Aging of the population does not explain the drop in mobility over the last 40 years -- the change in mobility within age bands is very close the change in overall mobility.
The story of the right, "country-club GOP" view: my grandfather left the Nebraska farm and his stern preacher father to step off a train with nothing and try his chances in what was then a boom area of the country. A couple decades on, he had so prospered as a Useful Man to the wealthy, that he was able to join some other upper middle class fellows in founding a country club (there was room for another at midcentury in that fast-expanding city).
The servers and caddies then - were virtually all black. Presumably also the landscapers. Some of the servers came off of serving on trains as rail travel died. I don't know about the makeup of the kitchen staff. It's hard to imagine a time when Texans didn't have a Hispanic underclass in the kitchen - but it must have existed.
The blacks were (perhaps happily - who knows? there's worse jobs than being the maitre'd of a club though) gradually replaced by Hispanics, in all positions except proshop helper/occasional caddy/golf cart maintainer, where personality made them not so fungible. I recall one died of AIDS and the golfers just about fell apart with grief.
At some point, the Hispanics were about half-displaced by Middle Easterners.
Now it's quite a United Nations, staff-wise.
The old BSers that play cards at lunch are generally very pro-Israel. That is an especially popular topic, the valor of the Israelis. Other than that, I don't know that they tend to think about foreign policy or its failures much. None of their kids died in the desert.
I'm certain that immigration has never been a subject of much interest to these GOPers. Certainly I've never heard my father, in his eighties, ever mention it. But then he's pretty taciturn and his great and abiding passion in life has been taxes and how to avoid paying them. Insofar as it has become of possible interest, it would be a new effect of Tucker Carlson and his occasional border diatribes working on their susceptible Fox-watching minds. (Diatribes from which they're now protected.)
It's probable that in their minds, immigrants - the whole lot of them - are like brave Israelis, putting the rest of the world to shame with their moxie. They don't care that vast swaths of their city have become "3rd world shitholes" in Trump's memorable phrase. Bryan Caplan is much less of a radical than he likes to think. He's really just parroting a conventional talking point.
That the GOP cynically co-opted the left's rhetoric around diversity and immigration because it made some people very rich, would not be something these old gin rummy players grasp - they only know that they have liked the effect, for the most part. Maybe not everything, if challenged - but who challenges very old men? And anyway, theirs was only the 3rd-most-exclusive club, it's not like they really made the rules ...
And somebody like me, pointing out these many years - long before the word "border" even entered common currency - that the government of the US deliberately subverted the will of the American people (who routinely told pollsters in the 70s that they wanted population to stabilize) - well, I was a nutty environmentalist - and now - voila! I can be dismissed as an alt-righter! By both left and right.
Did I mention "conservatives" anywhere in my post? Apologies if I did, I certainly didn't intend to.
I'd not be sure those voters weren't garden-variety liberals in the Barbara Jordan mold - the subject was not then taboo, though perhaps the lesson of that referendum was that it must become taboo - but admittedly I'm not familiar with California's large conservative electorate.
Democracy promotion is a curious aspect of the post-war era that changed in tone and policy after Vietnam. It's a recent invention in American foreign policy that derives from people taking rhetoric too seriously, "not getting the joke" of how the US really works. They still understood that it was a joke during the Clinton years, but as the rhetoric became more forceful, a whole generation did not get the joke anymore, and so we have started to have very serious problems on that front.
There was a movie in the 1990s called "Wag the Dog" about creating a fake war to distract from a presidential sex scandal. Everyone sort of understood it referred to Bill Clinton.
Apparently the movie was based on a novel, and in the novel, it was supposed to be modeled on GHWB's Gulf War original, not of course to be confused with its less successful sequel.
People in their 70s (in NZ) are doing a lot of downsizing, which means moving to somewhere smaller and more modern with only a tiny garden or just a balcony. They are also moving to warmer climes.
I don't understand in what way Catholicism undermines the family. I might have thought that atheism was more undermining as it has no truck with traditional rituals or values.
