via NPR Planet Money


In his latest New York Times Magazine column, Adam Davidson writes, “mobility has reached its lowest level in recorded history…This suggests, among other things, that people aren’t packing up for new economic opportunities the way they used to.”

To continue the discussion, we asked two demographic experts on different sides of the debate – Joseph P. Ferrie of Northwestern University and William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution – to answer the following question:

Have Americans lost the economic incentive to move?

William Frey’s response:

In a recent campaign stump speech, Presidential candidate Mitt Romney testified, “I believe in freedom. I believe in liberty. I believe in an opportunity society.” I was waiting for him to next say, “and I believe in the right for Americans to move any place, anytime to achieve their goals.” He didn’t say that, but high migration levels surely have done much to keep our economic engine humming – compared with the more stagnant levels in Europe and Japan.

Of course, migration, both short distance and long, hit historic low points in the last four years (I summarized the trends here and here).

Does this mean that we are on our way to economic stagnation, which will keep large numbers of our work force perpetually stuck in place? I don’t think so.

Migration rates have certainly declined since the 1950′s, when we had a younger (and thus more mobile) population, and renters were buying GI-Bill financed homes. Since then, the population has became older, more settled into owned homes, and dual earner couples proliferated. The nation’s shifting demography made us a little more sedentary. But this does not mean that opportunities became less available to young people or that they were less likely to migrate to take them.

As late as 2005, a healthy 29 percent of twenty-somethings changed residences annually. Migration driven population booms occurred in dozens of Sunbelt metropolitan areas, attracting workers of all skill levels.

What happened next was the triple tsunami of a bursting housing market bubble, a financial crisis, and the Great Recession. Potential movers, especially young people, were unable to finance a new home, sell their old one, or obtain a job. Many young adults are stuck in place, living with their parents, putting off marriage, and remaining underemployed.

We are certainly in an economic mess, which may keep part of a generation from moving on with their lives. But when the economy does pick up, there will be a pent-up demand for migration among these young people and the next generation. It’s in our national DNA. And it won’t necessarily follow an education-based mover stayer divide. Hispanics and Asians of all skill levels will contribute mightily to our labor force, as they disperse around the country.

Still, it’s probably true that Mitt Romney’s unfettered capitalism will need some assistance from the government toward training this next generation for the jobs they move to take.

Have Americans lost the economic incentive to move?

Joseph Ferrie’s response:

In the 1830s, the extraordinary mobility of the U.S. population was noted by Alexis De Tocqueville: “[M]illions of men are marching at once toward the same horizon…Fortune has been promised to them somewhere in the west, and to the west they go to find it.” How did we get from there – a nation perpetually in motion – to here – a nation seemingly stuck in place?

The population’s movement peaked in the late nineteenth century. Why? The simple answer is the movement of the western frontier. It left in its wake nascent urban centers, sites that could process and ship farm products to the east and import manufactured goods back to the west. These communities ranged from small towns to great cities that sprang up almost overnight. Chicago is the most dramatic example: its population grew from 4,500 in 1840 to more than 500,000 in 1880. Population growth this rapid provided enormous opportunities for potential migrants. They easily obtained jobs in factories, warehouses, and city offices. At the same time, the U.S. was a place with substantial differences across regions in the products and industries, providing migrants a range of choices in destinations that modern movers no longer see before them.

One lesson that can be drawn from this look backward at past U.S. migration is that geographic mobility and economic mobility were closely linked for much of the nation’s history. The US had exceptionally high rates of economic mobility in the nineteenth century, compared to older European countries. The second is that going forward, geographic mobility will be less closely linked to economic mobility. The U.S. has become more economically homogenous. Americans now experience, if anything, somewhat less income mobility across generations than many Europeans.

This is unfortunate in at least one respect: it makes the route to economic mobility today considerably less forgiving than it was in the past. In the nineteenth century, an ambitious son or daughter could see their income rise simply through the act of changing location, an investment that could be made until well into their adult years. Today, by contrast, education is the route to advancement, but educational investments are already largely determined by the time individuals have reached their early twenties. Economic mobility and the “American Dream” of a better tomorrow are, if not dead, at least a great deal more elusive than they were in the past, when a train ticket to Chicago was virtually all it took to make a big step up the economic ladder.

via Forbes, by Jon Bruner
more about the map

Americans are enormously mobile: 37.5 million people moved from one house to another last year, with 4.3 million of them moving between states. This mobility makes us efficient seekers of economic improvement—moving into, and then leaving, cities like Phoenix as their fortunes rise and fall.

