Americans Don't Move

"Mobility of Americans has reached record lows," Richard Florida reports in CityLab.

This matters in part because, as Florida writes, "Residential mobility matters both to the economic prospects of individuals and the economic dynamism of our cities and nation as a whole." Where a person lives has a huge impact over how much money they make even for the same job.

Trying to figure out why this may have happened, Florida points to a few possible causes including: increased occupational licensing (which ties people to the state that licenses them), land use restrictions (which keeps economies from building for the markets that are creating demand), and home ownership subsidies (which push Americans to tie themselves to a specific area). Whatever the cause, Americans continue to move less and less—2015 was the previous record low, only to be surpassed by 2016.