but mobile as in you take another job.

• 14:07Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right. You just said the number one reason people move is to take a new job. What I was reading is the number one reason people move is actually to change houses.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:19Robin Rauzi?

  So you mean like the number one reason for people to move out of state?

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Like a big out of state move is highly associated with job opportunity, often complemented by preferences and cost.

• 14:31Robin Rauzi?

  Right. Looking for a better job in a lower cost market to buy a house.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Or you like want to go back home and you find a job there that works. Like the job, the income is like the key component that you just, you're looking for income in that location. We don't really move for like benefits. We don't really move because like food stamps is more and are more generous in one state. Like we move for income and job markets.

• 14:58Robin Rauzi?

  There was an interesting Pew survey that they did in 2008. And it was called like, Why Do People Stay or Go? And basically, the gist of it was stayers largely stay for family and movers largely move for jobs.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  So economists might be a little late to the game in studying migration, but they're, for a long time, have studied labor markets within the US and differences between them.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  You can think of any job, and I mean, any job in the US, and it will pay a different amount in different locations.

• 15:31Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  So it is a kind of like fundamental aspect of our labor market that the same job, same occupation, same industry, even the same employer could pay a different amount in different places. So the question that economists have long had is, if you could make more money in the same job somewhere else, why doesn't everyone just go? So this gets back to the spatial equilibrium of if you were to just tell someone in this like very simplified world, I have 100 people and 100 jobs and all 100 jobs pay differently. The spatial equilibrium would be everyone makes the same amount. Right? Because if a job offered more in one location, people would move there. But we don't see that.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  So the spatial equilibrium we have is much more complex of like amenities, preferences, cost, families, because people don't move to take advantage of economic opportunity, even though I could move to a place that pays more money for the job that I do now.

• 16:32Robin Rauzi?

  Right. You know, I mean, in the course of just thinking about this idea and doing a little bit of reading, I kind of went back and forth between, we need more people to move. It's fine that people don't move. But one of the things that I came across, which I had never thought about, was people being willing to do exactly what you're talking about, moving from one spot to another, that it actually closes the gap between rich regions and poor regions. And that this was like kind of a longstanding, understood macroeconomic trend. Is that exactly what you were just saying? Is that like if people are willing to leave your town to go get a job across the state line that will pay them more, eventually you're going to have to raise wages to keep people there?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Well, it's complicated. Kind of going back to your first question, like, is it good that people move? In some level, we don't know because we don't randomly assign people to move. Like, it's not like I'll take 10,000 people and be like, alright, you guys, here you go. I'm throwing you across the US and we're gonna see how you do. I mean, there's such high selection in who moves.

• 17:33Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  And that it's not random, so we don't know if... It's kind of like, how much more money do you make by going to college? We'll never know because we don't randomly assign people to go to college. The people who go tend to be people who have either an academic inclination or rich families that want them to go to college and they're in a network of rich people like the family they come from. So it's, we'll never know how, exactly how much money you'll get from college for that reason. Same thing with moving, like, we don't know how beneficial moving is to people because the people who move already had some inclination and means to go anyway.

• 18:10Robin Rauzi?

  To your point that there's also good moves and there's bad moves, right? We count them all somewhat equally. I mean, I guess maybe out-of-state moves and moves for jobs specifically are different, but there's also, there's bad reasons to move. Divorces, evictions, job loss versus moving because you got a job.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  I'm thinking of moves as really being like, moving outside of your labor market, which is often outside of states. But like, you're in one labor market, you go to another labor market. That can often extend over state lines. So, moving from like, I moved from one part of town to another part of town, or I moved from this apartment to this apartment.

• 18:45Robin Rauzi?

  Economically, that doesn't really count for you.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter as much as moving to take advantage of economic opportunities or moving as a function of like, your economic preferences moving you to another labor market. We tend to think about it as within and without your labor market. So economists have looked at this for a while because they want to understand how moving kind of changes the spatial equilibrium after, say, like, a plant closes. Like, there's a shock to a labor market or a city. So, the thought is, is that people moving from that city and going somewhere else is like, one form of economic...

• 19:20Robin Rauzi?

  You reallocate them.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're reallocating the spatial equilibrium, which, you know, helps people who move because they're going to a place with higher wages. And then it helps people who stay behind because they're like alleviating some of the joblessness from the city because it's basically being exported somewhere else.