My interactive visualization, based on IRS data, illustrates these patterns by tracing inward and outward moves for every county in the country. Each move had its own motivations, but in aggregate they ­reflect the geographical marketplace during the boom and bust of the last decade: Migrants flock to Las Vegas in 2005 in search of cheap, luxurious housing, then flee in 2009 as the city’s economy collapses; Miami beckons retirees from the North but offers little to its working-age residents, who leave for the West. Even fast-growing boomtowns like Charlotte, N.C., lose residents to their outlying counties as the demand for exurban tract-housing pushes workers ever outward.Close to 40 million Americans move from one home to another every year. Click anywhere on the map below: blue counties send more migrants to the selected county than they take; red counties take more than they send.

By A.G. SULZBERGER, NYTimes
ULYSSES, Kan. — Change can be unsettling in a small town. But not long ago in this quiet farming community, with its familiar skyline of grain elevators and church steeples, the owner of a new restaurant decided to acknowledge the community’s diversity by adding some less traditional items to her menu. Cheeseburgers. French fries. Chicken-fried steak.

“American food,” the restaurant owner, Luz Gonzalez, calls it. And she signaled her move by giving her Mexican restaurant a distinctly American name: “The Down-Town Restaurant.”

Such fare was all but extinct in a place where longtime residents joke — often with a barely disguised tone of frustration — that the dining options are Mexican, Mexican or Mexican. After the last white-owned restaurant serving American favorites closed this year, it fell to one of the recent Hispanic arrivals to keep the burgers-and-fries legacy alive. Ms. Gonzalez even enlisted the help of neighbors to teach her to cook more exotic dishes — like potato salad.

For generations, the story of the small rural town of the Great Plains, including the dusty tabletop landscape of western Kansas, has been one of exodus — of businesses closing, classrooms shrinking and, year after year, communities withering as fewer people arrive than leave and as fewer are born than are buried. That flight continues, but another demographic trend has breathed new life into the region.

Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many places. In the process, these new residents are reopening shuttered storefronts with Mexican groceries, filling the schools with children whose first language is Spanish and, for now at least, extending the lives of communities that seemed to be staggering toward the grave.

That demographic shift, seen in the findings of the 2010 census, has not been uniformly welcomed in places where steadiness and tradition are seen as central charms of rural life. Some longtime residents of Ulysses, where the population of 6,161 is now about half Hispanic, grumble over the cultural differences and say they feel like strangers in their hometown. But the alternative, community leaders warn, is unacceptable.

“We’re either going to change or we’re going to die,” said Thadd Kistler, a lifelong resident who recently stepped down as mayor. “This is Ulysses now, this is the United States now, this immigration is happening and the communities that are extending a hand are going to survive.”

After years in which mostly white communities throughout the region used gimmicks to lure new residents with limited success, like offering free land or lengthy tax abatements, many are wondering if this unexpected multicultural mix offers one vision of what the future of the rural Great Plains may look like.

“The face of small towns is changing dramatically as a result,” said Robert Wuthnow, a Kansas-born Princeton professor who studied the Hispanic influx for his book “Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s.” “The question is: Is this going to save these small towns?”

There has long been a strong Hispanic presence throughout the region, which is rich with difficult work in meatpacking plants and on farms, feedlots and oil fields. But over the last decade, as their population in the rural Great Plains spiked by 54 percent — a figure comparable to gains in metro areas in the region — Hispanic residents have pushed from hubs like nearby Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal into ever smaller communities, buying property on the cheap, enticed, many say, by the opportunity to live quiet lives in communities more similar to those in which they were raised.

In the sparsely populated western half of Kansas, every county but one experienced a decline in the non-Hispanic white population, two-thirds of them by more than 10 percent.

At the same time, a vast majority experienced double-digit growth in Hispanic population, more than offsetting the declines in seven counties and many smaller cities and towns. Those places with the highest percentage of Hispanic residents tend to have the lowest average ages, the highest birth rates and the most stable school populations.

“These towns, I don’t know what they would do without Mexicans,” said Oscar Rivera, a Honduran immigrant who lives in a community of a few hundred people and travels through rural parts of western Kansas selling prepaid phone cards used to call overseas. “It would be like ghost towns.”

