My wife and I were talking about how some friends of ours have their whole family living in the same city - kids, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. They all see each other often and it seems really nice. Neither my wife nor I live within 1000 miles of where we were born, nor do our parents, so this makes us a bit jealous.
We also noted that everyone in this family is on the lower end of the income scale.
We were wondering if there has ever been a study about this, comparing income (or net worth, or some other similar value) to the distance someone lives from where they were born, and if there is any kind of a correlation. Meaning, possibly the farther you live from where you were born, the higher your income is likely to be. Or lower, or maybe no correlation.
We hypothesized that there may be a correlation because families on the lower end of the income scale do not have the resources to move to where there are better jobs, and so multiple generations may stay in the same area. Or that people with higher incomes may go away to college and then head to wherever the good jobs are.
Of course there are many examples of the opposite scenarios, too. But has there been any studies showing or not showing any rough correlation?
(Yes, this is the kind of thing we discuss over lunch…)
I doubt Census has your answer, but try starting here: Geographical Mobility: 2015 to 2016
IIRC people with more money are more likely to move. But I don’t recall if they measure how far. And I don’t think they track birthplace in these data.
I’m not sure that there will be a nation-wide correlation for a couple of reasons. First, most of the studies I’ve seen track distance from family ( either the closest relative geographically or from a person’s mother). And in that sort of study , you can’t distinguish between the person who lives two miles from her mother because she never left her hometown and the person whose mother moved 1000 miles away from the hometown to live near her daughter. Second, depending on the area, people may not be moving to get a better paying job - I know plenty of people who left NYC and ended up with *lower-paying *jobs. And they knew when they left that they would be earning fewer dollars - but that lower-paying job in Florida or Arizona or North Carolina could finance a lifestyle that the higher-paying job in NYC couldn’t.
There is other research showing that greater mobility reduces unemployment. Higher rates of homeownership, and thus lower mobility, leads to higher unemployment rates. Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
It seems obvious that people are more likely to move where there is greater opportunity, thus that people who move probably have greater income on the whole than people who stayed put.
I wonder how much of that is cause and effect though. Educated people and people with a very narrow skill set probably have to move to a certain city to make use of their skills. You can’t just find a job in bumfuck West Virginia if you have a very narrow computer science skillset.
Also, it depends on where you start. If you’re born in the middle of nowhere in Alabama or West Virginia that is one thing, but what if your entire family is from the SF bay area or the NYC area? You can probably find jobs in almost any field in these areas.