I've really struggled to understand why people will stay living in a certain area, unemployed, for years and years. Whether it's in a rustbelt city where the factories have shut down 20 years ago or a rural city where the only jobs are at Walmart or McDonalds, if you give people unemployment pay, they won't move.
I hear all the excuses for them not moving. It's too expensive, they'll uproot their families, etc. Do you think our grandparents didn't have those problems when they moved from the south to the rust belt to take those long-gone factory jobs?
It used to be people moved to where the jobs were. Now they are content to stay where the checks come.
Maybe now that the early phases of globalisation have settled down and all the frontiers have dried up, the global culture of movement has died down. It's a lot harder to think of moving as a possibility, let alone a good possibility, when it isn't part of the zeitgeist. People used to do it a lot in the 1800s especially, and it was something you could get swept along in - and there was an excitement of going to a fresh place where most people were new as well, economic opportunities and social relations were still up in the air.
Now you can trade a grind in one settled area for a slightly more profitable grind in another. With the tradeoff of losing contact with your whole social milieu and having to start a lot of things from scratch in the new place, while you're surrounded by people who have a lot more than you because they've been grinding in that place for years.
Not appealing, so it's no surprise that it's mainly the highly-educated who can a) seek high value economic opportunities and b) are guaranteed a welcoming social reception from university or work colleagues :)
People like us should be more generous about the incentives governing the lives of the new post-mobility local cultures.
I hear all the excuses for them not moving. It's too expensive, they'll uproot their families, etc. Do you think our grandparents didn't have those problems when they moved from the south to the rust belt to take those long-gone factory jobs?
It used to be people moved to where the jobs were. Now they are content to stay where the checks come.