One such town is Bazine, about two hours from here and little even by the standards of its neighbors. The decaying strip of downtown stores was abandoned long ago, and empty houses dotted the surrounding streets. A few years back, the high school closed and the building was sold on eBay. There was talk about shutting the elementary school as well.

“The decline was happening,” said Patricia Showalter, the mayor, standing inside the little post office she runs. “And then the Hispanic people came.”

For the first time in more than a half century, the population grew in the latest census, inching up to 334 as the Hispanic population jumped to 86 from 4. Now every house in town is occupied. A new church, La Luz del Mundo, just opened. Though there are no new businesses on Main Street, some entrepreneurial newcomers sell homemade tamales door to door.

And, most importantly to those who had watched the town become ever older, the school enrollment is growing.

In neighboring Ransom, which is almost entirely white, the student population has declined to 34 from 62 in the last eight years. Meanwhile, in Bazine, the numbers have increased to 46, up from 35. The average age in Ransom is 15 years older than in Bazine.

In Ulysses, which grew a modest 3 percent over the last decade, much appears unchanged by the years. Livelihoods are still tied to the earth, where people grow wheat and corn in the dusty soil, drill for the generous deposits of oil and gas beneath the surface and feed cows inside muddy pens that line the roads. Churches — there are more than a dozen — still play an important role, and the pace is still slower than what one usually experiences in a bigger city.

But the influx of Hispanics, a majority of whom were born in Mexico, has left an unmistakable impact.

Rachel Gallegos remembers that as a young girl she was the only Hispanic student in her class and her parents’ Mexican restaurant was the first Hispanic business in town. Now, Hispanics make up two-thirds of the school population and own bakeries, clothing stores, car dealerships and computer repair shops, some catering to Hispanics and others simply filling vacant niches.

And when children become adults, a time when residents have historically headed to bigger communities seeking opportunity, her family was becoming rooted in the community — Ms. Gallegos said that of her nine siblings and their two dozen children, all but a couple remained.

Ginger Anthony, director of the Historic Adobe Museum, which chronicles the history of the onetime frontier town, discussed the changes with dismay, pausing repeatedly to reiterate that she did not want her criticism to seem “politically incorrect.” She is so unnerved, particularly by illegal immigrants, that she recently started locking her door — saying that the police-beat column in the local paper disproportionately features Spanish surnames.

“This wave of new people coming into the Midwest, it’s not always a good thing,” she said, as a co-worker nodded in agreement. “If you talk to the average working person, a lot of them are sort of fed up. Our town isn’t what it was.”

But Hispanic residents here say they have been mostly well received, even if the non-Hispanics sometimes keep their distance. There are exceptions, like when students at a neighboring high school showed up to a basketball game in sombreros and tossed tortillas onto the court.

Jose Olivas, a longtime community developer with Mexican American Ministries, said that it took years of pressure to hire Hispanic employees at schools and at some businesses. Now employers are taking Spanish lessons, and expressing preference for bilingual job applicants.

“For a while you had to be careful,” Mr. Olivas said. “But they’ve really changed their attitudes.”

Mr. Kistler, the former mayor, agreed that there were culture clashes, but said they were slowly dissipating.

“At first every community, including Ulysses, was very unwelcoming, but a lot of that was because we wanted to hold on so tight to what we were,” he said. “In the last five years, we’ve really seen that they’re here, they’re staying, they’re part of the community. We’ve kind of gotten used to each other.”

Part of that has been dictated by demographics.

At the hospital in town, exactly half of the 102 babies born last year were Hispanic. And in a telling sign of the future of the community, 13 babies were listed as having one white and one Hispanic parent.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 15, 2011

Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about the growing Hispanic population in small rural towns throughout the Great Plains misstated, in some editions, the population for one of the towns, Ulysses, Kan. In the 2010 Census, the population was 6,161, not 6,933. And also because of an editing error, the article referred incorrectly in some editions to the decline in the non-Hispanic white population in western Kansas. It declined in all counties but one (Ellis County) — not in all counties.

via Wall Street Journal

By JENNIFER LEVITZ

MANCHESTER, N.H.—Matt Marshall is still trying to determine which path he will take when he graduates from the University of New Hampshire in June. But the 23-year-old business major has pinpointed his general direction: out of the state.


“I definitely want to go someplace else. Where, I don’t know, but I’ve lived here all my life,” he said, mentioning a warmer locale as his possible future home. “I hate snow.”

New Hampshire is giving the spiky-haired Mr. Marshall anything but the cold shoulder. With census figures showing New England leads other parts of the U.S. in the decline of its under-45 age group, the Granite State and its neighbors are desperate to keep young people around.

