I listened to Derek Thompson’s podcast with Atlantic editor Yoni Appelbaum on his upcoming book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. The discussion was fascinating: positing that the decline in American mobility is the most important social change in the last fifty years ¹ and that it’s the fault of the progressive movement.

I found it fascinating to learn how high mobility was in the past and in particular about “moving day” as a day where all of the leases ² came up and everyone moved all at once while Europeans came over and spectated . Apparently it still happens in Quebec; I should go gawk or maybe market my enthusiastic if slightly clumsy moving skills.

Applebaum argues that this is mobility unprecedented in world history and led to a new sort of permissionless society: if you didn’t like your current situation you could up and move, reinvent yourself, and knock on your neighbors’ door to restablish community.

As someone who has moved several times for opportunity this resonated with me especially having seen the opposite. I was born in the growing city of Charlotte where almost everyone had moved there and community was easy to establish as everyone was looking for it. As families grew the children continued the pattern of mobility dispersing off to chase their individual dreams. This was in sharp contrast to our experience when we moved to Louisville, KY. People don’t really move to or from Louisville: when people ask you where you went to school they’re really asking about high school! A large majority of the folks I went to high school with remain; I’m sure they are pursuing their dreams though my bias leds me to be skeptical it’s best served by staying put.

Of course that freewheeling state of affairs wouldn’t last too long: someone always wants to object. This is where zoning laws came in which I was not shocked to learn were explicitly racist aimed at Chinese Americans in California and Jewish Americans in NYC. The interesting twist came when Appelbaum suggested that progressive policies in the 70s contained citizen suit provisions which enabled individuals without traditional standing to sue in the public interest. And inevitably the “public interest” in many of these cases is a quite private NIMBY desire to limit housing development.

This part was quite interesting; without reading the book I’m not sure I trust the causality. Effectively Appelbaum argues that progressive governance leads to heavy interference in housing markets causing high housing costs and points out that the most expensive cities to live in such as the Bay Area or New York City are very reliably democratic. There’s a bit too much confounding here for me to take this at face value. I could even argue the other way: high housing costs filter for a richer/more educated populace which results in progressive governance. I’d also note that both cities are geographically constrained. Presumably the book has a deeper analysis hopefully even with an interesting natural experiment.