The book that the link is referring to is discussing Catholic prohibition on cousin marriage and other consanguinity regulations. These consanguinity regulations were a big deal in the Middle Ages in part because aristocrats were continually "discovering" violations of the regulation so as to justify their annulments because divorce was illegal. Prior to that, cousin marriage and other kinds of incestuous marriage (plus polygamy etc.) were common.
We should all agree to "hold Progressives responsible for the prominence of race in today’s politics."
We were moving towards a color-blind society, which is the right (& correct!) social goal. But Democrat racists continue to fan the flames, emphasizing a huge untruth about "equality".
"Blacks have an equal average IQ as Whites or Asians"
This is false, but semi-dishonest writers, often highly educated and literate Jews(?) like Tait, avoid clearly stating this falsehood, yet attack all who honestly speak this truth as "racists". Similarly, to point out actual differences in the way women and men think is called "anti-feminsim". Tellingly, Tait often mentions racism and opposition to feminism as part of the alt-right, but refuses to specify what those racist/ misogynistic ideas actually are -- we're all supposed to know the details (as an exercise for the reader?). Intellectually flabby, deliberately non-honest.
On free speech, he's stronger - but absolutely wrong. He claims the alt-right free speech position is "absolutism", but in fact it is pure all "first amendment" allowed speech should be allowed everywhere. That's far different - tho many Prog liars want to call that absolutism instead of First Amendment.
On immigration, one of the main reasons Trump got elected and continues to be hugely popular, he implicitly claims the alt-right opposes immigration. The vast majority oppose ILLEGAL immigration, but he can't even bear to write that sentence. Intellectual cowardice.
The Republican GOPe who respect such Prog liars like Tait SHOULD be rejected. Kling seems to think lying about race, feminism, and immigration should not be rejected since the GOPe has been accepting those lies for decades. Decades in which higher paid US non-college jobs have been going to China and other off-shore places. This globalization has been reducing global poverty, but also reducing US median income growth - a trade-off many might find reasonable but few honestly note since it's been a political choice that, for the US non-elite, is not popular.
Near the end, where he mentions Hanania, it's ironic that Richard seems more honest more often than Tait is (in this article), but also how Richard's note on how NYT seldom actually lies, but often implies untrue things, is so obvious. Being against illegal immigration can be called a form of being against immigration, but not mentioning both legal & illegal as separate issues implies a false equality between the two.
Conservatives, and the alt-right, and the right, are pretty much against illegal behavior. And a huge racial issue is how much more crime is done by Blacks - which, if noticed (as done by S. Sailor) results in one being called a racist. The Truth is racist from this POV.
Ukraine shows that the GOP learned nothing from Iraq/Afghanistan. It's literally the same people that supported that war and they publish op-eds in the NYTimes saying how they really didn't learn anything because hey Saddam was a bad guy so what can you do.
"Ageing Population" = "Costs of the Diseases of Old Age". Things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or anything that takes your fancy. Those costs, once you're drawing your pension, are potentially horrific.
So you retire, and never sell the house until you really, really, need to. That house would be relatively close to central business districts, and you'd be looking at a real return of maybe 2.5% pa over the last twenty or thirty years or so. Life expectancy at 55 begin to increase about 40 or 50 years ago.
There's a chunk of internal migration that's simply not happening anymore, so mobility goes down.
Kling is correct- the causative factor is aging of the population. I am 57 years old, and was my parents' oldest child. After their marriage and my birth a year later, my father and mother moved "out of county" 4 times before I was 8 years old. They then lived in the same home until I started graduate school at age 22, then moved one last time "out of county" bringing us to present day.
"I hold Progressives responsible for the prominence of race in today’s politics. Without Woke, there would be no anti-Woke."
Yep.
Nation building - yep
"But I think that younger activists on the right have gone overboard in their rejection of the Republican establishment. I will probably have to spell that point out in a longer essay."
PLEASE! If it also works for a Tim Urban high rung liberal, even better.
actually, one could argue that war spending dampens spending on things with no end. It's possible for it to save money. Not likely though. Still, definitely better than the long-term consequences of covid spending.