• 19:35Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  So all of these things that economists look at, people moving to take a new job, people moving, maybe it's just because of preferences, people moving across labor markets because of a shock, all of them are declining.

• 19:45Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  And so some of it could be, I'm happy where I am, but given that this is a way to deal with an economic storm.

• 19:54Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  It's not good that people aren't utilizing it. That, that part is concerning. This is almost like a feedback loop. Now that people aren't moving to go to better labor markets, that makes certain labor markets a lot worse because we don't have this outside option that people take advantage of to keep things moving. Let's go back to our favorite example of Janesville. Janesville loses one of the highest paying, largest employers for workers without a college degree in the city. It then shuts down another place of employment, which was a supplier to the General Motors factory. You have all these people who have lost jobs.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  In one version of the world, some of them leave, some of them stay and find new jobs immediately, or take a long time to find new jobs after, say, a period of retraining, but hopefully not too many drop out of the labor force. What we have seen over the past, I mean, it's hard to say when this started. It's what we have seen recently, I can say that vaguely enough, is that rather than packing up and shipping out, you're seeing just a lot of people leave the labor force and they'll just stop work and they won't work again. They'll try to get on disability, they'll try to double up and live with family, or they'll just wait it out until they get social security with a little bit of their savings, but they won't go back. And that's horrible.

• 21:19Robin Rauzi?

  Sorry, didn't mean to laugh. I didn't see that coming. I knew you were gonna say that.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  It's horrible because I know I can sound like a cruel, heartless economist and be like, let's get them workers in jobs, go, get a job.

• 21:31Robin Rauzi?

  It's not, it's not great for anybody to not have that, I don't know, option. Jobs are good for people, frankly.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Jobs are good for people. Income is good for people. Wages are good for people.

• 21:42Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  We can do a little bit of scene setting because I think, no doubt, everybody is thinking, but afraid to say in front of me because I'm so sensitive, isn't this because of housing?

• 21:57Speaker 02

  So there's kind of like two-

• 21:59Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, the people aren't, there is an assertion, including in a large book recently released, that that's what's keeping people stuck in place, is the-

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:08Robin Rauzi?

  Is the high cost of housing, and so nobody can afford to move.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Yes. Evidence there is really weak. I think it's true, this is like being a demographer. It's definitely true. There are people who don't move because housing is too expensive there, or they're locked into expensive housing where they are. But people have been looking for that in broader studies of economic mobility, and they haven't really seen it. In part because homeowners-

• 22:38Robin Rauzi?

  Move less.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Fifty years ago, homeowners moved at like a fourth of the rate of renters from various demographics. So if 5% of homeowners move, 10 to 20% of renters will move. When you close your eyes and you think of like the modal cross-state mover in the US, that person is under 20-

• 23:02Robin Rauzi?

  When I think of the, when I think of the modal cross-state mover-

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Which you often do, I often do, I think about them often, of the modal cross-state mover. But it's, it's like, they're under 35, they're single, and they rent, and they pack up and go. They're mobile in every sense of the word, and they pack up and go. Because all of those things, having a home, having a partner-

• 23:22Robin Rauzi?

  Having kids.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Having kids, all of that makes it harder to move. And that's always been the case. It's not like the affordability issues of the past two to five years are freezing American movement. The decline in American movement is almost as old as I am, if not older. And the patterns of young, single renters being the majority of moves is also older than I am. I mean, you just, young people have a lot higher tolerance for things like-

• 23:51Robin Rauzi?

  Doubling up.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, they double up, they have roommates, they have strategies for making a city affordable. So if you look at like the most unaffordable cities in the US, they are still the highest rates of young people moving there. It's New York, LA-

• 24:06Robin Rauzi?

  Houston.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Houston, Atlanta, and then Chicago to some degree.

• 24:12Robin Rauzi?

  So even in San Francisco, like the most expensive place- You know, in California, I think has seen a rebound of young people moving there.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  When we say, why are people moving across labor markets less? We are in some ways asking why young people are moving less.

• 24:26Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Because older people, homeowners, married people, people who are, you know, been at a good job for five years, they just, they move less frequently.

• 24:34Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, and which should be expected, right?

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Which should be expected. And then there's also the, um, we have had a wild ride through housing over this century, given the housing bubble, its crash, the number of people who were foreclosed, who were in negative equity on their homes, and then the era of almost no interest rates that people took advantage of, and this kind of recent spike we've been in over the past two to four years of both high interest rates and high home prices, like the worst of all worlds. But through that variation, people have looked to see how much house lock contributes to unemployment or how much house lock prevents people from moving, or conversely, how much things like a housing collapse would, people would take advantage of to move and to buy the cheaper home.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  And it's not, like, they just really don't find a lot of strong evidence.

