Mobility, Meet Stagnation, the New American Way

 

Mobility, Meet Stagnation, the New American Way

It never ceases to amaze me how Americans – isolated between the two largest oceans on Earth and until recently bordered by long international boundaries with “friendly” nations – seem to generate opinions and cultural assumptions based on our own jaded biases. These opinions are internally more likely to vary on a red/blue axis, rather than local ethnic experiences. In so many ways, American “assimilation” – despite our racial and ethnic mix – is increasingly adopting either a red or blue cultural perspective. The calcification of attitudes between these dramatically polarized political approaches seems linked to a major change in American upward mobility and the most significant decline in people changing locations to pursue better economic opportunities. People who stay in place, both in terms of economic status and in physical geography make less, are more willing to accept an “us v them” attitude and tend to carry the same attitudes from generation to generation.

Some refer to this as part of the stagnation that has settled on our land. Others point to the barriers created for most people by the massive schism between the haves and the have-nots. It is often referred to the wealth or income gap, but those who are willing to move to a new, job-centric urban areas (generally measured by more than a 2-hour travel differential from their original base) tend to make more money and are more likely to cast a liberal vote. Those who remain where they were born and raised usually make less and vote with a more conservative eye. Attitudes are increasing branded into the psyches of those who want opportunity to come to them, unwilling for them to seek the opportunity. There are lots of factors involved.

This schism has only increased in the last 50 years… Americans are finding upward social mobility vaporizing; the American Dream seems to have been relegated to the past. For most Americans, how and where you are born plus family status just might define your future, and most of those unwilling to move are likely to earn less than their parents and grandparents.

“After steadily falling for decades, the rate of Americans moving for work fell to a record low of just 1.6% in the first three months [in 2023], according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas [who prepared the above chart] … ‘This is the lowest quarterly result that we've seen, among all the job seekers we've worked with, since 1986,’ the company's senior vice president, Andrew Challenger, told CBS MoneyWatch… Challenger is an outplacement firm, meaning it's hired by companies that are conducting mass layoffs to help those workers find new employment. In the 1980s and '90s, a third of the workers surveyed by Challenger said they regularly moved to take a new job, but that figure has been dropping for years.

“The trend is evidence of a decline in the dynamism of the U.S. economy, experts say, while also undercutting the historic narrative of Americans as a population of pioneers and risk-takers boldly venturing into new terrain in pursuit of opportunity… The pandemic-fueled run up in home prices, coupled with the surge in mortgage rates over the past year, also has made it much more difficult to move as housing costs have shot up much faster than incomes.” Irina Ivanova for the May 19, 2023, CBS MoneyWatch.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill doesn’t help. It appears to be one of the greatest upward transfers of wealth to the highest earners in our nation’s history. Taxes cuts for the rich are offset by major reductions in the benefits to the lower income classes. That income-wealth gap seems to be an accelerant of the above-noted stagnation, as further evidenced by the August 1st jobs report; Donald Trump shot the messenger (firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics) because the BLS job numbers reflected a slowing economy in direct contradiction to Trump’s unrealistic rosy pronouncements. Fewer businesses are hiring, job holders are staying put, tariffs (actual and set to take effect) are challenging business decision-making, and economists are thus uniformly predicting higher inflation attributable to those tariffs. For most of the nation, the numbers look fairly bleak.

“According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the share of income going to middle-income households in the U.S. has decreased from 55% in 1970 to 45% in 2018. This shift highlights the limited opportunities for upward mobility for those in the middle class… A study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute revealed that the top 1% of earners in the United States has seen their income grow by 205% since 1979, while the bottom 90% experienced only a modest increase of 61%. This growing income gap has made it increasingly difficult for individuals from lower-income backgrounds to move up the economic ladder.

“Furthermore, access to quality education has become a critical determinant of economic mobility in the United States. A report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) indicated that the United States has one of the highest levels of income-based achievement gaps in education among developed countries. Limited access to quality education, particularly for those from low-income communities, has contributed to the perpetuation of socioeconomic disparities and hindered upward mobility.” The American Dream is Dead, published August 2023, 1PercentEntrepreneur.com.

Wealthy families exacerbate the stagnation/wealth gap because they can afford to send their children to the best universities to prepare them to carry on that income disparity. As the Trump administration caps student loans, cuts federal funding to major research universities, he is perpetuating the red/blue divide and the widening wealth gap. Political divides are also hardening, and blame is the standard view of the opposing viewpoint. There’s a great deal of anger in those numbers, as increasingly voters are less issue oriented and focused on a leader that they can entrust to make decisions in an overly complex world.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this hardening fracture of American values, strong polarized immutability, only adds to the big question: are we too big and too fractured to believe that the United States can ever be unified or properly governed ever again.