The Mobility Myth

Pundits love to fret about our "increasingly mobile society," but Americans are actually more likely than ever to stay put.

Alison Stein Wellner from the April 2006 issue

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So where did the mobility myth come from, and why do we cling to it with such tenacity?

While historical statistics are difficult to come by, it seems likely that Americans used to be much more mobile than they are today. Alexis de Tocqueville described the United States as a place where "a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing." Although comprehensive demographic surveys were not possible in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, town census rolls show a great deal of turnover. In Boston's Jamaica Plain district, for example, only half of the household heads listed in the 1880 census were still there in 1890, according to a 2002 study by the Berkeley sociologist Claude S. Fischer published in the journal City & Community. This restlessness resulted from a series of "shocks," Fischer says, including economic depressions, farm failures, natural disasters, and wars. Migration to the frontier, driven by the search for fortune and a better life, also contributed to mobility.

Historians generally agree that throughout U.S. history Americans have been more mobile than people in other countries, particularly Europeans. The evidence for this is mostly anecdotal, since comparable statistics are hard to find. But even today, Americans are at least slightly more mobile than people in other countries. For example, 11 percent of U.K. residents moved house in 2001, compared to 14.2 percent of U.S. residents.

It's hard to pinpoint the moment Americans began to settle down, since the Census Bureau did not start collecting comparable yearly data on mobility until 1948. But since then, mobility has declined steadily. Local moves (within the same county or within the same state) have declined the most. In 1948, 17 percent of the population made a local move. By 2004 that figure had fallen to 11 percent. Interstate moves were already rare in the 1940s and have remained essentially flat since then: In 2004 just 2.7 percent of the population moved across state lines, compared to 3.4 percent in 1948.

The profile of the typical mover hasn't changed much either. "Migrants have always been younger," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Movers today, as in the late 1940s, are disproportionately in their 20s and early 30s, although today's young aren't quite as restless. In 1948, 37 percent of 20-to-29-year-olds moved, compared to 28 percent in 2004.

Frey believes increased homeownership has played an important role in declining mobility. Sixty-eight percent of Americans owned homes in 2003, compared to 55 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1900. The increase is due partly to tax policies that subsidize home ownership and partly to looser mortgage application standards. A homeowning America is a more rooted America because homeowners are less likely to move. In 2004, for example, 6 percent of homeowners moved, compared with 28 percent of renters.

Inside those homes are people who are probably less inclined to move than they once were. Two careers are less portable than one, Wolf notes, and the number of dual-income, dual-career households is on the rise. In 1951, Census Bureau statistics show, 77 percent of women in married-couple households were not in the paid labor force. By 1997 that share had dropped to 38 percent.

And then there's a technology that is usually blamed for increasing mobility, not decreasing it: the automobile. Americans today are more likely to sit in traffic for longer periods of time each day rather than move house to get closer to a job. Between 1990 and 2000, according to Census Bureau data, the share of one-way commutes that were more than 90 minutes long nearly doubled, from 1.6% to 2.8%.

Finally, Frey notes, there's the general aging of our society. Since 1940 the percentage of people 65 and older has more than doubled, thanks to increases in longevity. The average baby born today can expect to live 10 more years than a baby born in 1950. Younger people move more frequently than older people, so as society grays the share of people who move each year naturally declines.

Why We Believe the Mobility Myth

Why does the mobility myth have so much staying power? "Maybe there's a button on people's keyboard that says 'increasingly mobile society,'" jokes Fischer, who has published papers debunking the mobility myth since the late 1970s. In his recent City & Community article, Fischer cites several academics who made this gaffe in their scholarly work, along with prominent newspapers that help perpetuate the myth. (In 2001, to give just one example, The New York Times attributed shifts in family patterns to "ever growing mobility among Americans.")

One reason the mobility myth persists, Fischer argues, is that it jibes with the widely held idea that we're in the midst of "a fall from grace." (You'd think we'd have landed by now--we've been falling for centuries.) If we're increasingly mobile, we're a less stable society than we once were, which fits nicely with the fall-from-grace theme. This sort of anxiety is epitomized by Vance Packard's oft-cited 1972 book A Nation of Strangers, which describes "a society coming apart at the seams" thanks to mobility. Packard connects increasing mobility with the disruption of male-female relationships, the unraveling of traditional religious beliefs, and the crushing speed of technological change. Mobility is an easy scapegoat for complex changes in the American social fabric.

Related to this habit is the common tendency to pine for the good old days. "When people think back," says Fischer, "they often interpret the past in terms of their own personal biographies, so the past was innocent and fun and stable, like childhood. They remember the past through rose-colored glasses, and an image of stability is part of it."

Historian Stephanie Coontz cites another factor that helps sustain the mobility myth: The people purveying it --academics, journalists, pundits--are a college-educated crowd, and highly educated people are more likely to move longer distances than less-educated people (although they are not more likely to do so than they were in the past). In 2004 only 25 percent of American adults had a bachelor's degree. "It is very common to believe that your particular, narrow slice of the socioeconomic strata is totally representative of the population as a whole," Coontz observes. She adds that Americans are especially likely to make this mistake because we tend to deny that there's such a thing as class in the United States. In societies where class differences are more commonly acknowledged--the United Kingdom, for example--such generalizations are less common. In those societies, Coontz says, the privileged few "are not only aware but proudly aware of the fact that they're a small sliver of the population."

Some social critics seem to be relying on a gut-level sense that we are moving around more than we once did, statistics to the contrary be damned. In Restless Nation, James Jasper writes: "Statistical averages are of little help in understanding dreams and identities....Perhaps only one man in ten abandons his job and his family to start life anew out West. But what do the other nine think about?"

This intuition is reinforced by the ways in which we have become more mobile. Domestic travel is increasing, for instance. The number of "person-trips"--defined as one person traveling either overnight or 50 miles or more away from home--increased 9.8 percent from 1994 to 2003, according to the Travel Industry Association of America, which surveys 25,000 households a month on their travel habits. In fast-growing cities, particularly in the Southwest and West, the sense of mobility could be enhanced by rapid population growth, demographer Frey suggests. In Las Vegas, for example, the population is 13 times what it was in the 1960s. In such cities, Frey says, the population is "mostly made up of people born somewhere else."

Above all, the mobility myth is politically expedient. Conservatives can use the notion that our society is becoming less stable because of increasing mobility to advocate programs that encourage traditional families and to push for taxpayer funding of faith-based social service organizations. Liberals can cite increasing mobility to justify funding for various social programs, including elder care and family care initiatives. Neither the right nor the left has an interest in debunking it, and so the myth endures.