Yes, Part D started shortly after the wars started.
That said, we don't know what new spending might have started in the absence of the massive war expenditures.
Note: the wars didn't prevent addressing SS and medicare issues if addressing them meant reducing benefits or increasing taxes and premiums related to them.
I suppose one could also argue the transaction costs were largely falling for most of the last 40 years because interest rates were falling and a new mortgage could be obtain at the lower rate
Is this plausible? Yes. Is it likely to be true? I doubt it. Sure, mortgage rates have fallen over that 40 year period until 18 months ago, but the actual costs of land and building have gone up relentlessly over that 40 years. The fall in mortgage rates benefits the sellers of real estate, too, by allowing the buyers to borrow more money to pay higher prices. My parents built a 3 bedroom ranch with land my father inherited, and $18K mortgage, and the labor of my father, maternal grandfather, and an uncle in 1974. The interest rate on that mortgage was over 8%. If they had to do it today at 7% mortgage rates, the size of the mortgage would have been at least $180K in the same location- even 3 years ago at 3% mortgage rates.
For those who own homes, appreciation applies on both ends equally. (ignoring that they may be moving to either a more or less expensive location). For those who don't own a home, the cost of buying is the same regardless of location, again ignoring that the new location may be more or less expensive.
Ok, you make a good point that appreciation means getting a bigger loan but again, the existing owner should have appreciation of the current home to reduce the mortgage size and non-owners face the appreciation in their current location too.
You get appreciation in the home you own (along with the bank) over time, not instantly, Stu. If you buy a home and sell it 5 years later to buy another, more expensive one in another location, you don't benefit much from the appreciation of the first one- most of such benefit usually accrues over 2 decades and the build up of equity from paying down the first mortgage, plus you face a second round of transaction costs that have usually gotten higher no matter when you move.
homes in each location in year x+y = $300k ( $210k, if you prefer)
Home prices going up applies in both locations. Yes, you can move to a more expensive location but you can also move to a less expensive one. that's a whole other issue.
As for transaction costs, it is probably true they have gone up but what I said was that mortgage interest mostly went downward for new loans during that time period and this somewhat counters any fee increases.
I think you are using transaction costs somewhat incorrectly here. Transaction costs are those that do not accrue to either the buyer or seller, but to some third party (or a hole in the ground.) So while mortgage rates going down means less transaction costs in the sense that the bank gets less, the resulting increase in the price of the home, and the price of the home the prospective buyer is going to sell, is not a transaction cost changing. However, the transaction costs associated with those higher prices also go up, as the realtors' fixed percentages mean absolute costs increase with the price, likewise taxes, down payments, etc.
Annoyingly, all of those transaction costs are up front costs, while mortgage payments are over time, and so awkward to compare. Plus then there is the possibility of refinancing if rates drop, etc. Still, the main point is that the price changes due to changes in rates are not transaction costs themselves, and that the changing transaction costs of the mortgage rate are countered by the opposite changes in transaction costs based on price.
You are correct what I refer to is not a transaction cost in the strict sense. I think what is relevant here is transaction cost in the broadest sense - how has the cost of exchanging homes in differing locales changed.
Aging of the population does not explain the drop in mobility over the last 40 years -- the change in mobility within age bands is very close the change in overall mobility.
Compare mobility for 1981-1982 (https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p20/384/tab04.pdf) to mobility in 2021-2022 (https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/geographic-mobility/2022/cps-2022/mig_01_2022_1yr.xlsx)
In 1981-1982, the share of movers was 16.6% overall, 35.4% for ages 20-24, 30.0% for ages 25-29, 6.7% for ages 55-64, and 5.2% for ages 65-74.
In 2021-2022, the share movers was 8.2% overall, 17.1% for 20-24, 18.2% for 25-29, 5.9% for ages 55-59, 4.7% for and 3.3% for ages 65-74.
