Lord/ Francois:

WEll said! Idiot economists always overlook the costs to the individual but gloat over the benefits to their precious businesses.

I must admit I tried moving for a new job and found it was not at all to my liking- but at least I had the common sense to rent instead of buying a house at the new location. Oh yeah- the new job wasn’t as advertised (employers do sometimes lie). Only the paycheck was as advertised.

Enourmous costs to me (moving and a cheap sale of a house) and a measly 3 grand movers bill to employer. Not to mention the social costs to me. No social costs to the employer..

Economists always seem to miss the costs to individuals…

The other reality is that there is no serious lack of labour mobility in the lower links of food chain here. The inflexibility most certainly is on the part of the more well-paid sectors where people may not be willing to up roots once they have reached a certain level of stable economic well-being. That would reflect an entirely different attitude towards whether the future can, in generic terms, be expected to qualitatively better than the present. None of the above, by the way, takes into account that in cases where homeowners do move in response to economic opportunity they are as, likely as not, not to sell their original residence and buy a second in the new place. The store of value that property is seen as being would result in higher rates of home ownership.

Of course, there is no question that mobility benefits industry as it permits it to make purely number-generated decisions when deciding to tear down and rebuild in Michigan or start from scratch in the sun belt. Whether this results in more Chevrolets being built is another matter, but it sure turned the rust belt-sun belt competition into a zero sum game.

Very attractive prospect indeed, particularly well-suited for human nature.

Sheesh!

Australia is a funny case, in that its population in housing-mad (homeownership rates well over 70%) and people hate to move. Even by European standards, very high attachment to community and family.

Plus very high concentration in a few cities large that are parochial (relative to each other; Australians are huge international travelers). People in Melbourne look very dimly on Sydneysiders (less so the reverse). If you are in Sydney or Melbourne, you’d have to be in pretty desperate straits if you needed to look for a job further afield. Perth is so isolated that that produces much the same effect. So I’m not sure you can generalize from Australia….