• 25:27Robin Rauzi?

  So just to make sure I understand what you're saying, housing prices have gone up and down and it's not, they don't seem to be causing either an increase in moving or a decrease in moving, that the moving is on its own trajectory?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:41Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  The way that I think about it is, if people were just moving for housing, you'd have a lot of people who have moved to Nevada in 2009,

• 25:52Speaker 02

  which was one of the epicenters of the home price collapse. I mean, you had houses for sale for half of what they were, but people didn't take advantage of that because people don't move

• 26:00Robin Rauzi?

  Exclusively just for cheap housing.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Solely for housing. It's like a joint decision where they have to find the economic possibility and then they look for housing. And so I think you can think of this as almost like an ordered problem, where part one problem, people aren't getting as many job opportunities writ large in the US, including some across labor markets. And then the second problem would be, even if they did, it could be that housing is too expensive. But the, those like, because housing is too expensive is a relative term because you're talking about a group of people that tend to have much lower housing preferences as opposed to homeowners.

• 26:35Robin Rauzi?

  Right, okay.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  You know, like, just because there's cheap living somewhere in the US does not mean that people move there.

• 26:43Robin Rauzi?

  Well, the other thing that's funny to me is it would seem like it's easier to search for a job in a remote location now than any time in the past. I mean, maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. Maybe it's like, well, I've looked at the opportunities that are available to me in Tulsa, and it's not worth going.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  There's been some research into this. One of the papers found that we might have too much information. That part of moving across labor markets, there's a degree of experimentation.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Maybe like, almost like ignorance is bliss. Like, I think of my brother, graduating college, packing up his car, driving to LA.

• 27:21Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Just always wanted to go.

• 27:23Robin Rauzi?

  And people do it, they do it all the time.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  And they do it.

• 27:26Robin Rauzi?

  They show up here all the time, yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  But there's some degree to which that happens less, because people, you know, they try to get a job before, or they do a lot of research on housing, and they just decide it's not worth it. Like, it's almost like the amount of information that you can access about another location can scare you off. And what that probably means is that a lot of people moved and had catastrophic consequences, and had to move back home, and we don't see that. But we, the idea that you just, you pack up and go, happens less. I, um, I mean, I think this is a natural place to talk about our first moves.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  I'm from Texas, I went to UT Austin, and after I graduated, I spent a year living and working abroad. And I came home unemployed in the summer of 2008. So like, this is not good. Timing there, bad, very bad. And I had no way of knowing. I'm just like, oh, I have a college degree, I'll be fine. I applied for 50 jobs, and I got one call back from a think tank in DC who did an interview over the phone, and then over the phone, they offered me a job. And it was over Labor Day weekend, I started the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend, and I flew to DC. That's not true, I couldn't afford a ticket to DC.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  I flew to Baltimore on a one-way ticket from Houston with a suitcase. It wasn't even a large suitcase, like, it was a sad little suitcase that had, in total, three days of professional clothing.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  So I could work, I had something to wear Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and I was like praying that we had casual Friday.

• 29:08Robin Rauzi?

  I sort of bounced around, you know, I graduated into recession and so I had a like a really low paying hourly reporting job. And then I actually did an internship after that at the LA Times. And then I went to graduate school in Ohio. I was from Ohio and I could not get back to LA fast enough. I applied for a job at the LA Times, peak circulation. It was just before the internet broke everything about the news media. And they paid for me to move and they sent a moving truck to my parents' house, put me up in a studio apartment until I found a place to rent. Yeah, nobody gets to move like that anymore.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, Robin, journalists are canceling you as we speak because the LA Times moved you.

• 29:55Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, you know, it was, it was a long time ago. And I did have to pay taxes on the cost of the move. It was imputed income, which I didn't have a lot of money to pay those taxes when that tax bill came due.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, that first job somewhere else, I was living with a cousin. I mean, I, I didn't have a place of my own, I think for almost three months, which is kind of crazy because she was very pregnant. And like, I'm basically in the baby's room. They were so kind to put me up and I don't know how I would have been able to move if they hadn't. If I didn't have cousins there, if I hadn't got the job over the phone.

• 30:30Robin Rauzi?