[The 1981-1982 data do not report movers to abroad, so I have looked at only mobility within the US in both datasets to maintain comparability.]
Kin relationships will reassert themselves as our cities devolve into criminal anarchy.
The story of the right, "country-club GOP" view: my grandfather left the Nebraska farm and his stern preacher father to step off a train with nothing and try his chances in what was then a boom area of the country. A couple decades on, he had so prospered as a Useful Man to the wealthy, that he was able to join some other upper middle class fellows in founding a country club (there was room for another at midcentury in that fast-expanding city).
The servers and caddies then - were virtually all black. Presumably also the landscapers. Some of the servers came off of serving on trains as rail travel died. I don't know about the makeup of the kitchen staff. It's hard to imagine a time when Texans didn't have a Hispanic underclass in the kitchen - but it must have existed.
The blacks were (perhaps happily - who knows? there's worse jobs than being the maitre'd of a club though) gradually replaced by Hispanics, in all positions except proshop helper/occasional caddy/golf cart maintainer, where personality made them not so fungible. I recall one died of AIDS and the golfers just about fell apart with grief.
At some point, the Hispanics were about half-displaced by Middle Easterners.
Now it's quite a United Nations, staff-wise.
The old BSers that play cards at lunch are generally very pro-Israel. That is an especially popular topic, the valor of the Israelis. Other than that, I don't know that they tend to think about foreign policy or its failures much. None of their kids died in the desert.
I'm certain that immigration has never been a subject of much interest to these GOPers. Certainly I've never heard my father, in his eighties, ever mention it. But then he's pretty taciturn and his great and abiding passion in life has been taxes and how to avoid paying them. Insofar as it has become of possible interest, it would be a new effect of Tucker Carlson and his occasional border diatribes working on their susceptible Fox-watching minds. (Diatribes from which they're now protected.)
It's probable that in their minds, immigrants - the whole lot of them - are like brave Israelis, putting the rest of the world to shame with their moxie. They don't care that vast swaths of their city have become "3rd world shitholes" in Trump's memorable phrase. Bryan Caplan is much less of a radical than he likes to think. He's really just parroting a conventional talking point.
That the GOP cynically co-opted the left's rhetoric around diversity and immigration because it made some people very rich, would not be something these old gin rummy players grasp - they only know that they have liked the effect, for the most part. Maybe not everything, if challenged - but who challenges very old men? And anyway, theirs was only the 3rd-most-exclusive club, it's not like they really made the rules ...
And somebody like me, pointing out these many years - long before the word "border" even entered common currency - that the government of the US deliberately subverted the will of the American people (who routinely told pollsters in the 70s that they wanted population to stabilize) - well, I was a nutty environmentalist - and now - voila! I can be dismissed as an alt-righter! By both left and right.
Detect a pattern?
Yup, they closed the barn door that day.
Did I mention "conservatives" anywhere in my post? Apologies if I did, I certainly didn't intend to.
I'd not be sure those voters weren't garden-variety liberals in the Barbara Jordan mold - the subject was not then taboo, though perhaps the lesson of that referendum was that it must become taboo - but admittedly I'm not familiar with California's large conservative electorate.
What the GOP - and especially the California GOP - has to do with conservatism I don't know, so I can't follow - sorry.
ETA: I mean, no one would ever seriously entertain the idea that Reagan was conservative - so I know you must mean something else.
So atomization is responsible for the rise of WEIRD rather than its decline, as so frequently asserted nowadays?
Democracy promotion is a curious aspect of the post-war era that changed in tone and policy after Vietnam. It's a recent invention in American foreign policy that derives from people taking rhetoric too seriously, "not getting the joke" of how the US really works. They still understood that it was a joke during the Clinton years, but as the rhetoric became more forceful, a whole generation did not get the joke anymore, and so we have started to have very serious problems on that front.
There was a movie in the 1990s called "Wag the Dog" about creating a fake war to distract from a presidential sex scandal. Everyone sort of understood it referred to Bill Clinton.
