Mobility Matters to Mobility

Central Texas. Southwestern Pennsylvania. The Twin Cities of Minnesota.

My wife and I left Central California in 2006 because we recognized that economic mobility went hand-in-hand with geographical mobility. The willingness and ability to move correlates with economic mobility. If you cannot, or will not, consider relocating from a struggling region, your economic opportunities become limited.

Richard Florida has argued that a handful of metropolitan areas attract the Creative Class that relies more on intellectual and social capital than physical abilities and natural resources. Generally, these are educated people from the middle and upper-middle class. They seek out similar individuals, part of the Great Sort we find in Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart.

We could move and we did, seeking financial security alongside many others who have migrated along similar paths.

We selected Central Texas because it aligns with our educational backgrounds, our job skills, and our moderate values. It is hospitable to a libertarian strain of centrism. I wouldn’t be at home in San Francisco or New York, but I want to be in a culturally rich, creative, science and technology hub. That’s Austin, Texas: a cultural hub that takes pride in its “weirdness.” There’s something to the slogan, “Keep Austin Weird.”

Sadly, many of my most talented students don’t want to relocate from their native regions. This limits their futures and it limits what society will gain from those gifted people.

If you want to be a Broadway performer, you cannot remain forever in the Midwest. If you want to be in film or television, you at least have to consider traveling to Los Angeles, New York, or a similar film hub. Career clusters are a phenomena: observable and predictable. Think about how interconnected job types are, as you need one set of workers for another set to thrive.

Silicon Valley isn’t an accident. It’s a gathering of career types that are interconnected. That’s true of most geographical career clusters.

Academic and vocational education institutions develop within career hubs, emphasizing the skills and knowledge employers want. Then, more employers migrate or emerge because there are potential workers. The workers network, leading to yet more creations and more employment. Success breeds yet more success.

Eventually, an employment hub fails to evolve. Regions once dependent on textiles struggled. Manufacturing hubs faded. The Rust Belt has tried to reinvent itself, with mixed results.

Migrations map human history. We moved into agricultural villages, industrial cities, and technology hubs. We will continue migrating.

Nostalgia and family roots lock many people into places. I understand this, observing it in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. People love their communities and don’t want to leave, even as employers close and the educated elites migrate away. The remaining residents struggle, as they have to support crumbling towns with fewer and fewer residents. We watched as schools closed, one after another. Stores closed. People moved away….

Southwestern PA is beautiful. It’s also struggling with few great career options for me or my wife. We also considered the futures of our daughters.

We are fortunate to be able to move and we are, for better or worse, psychologically able to relocate and start over. Not every family can make the choices we have made.