  Moving, but moving is hard. I mean, like, when you're young, it's an adventure. And but when you're, you and I have both moved in the last, you moved when, like, under a year ago. I moved just over a year ago.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  It's pricey.

• 30:45Robin Rauzi?

  It's expensive and we weren't even changing jobs. I can understand why, like, the speculative move to a new place for a, for a new career is just beyond people's reach right now.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Or you just, you get to a certain age and comfort level and you're like, I'm fine. Like, this is spatial equilibrium of like, I know I could make more money there, but I don't want to go there. I'm happy here. Who wants to make new friends at 40? I can tell you it's not easy.

• 31:16Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  You know, and leaving people behind, leaving networks behind, it all has a cost. I think what I find troubling about moving is that the decline in moving aligns so well with the decline of worker power in our labor market. The problem there, going back to spatial equilibrium, is that we are starting to see this lack of mobility almost like compound across cities. Where cities that have the high wage markets, that have lots of job opportunities, become more and more expensive relative to low wage cities. And that this, this lack of movement essentially is skewing our spatial equilibrium.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  So where it should be that there are people moving back and forth, one in search of high wages, one in search of lower cost of living, and this kind of compresses cities, you're starting to see cities really, really, really pull away from each other. And that's not just housing, that's also labor market policy. You know, since the federal government stopped caring about the minimum wage or labor law enforcement, that's now all set on a local level, which like, great if you live in one of those places, bad if you don't. Like, the acceleration of wage growth in a place like Seattle

• 32:35Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  would both make it harder to move to a place like Seattle, and less appealing for someone from Seattle to move to, say, Akron.

• 32:42Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  And like, maybe they're from Akron and they want to move back, but like, the different, like, the, just like, the

• 32:48Robin Rauzi?

  The pay cut they're gonna take to do it.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the, the pay cut and the cost of living cut is, this is too much. I mean, it's definitely an argument for why remote work could help a lot of places, because if you didn't have to give up as much salary but could move other places, people would move. I would say, case in point, You know, my husband and I moved to Houston, which is by no means a struggling city. But we moved here because we kept our jobs.

• 33:12Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  We were able to pick out where we could go, which is why, despite having kids and a mortgage and being married, we were able to move labor markets because we we kept our employer. Not employer, in my case, but job.

• 33:26Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, no, we did this. I mean, we did the same thing in Spokane. I could work remote and I did for two and a half years.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Working remote, I think we all went through it on some level of like, even if you didn't have a remote job, you knew that people were working remote. And then employers called it back. And I got asked by so many journalists, why are people going back to work? Like, what is the reason? And I was like, yeah, workers have less power. And employers gave an amenity away for free that workers really valued, that they could translate into so many aspects of their lives of easier commute, better house, lower cost of living. I mean, it was a massive amount of power that employers gave to workers in a crisis. And almost as soon as they could, they clawed it back with all the intensity of like, we

• 34:15Speaker 02

  have to be there five days a week because of culture of like, sure, sure.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  But employers rarely give away something for free. And I think that working remotely is a great example of like, how people had mobility and it was reduced. And this worsens our prospects for things like moving.

• 34:33Robin Rauzi?

  I was sort of surprised how little, again, it's a little bit how journalism isn't always reflective of of reality, like the number of stories about remote working and people moving away to to someplace lower cost, that how actually little of that actually happened. And that most remote work really now is people working from home two or three days a week, but still working for a local employer, that there aren't a lot of, I mean, even the programs like the famous one is in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to draw remote workers to a new city with the idea that they're going to bring income into the city, but also, you know, they do other things there, like try to get them to be entrepreneurial and start new businesses and. I don't know, like 5,000 people.

• 35:16Robin Rauzi?

  It's some very small number of people who have done these kind of remote, like formal, we give you $10,000 to move programs.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  You know, but what's funny is that those programs have existed for very low income people. Kentucky had a program, RAP, Relocation Assistance Program, where if you got a job somewhere and you were on welfare, they would pay you to move. It was like a thousand bucks, but they would pay you to-

• 35:39Robin Rauzi?

  It sounds kind of nice, but also kind of like, get your lazy ass out of here.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, but like, you could either view it as kind or unkind. Of like, unkind, you're poor and you're on welfare, we want to pay for you to leave. But kind being, if you get a job that you can't take, isn't that against the whole idea of getting people off welfare? And they found it was, I mean, people who took advantage of it did have higher earnings in the long run. So we, I think that there's going to be a lot more salience for move assistance in the future. I've thought for a long time that you should be able to, if you are on unemployment insurance, you should be able to take it as like a one-time cash payout and you can move.