I saw it on VHS. Hard to imagine big actors like Huffman, Macy, and De Niro appearing in a movie like that today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgPnYVg74Y
Apparently the movie was based on a novel, and in the novel, it was supposed to be modeled on GHWB's Gulf War original, not of course to be confused with its less successful sequel.
People in their 70s (in NZ) are doing a lot of downsizing, which means moving to somewhere smaller and more modern with only a tiny garden or just a balcony. They are also moving to warmer climes.
I don't understand in what way Catholicism undermines the family. I might have thought that atheism was more undermining as it has no truck with traditional rituals or values.
The book that the link is referring to is discussing Catholic prohibition on cousin marriage and other consanguinity regulations. These consanguinity regulations were a big deal in the Middle Ages in part because aristocrats were continually "discovering" violations of the regulation so as to justify their annulments because divorce was illegal. Prior to that, cousin marriage and other kinds of incestuous marriage (plus polygamy etc.) were common.
We should all agree to "hold Progressives responsible for the prominence of race in today’s politics."
We were moving towards a color-blind society, which is the right (& correct!) social goal. But Democrat racists continue to fan the flames, emphasizing a huge untruth about "equality".
"Blacks have an equal average IQ as Whites or Asians"
This is false, but semi-dishonest writers, often highly educated and literate Jews(?) like Tait, avoid clearly stating this falsehood, yet attack all who honestly speak this truth as "racists". Similarly, to point out actual differences in the way women and men think is called "anti-feminsim". Tellingly, Tait often mentions racism and opposition to feminism as part of the alt-right, but refuses to specify what those racist/ misogynistic ideas actually are -- we're all supposed to know the details (as an exercise for the reader?). Intellectually flabby, deliberately non-honest.
On free speech, he's stronger - but absolutely wrong. He claims the alt-right free speech position is "absolutism", but in fact it is pure all "first amendment" allowed speech should be allowed everywhere. That's far different - tho many Prog liars want to call that absolutism instead of First Amendment.
On immigration, one of the main reasons Trump got elected and continues to be hugely popular, he implicitly claims the alt-right opposes immigration. The vast majority oppose ILLEGAL immigration, but he can't even bear to write that sentence. Intellectual cowardice.
The Republican GOPe who respect such Prog liars like Tait SHOULD be rejected. Kling seems to think lying about race, feminism, and immigration should not be rejected since the GOPe has been accepting those lies for decades. Decades in which higher paid US non-college jobs have been going to China and other off-shore places. This globalization has been reducing global poverty, but also reducing US median income growth - a trade-off many might find reasonable but few honestly note since it's been a political choice that, for the US non-elite, is not popular.
Near the end, where he mentions Hanania, it's ironic that Richard seems more honest more often than Tait is (in this article), but also how Richard's note on how NYT seldom actually lies, but often implies untrue things, is so obvious. Being against illegal immigration can be called a form of being against immigration, but not mentioning both legal & illegal as separate issues implies a false equality between the two.
Conservatives, and the alt-right, and the right, are pretty much against illegal behavior. And a huge racial issue is how much more crime is done by Blacks - which, if noticed (as done by S. Sailor) results in one being called a racist. The Truth is racist from this POV.
Ukraine shows that the GOP learned nothing from Iraq/Afghanistan. It's literally the same people that supported that war and they publish op-eds in the NYTimes saying how they really didn't learn anything because hey Saddam was a bad guy so what can you do.
"Ageing Population" = "Costs of the Diseases of Old Age". Things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or anything that takes your fancy. Those costs, once you're drawing your pension, are potentially horrific.
So you retire, and never sell the house until you really, really, need to. That house would be relatively close to central business districts, and you'd be looking at a real return of maybe 2.5% pa over the last twenty or thirty years or so. Life expectancy at 55 begin to increase about 40 or 50 years ago.
There's a chunk of internal migration that's simply not happening anymore, so mobility goes down.
