Adam Davidson: A Mess on the Ladder of Success

Adam Davidson is the co-founder of NPR's Planet Money, a podcast, blog, and radio series heard on “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and “This American Life.”

Throughout American history there has almost always been at least one central economic narrative that gave the ambitious or unsatisfied reason to pack up and seek their fortune elsewhere. For the first 300 or so years of European settlement, the story was about moving outward: getting immigrants to the continent and then to the frontier to clear the prairies, drain the swamps and build new cities.

By the end of the 19th century, as the frontier vanished, the U.S. had a mild panic attack. What would this vibrant, entrepreneurial country be without new lands to conquer? Some people (I’m looking at you, Teddy Roosevelt) decided to keep on conquering (Cuba, the Philippines, etc.), but eventually, in industrialization, the U.S. found a new narrative of economic mobility at home. From the 1890s to the 1960s, people moved from farm to city, first in the North and then in the South. In fact, by the 1950s, there was enough prosperity and white-collar work that many began to move to the suburbs. As the population aged, there was also a shift from the cold Rust Belt to the comforts of the Sun Belt. We think of this as an old person’s migration, but it created many jobs for the young in construction and health care, not to mention tourism, retail and restaurants.

For the last 20 years — from the end of the cold war through two burst bubbles in a single decade — the U.S. has been casting about for its next economic narrative. And now it is experiencing another period of panic, which is bad news for much of the work force but particularly for its youngest members. The U.S. has always been a remarkably itinerant country, but new data from the Census Bureau indicate that mobility has reached its lowest level in recorded history. Sure, some people are stuck in homes valued at less than their mortgages, but many young people — who don’t own homes and don’t yet have families — are staying put, too. This suggests, among other things, that people aren’t packing up for new economic opportunities the way they used to. Rather than dividing the country into the 1 percenters versus everyone else, the split in our economy is really between two other classes: the mobile and immobile....