• 36:18Robin Rauzi?

  I, you know, it's funny, I think that's one of the reasons I first started thinking about moving again was because of that conversation about unemployment insurance. And I did find that there was a bill proposed in 2019, of course, that disappeared in the in the great wash of the pandemic, but that it did, in fact, it was a $2,000 credit for people who had suffered job loss to relocate to a place to get another job.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  I think in the future, you might see policies that are, you know, you could have a version of unemployment where you basically get a cash payout to pay you to go somewhere else. And that would be very good for the economy and for that person to be able to leave a bad labor market. Helping people start a new life is good, and they might not thrive in that life.

• 37:01Robin Rauzi?

  Good for the economy, yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  It's not guaranteed that they'll thrive and have a better job and better everything, but they could do, they could do better. I, I guess the other aspect of optimism here is not just that like- All right. So I said at the beginning, it's preferences, it's economic opportunity and income, and then it's cost. And policy can't do anything about preferences.

• 37:20Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  It can do a lot of things directly about cost. I think the optimism for me is knowing how much of this is about the labor market.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  And making the labor market better for somebody else does help you. Your labor market, which is dynamic and complex and myriad and exists in every locality, is better off when there aren't people who don't have sick days in it. When there aren't people who could be making 725 an hour in it, that that helps you. And we, I think we see so much of policy as like, what flows through me?

• 37:55Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  But the broader kind of slowdown in labor mobility is not fixed through just targeting you. You don't need to be unemployed to benefit from a better unemployment system, or have a lack of paid sick days to make it good that someone else has them. Like, we are so interconnected on each other sometimes, and the labor market is where that is the most obvious place. To me, that's optimistic. I mean, even at its height, non-competes, I mean, the estimates vary, but it was like 15% of workers, and yet it is pointed to as like a major chokehold of job-to-job mobility. Not because 100% of people had non-competes, but because maybe 15% of them did.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  So what does that say about a policy targeted towards mobility in one part of our labor market that it could have massive dividends for you?

• 38:45Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, if you could increase things 15%, that you could really move a needle.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  You can move the needle. And I guess the labor market, in some ways, it's easy to move the needle in both directions. And we don't, sure, sure. Haven't been doing it a lot on workers' behalf.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Should be doing it more on workers' behalf, haven't done it so much lately. But I think that that means, like, we could. It's hard to quantify, like, the benefits of our labor market, getting these types of, like, small improvements. And you might not even feel it in your life, but then, you know, people would move more.

• 39:19Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  And that would, and you would, I don't know, I just, I, to me, I'm, again, capitalist at heart, but also like labor economist at heart. And I do think the labor market is everything, and we can make it a lot better. And it would help with things like this.

• 39:31Robin Rauzi?

  All right. You reached an optimistic note. I think we should stop there.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Okay. And we will actually stop.

• 39:37Robin Rauzi?

  We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back with executive orders and spiritual sponsors.

• 39:45Robin Rauzi?

  And we're back. Catherine, it's time for executive orders.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  I'm like looking at our show notes and I feel like mine's really long.

• 39:55Robin Rauzi?

  Your executive order?

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Barbit, can Catherine make her executive order less than 10 minutes long? We'll see fam. I'm not going to go into how much I outlined. I will just say that my executive order is that we need to do through one of the streaming platforms. Obviously, it needs a box office release, but I would like to do a four-part series on Frances Perkins and every episode is a movie that's a different part of her life. I envision she's played by four different actresses, starting from when she's like a young social worker on the street to like she's retired and she's at Cornell. I've got people in mind. I've got plots in mind. I've got storylines. I have like pivotal moments. I definitely have the trailer for the first one, "Live and Rent Free Up Here."

• 40:41Speaker 02

  And thank you, production, for this question. Frances Perkins was the first female cabinet member. She was the Labor Secretary under FDR. She oversaw the creation and implementation of the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, the three broad and vitally important pieces of social legislation and then that were the heart of the New Deal. So she is the New Deal.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  And she took the New Deal to FDR. She wasn't like, "Hey, Franny, can you do this?" She was like, "Yo Frank, I'm not taking this job unless I get to do all of this." She has lots of cool moments in her life. I think this is the part I just want to see on film.