Kling is correct- the causative factor is aging of the population. I am 57 years old, and was my parents' oldest child. After their marriage and my birth a year later, my father and mother moved "out of county" 4 times before I was 8 years old. They then lived in the same home until I started graduate school at age 22, then moved one last time "out of county" bringing us to present day.
"I hold Progressives responsible for the prominence of race in today’s politics. Without Woke, there would be no anti-Woke."
Yep.
Nation building - yep
"But I think that younger activists on the right have gone overboard in their rejection of the Republican establishment. I will probably have to spell that point out in a longer essay."
PLEASE! If it also works for a Tim Urban high rung liberal, even better.
actually, one could argue that war spending dampens spending on things with no end. It's possible for it to save money. Not likely though. Still, definitely better than the long-term consequences of covid spending.
Yes, SS and Medicare on are on auto-pilot.
Yes, Part D started shortly after the wars started.
That said, we don't know what new spending might have started in the absence of the massive war expenditures.
Note: the wars didn't prevent addressing SS and medicare issues if addressing them meant reducing benefits or increasing taxes and premiums related to them.
'Alex, I go with “Aging of the population.” '
That is a likely contributor but doesn't come close to explaining going from 20% to 10%.
I suppose one could also argue the transaction costs were largely falling for most of the last 40 years because interest rates were falling and a new mortgage could be obtain at the lower rate
Is this plausible? Yes. Is it likely to be true? I doubt it. Sure, mortgage rates have fallen over that 40 year period until 18 months ago, but the actual costs of land and building have gone up relentlessly over that 40 years. The fall in mortgage rates benefits the sellers of real estate, too, by allowing the buyers to borrow more money to pay higher prices. My parents built a 3 bedroom ranch with land my father inherited, and $18K mortgage, and the labor of my father, maternal grandfather, and an uncle in 1974. The interest rate on that mortgage was over 8%. If they had to do it today at 7% mortgage rates, the size of the mortgage would have been at least $180K in the same location- even 3 years ago at 3% mortgage rates.
For those who own homes, appreciation applies on both ends equally. (ignoring that they may be moving to either a more or less expensive location). For those who don't own a home, the cost of buying is the same regardless of location, again ignoring that the new location may be more or less expensive.
Ok, you make a good point that appreciation means getting a bigger loan but again, the existing owner should have appreciation of the current home to reduce the mortgage size and non-owners face the appreciation in their current location too.
You get appreciation in the home you own (along with the bank) over time, not instantly, Stu. If you buy a home and sell it 5 years later to buy another, more expensive one in another location, you don't benefit much from the appreciation of the first one- most of such benefit usually accrues over 2 decades and the build up of equity from paying down the first mortgage, plus you face a second round of transaction costs that have usually gotten higher no matter when you move.
homes in each location in year x = $200k
homes in each location in year x+y = $300k ( $210k, if you prefer)
Home prices going up applies in both locations. Yes, you can move to a more expensive location but you can also move to a less expensive one. that's a whole other issue.
As for transaction costs, it is probably true they have gone up but what I said was that mortgage interest mostly went downward for new loans during that time period and this somewhat counters any fee increases.
I think you are using transaction costs somewhat incorrectly here. Transaction costs are those that do not accrue to either the buyer or seller, but to some third party (or a hole in the ground.) So while mortgage rates going down means less transaction costs in the sense that the bank gets less, the resulting increase in the price of the home, and the price of the home the prospective buyer is going to sell, is not a transaction cost changing. However, the transaction costs associated with those higher prices also go up, as the realtors' fixed percentages mean absolute costs increase with the price, likewise taxes, down payments, etc.
Annoyingly, all of those transaction costs are up front costs, while mortgage payments are over time, and so awkward to compare. Plus then there is the possibility of refinancing if rates drop, etc. Still, the main point is that the price changes due to changes in rates are not transaction costs themselves, and that the changing transaction costs of the mortgage rate are countered by the opposite changes in transaction costs based on price.
You are correct what I refer to is not a transaction cost in the strict sense. I think what is relevant here is transaction cost in the broadest sense - how has the cost of exchanging homes in differing locales changed.