Massachusetts is funding internships at private companies—$2.2 million this year, up from $1 million last year. In a pilot program started in July, Vermont is forking over cash to graduates who stay in the state.

New Hampshire, under the direction of a young-worker retention task force established by Democratic Gov. John Lynch, has launched a nonprofit called Stay Work Play to sell the state to college students. The state also is directing one-third of its entire marketing budget toward wooing and retaining younger people.

“I can’t think of anything more important,” said Steve Boucher, legislative director of the New Hampshire Division of Economic Development.

Despite New Hampshire’s relatively low unemployment rate of 5.4% as of September, officials have found that about half of all college students leave the state after graduation, believing they need to head to a big city to find a robust social life.

Among the events planned is a “college invasion tour,” featuring comedians and concerts, to help show a fun alternative to New Hampshire’s “traditional Yankee” side, Mr. Boucher said.

Regional officials say their retention programs are new, so they are still measuring the effects. Students who have been courted by the states have mixed reviews.

Ariana Chehrazi, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology senior, had been planning to return to her native Los Angeles after graduation, but changed her mind after landing a summer internship at a diagnostics firm through the state program. Los Angeles doesn’t “have the same feel as wanting to keep you here.…Massachusetts is trying harder to get young people,” she said.

But 22-year-old Brian Iwanicki, a New Hampshire native, said it wasn’t easy to find “a hip place that a young professional might want to go” in Manchester, New Hampshire’s biggest metropolis. “It’s a short list,” he said.

Still, 10 networking groups for young professionals have cropped up across New Hampshire—which state leaders see as an indicator that retention efforts are working.

The loss of young people is one factor in New England’s slow growth, which puts the region at the forefront of a nationwide aging trend. State leaders in the region say innovation depends on smart, young people and many officials see the signs of that base dwindling. Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican, said last week that employers have been complaining to him about a shortage of skilled workers.

Another worry: potential loss of political clout. States that lost congressional seats after the latest census were primarily in the Midwest and Northeast, including Massachusetts.

New England’s population grew 3.8% in a decade, the 2010 census found, compared with the U.S.’s 9.7% overall growth. The population continues to shift South and West because of a combination of weather, cost of living and relatively low-skilled jobs for newcomers, said Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.

With fewer people arriving, New England leads in the graying of its population. Of just seven states with a median age of 40 or older, four are in New England: Maine (42.7), Vermont (41.5), New Hampshire (41.1) and Connecticut (40.0). There are bright spots—Boston continues to gain young people—but each New England state saw a decline in the under-45 group. Meantime, Arizona’s under-45 population jumped 16%.

On a recent night, Stay Work Play New Hampshire visited the University of New Hampshire’s Manchester campus. “It’s easy to get the perception there is nothing to do…but I’m constantly amazed that there is a lot of stuff happening” in the state, said Kate Luczko, the program’s executive director.

The message rang true to Brian Bishop, a 22-year old who said he wouldn’t likely head South or West. “I lived in Florida for a year and a half,” he said, with a sour expression. “It’s too slow-paced, too much small talk. Here we try to get things done.”

via NPR Planet Money

The U.S. population grew by nearly 10 percent between 2000 and 2010. But that varied widely from state to state. Here’s a map, based on numbers from the Census Bureau.



As the map shows, the country continued its long shift to the South and West.

Michigan, where the population fell by 0.6 percent, was the only state that actually shrank during the decade. But population growth lagged the national average in much of the Northeast and the Upper Midwest.

Several states out West, on the other hand, grew by more than 20 percent. Nevada, where the population expanded by 35 percent grew the most. That growth was driven by a cycle where a rising population fed a housing boom, which in turn attracted more people.

But since the housing bubble burst, Nevada has struggled. For more than a year, the state has had the highest unemployment rate in the country. Unemployment in Nevada is now over 13.4 percent.

According to National Geographic:
The map shows population density; the brightest points are the highest densities. Each country is colored according to its average annual gross national income per capita, using categories established by the World Bank (see key below). Some nations— like economic powerhouses China and India—have an especially wide range of incomes. But as the two most populous countries, both are lower middle class when income is averaged per capita.

The feature article, Age of Man, is worth perusing, as well. If you’re a visual learner, you’ll also enjoy The Face of Seven Billion, where you can explore how the global population breaks down in terms of language, nationality, literacy, religion, and so on.