• 41:26Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  I'm gonna keep it a tight 20, don't worry.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Like, she's getting lunch with a friend when the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire happens, and she runs to the fire.

• 41:36Robin Rauzi?

  To the scene of the fire?

• 41:37Speaker 02

  To the scene of the fire, and she watches the thing from the street. And then she will become head of the safety, Industrial Safety Committee in New York, inspired by that moment because she doesn't, she just doesn't think it should happen again. I mean, they were locked inside.

• 41:50Robin Rauzi?

  I'm just saying, we don't need to like, I don't work at Netflix, you're not pitching me this, right?

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Or, hold on, how about, how about when he gets elected to a fourth term? It's like 44, she's passed everything, but the war has stymied her efforts. She's been 12 years there, and she's like, Franklin, I am resigning, you need to pick somebody else. And on inauguration day, she's like, okay, this would be the moment to say in a press release, who you was going to replace me, I would like to quit now. And he says, you can't, I'm sorry, I can't do it without you, and you can't leave. And then they both sob while holding hands in the Oval Office, and he dies a few months later.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Right? Have you seen that? I mean, like, how many people want an Oscar out there? Ladies, let's make this happen. I mean, there's an Oscar-worthy moment in every one of the chapters I put out. Okay, so I talked for a long time. God damn it, Catherine, I just get so excited. All right, so my executive order is that I have empowered with the ability to generate the storyline, a lot of production notes, casting decision, authority, and veto for a Frances Perkins movie.

• 42:59Robin Rauzi?

  Once again, your executive order is, give me a movie studio.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Give me, my executive order is that I need to be in charge of some, like, labor-oriented movie studio. This is another one of my projects.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  What is your executive order?

• 43:12Robin Rauzi?

  My executive order is, stop telling me how early you get up in the morning, all of you. I don't care how early you get up in the morning. I need sleep, I don't want to be sleep-shamed, I don't care. I have one more, which is from Marco in Seattle. Marco says election day should be a federal holiday, which I think we can all just agree. But he also said it should be on Friday, so that everyone has the whole weekend to party with the results, or just get over it by Monday. Which I was like, good reasoning. I like it.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  I love it. I love it.

• 43:43Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, spiritual sponsors.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  My spiritual sponsor is the motto of the National Consumers League back in their heyday of being at the frontier of social work and social legislation in the US, which was investigate, agitate, legislate.

• 44:00Robin Rauzi?

  Put that on a t-shirt.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Put that on a t-shirt.

• 44:04Robin Rauzi?

  My spiritual sponsor this week is the Angel City Football Club, which is currently topping the rankings of the National Women's Soccer League.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Right behind them are the Houston Dash.

• 44:14Robin Rauzi?

  And right behind us are the Houston Dash. And I don't know how that will be, if that will still be the case by the time this airs. But it's been a long four years of not great results for this team. And so enjoying these early, early weeks of the season.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Y'all, Robin, add another 10, and that's where Houston is. But if this is the final episode of Optimist Economy, it is because Angel City and the Dash are 1 and 2 in the rankings, and they play each other on Friday. So honestly, Robin, it's been great.

• 44:45Robin Rauzi?

  It's been nice. It's been good.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  It's been, this is great. I feel like we gave people optimism, and it falls apart over a petty rivalry. That's okay. That's okay.

• 44:53Robin Rauzi?

  That's okay. Credits?

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Credits.

• 45:01Robin Rauzi?

  I rewrite the credits every week so that, just to keep you on your toes. Have you noticed that?

• 45:05Speaker 02

  I did notice that.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Look at the end of the episode, too, where I'm like, "The Podcast Economy Optimist is edited by LaMond and Andy Sophie." Okay. The Optimist Economy Podcast is edited by Sophie LaMond. Andy Robinson edits all of our videos, which you can find on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. We're also on Substack, where even our free subscribers can post to our chat, and where fellow optimists share news, articles, and thoughts.

• 45:39Robin Rauzi?

  This podcast is a production of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is Optimist Economy, and it is still entirely supported by listeners like you. At optimist economy.com, you can support the show. And ladies, I want you to know that we also have a women's t-shirt for sale just for you.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  In addition to the hat being that's in stock.

• 45:56Robin Rauzi?

  In addition to the hat, if you're watching the videos, the hat that Catherine is wearing right now.

• 46:01Robin Rauzi?

  Thanks Andy, thanks Sophie. Snapping you up.