Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
If you had to describe the U.S. economy at the moment, I think you could do worse than the word stuck.
The labor market is stuck. The low unemployment rate disguises how surprisingly hard it is to find a job today. The hiring rate has declined consistently since 2022, and it’s now closer to its lowest level of the 21st century than the highest. We’re in this weird moment where it feels like everybody’s working but nobody’s hiring. Second, the housing market is stuck. Interest rates are high, tariffs are looming, and home builder confidence is flagging. The median age of first-time homebuyers just hit a record high of 38 this year.
Finally, people are stuck. Americans don’t move anymore. Sixty years ago, one in five Americans moved every year. Now it’s one in 13. According to today’s guest, Yoni Appelbaum, the deputy executive editor of The Atlantic, the decline of migration in the U.S. is perhaps the most important social fact of modern American life. Yoni is the author of the latest cover story for The Atlantic, “How Progressives Froze the American Dream,” which is adapted from his book with the fitting title Stuck. Yoni was our guest for our first sold-out live show in Washington, D.C., at Union Stage in February. Today, we talk about the history of housing in America, policy and zoning laws, and why Yoni thinks homeowners in liberal cities have strangled the American dream.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Summary
In the following excerpt, Derek and Yoni Appelbaum break down some of the biggest social changes over the past half century and discuss how they interact with one another.
Derek Thompson: I wrote the cover story of the last issue of The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century,” where I argued that alone time, rising self-imposed solitude, is what I called the most important social change of the past half century. I worked on this article really hard. You were an editor or an editor’s editor on this article, a 9,000-word article that I had spent months and months on. You are the author of this month’s cover story, and I’m reading along until I get to this sentence in the [fifth] paragraph: “The [sharp] decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half century, although other shifts have attracted more attention.”
What the fuck is that? I mean, is The Atlantic just going to do this every single month? Whatever random thing we just had to focus on is the most important social change in the last half century? Defend this claim that the decline of geographic mobility is the most important social change of the last 50 years.
Yoni Appelbaum: I think then I can tell this crowd that the next issue of The Atlantic says, “The guy who leaves a quarter inch at the bottom of the bottle and doesn’t get up to replace it with a new one, that is the biggest social problem in America.”
Thompson: Biggest social change. Yes.
Appelbaum: And we’re just going to do this every month. No. So, I think you’re right. Aloneness is an enormous crisis in America, but—and this is what I’ll defend—I think the reason that we feel so alone and disconnected from each other is that something fundamental has shifted in American life. We used to move around a lot. We don’t anymore, and it’s had the perverse effect of leaving us really disconnected from each other.
Thompson: And the key statistic here is in the late 19th century, 1 in 3 Americans moved in any given year. Now, it’s 1 in 14. So, the annual rate of mobility has gone from about 30 percent of the country to about 7 percent of the country. That’s an enormous change, and I love this passage of the book Stuck. You write, “The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities … is America’s most profound contribution to the world. Many of the cherished features of our society trace, in one way or another, back to this innovation; many of our country’s most glaring injustices result from the ways in which this freedom has been denied to those who needed it most. The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets; it’s a lethal threat to the entire American project.”
Appelbaum: God, there’s nothing worse than listening to your own words getting read back to you in front of a [crowd]. I wrote that because when we move, there are two ways to look at it, right? One is: You back up a truck, you load it up, you go someplace new. It’s a mechanical thing. The other way to think about it is what it actually means to move, to relocate from one place to another. You’re starting over. You arrive in a new town. You need to figure out who you are. You need to reconstruct your identity. And you do that by finding a job. You do that by building social connections. Maybe you show up at church for the first time in years that Sunday in order to find out who else lives around here. Maybe you’re at the bar and you turn to the person sitting next to you, which you wouldn’t usually do because it’s awkward to talk to the guy sitting next to you at the bar, and you introduce yourself.
When you move, you have a chance to figure out who you want to be. You have a chance to start over. And in America, this is a land of second chances, of fifth chances, of 13th chances. Americans move a lot, and we’ve historically done that a ton. And that made our society really open to people redefining themselves, not slotting into a particular role in an elaborate social hierarchy, being stuck with the identities with which you’re born. No, in America, you’ve had the chance to move up, to move in some entirely unexpected direction, to decide who you want to be. And the injustice is part of it too, because if you want to know who’s gotten the raw end of the deal in America, you can look back through our history at the groups that have been deprived of mobility.
The literal mechanism of enslavement is the denial of mobility. You can’t physically leave, right? And defiantly, African Americans would run away; [that] was the language they used at the time, right? They would assert their mobility in the face of immobility. And that’s been true throughout our history, that the populations we’ve denied mobility have been the ones that have gotten the raw end of the deal, and the people who have had the chance to move and redefine themselves are those who’ve moved up in America.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Yoni Appelbaum
Producer: Devon Baroldi