May I ask when you lived in California?
No idea, but it seems to me that an economy based on it’s people living beyond their means is begging for trouble, eh?
Besides, once you have a cushion of savings and are no longer living paycheck to paycheck, you can go forth and have that relatively profligate standard of living! 
Although, with the loss of the Space Shuttle Program, many will be laid off, driving unemployment very high. So, let me get this straight, Mr. President and members of Congress. You mean to fix the unemployment problem by creating more unemployed people? I mean, I don’t have a Masters in Logic and Reasoning, but even an autistic 4 year old can see the obvious hole in what you intend to do.
nod nod nod This is what I’m getting at. I’m extrapolating this from what’s going on in Canada, to a degree. Right now, there are people in Ontario going on years unemployed. We have a social safety net so that those people don’t have to move for health insurance reasons, but the pressure is still on. Yet my province is hurting for educated workers in some areas, but no one wants to move here because we’re considered the ghetto of Canada.
I’m not saying everyone should mass move to the Midwest. Listen, I hate having to choose a specific poster to use, but this particular Doper has a story that I think about in relation to this situation, and by no means am I telling her she should do this, I’m just trying to show a particular situation I was thinking of when composing the OP.
So Poster had a great job not tied to a specifiic geographic area. Her husband had a great job too, and they were saving money and had a house and everything. Then her husband got sick and had to stop working. Then the job market fell out under her. Now she’s doing odd jobs and menial labour just to make ends meet and she’s done the most amazing things to squeeze out the last bit of value from a penny. I’ve always assumed the reason she and her husband never moved was because of health insurance.
But assume the health insurance ran out. This is what I’m talking about.
There was also a Doper recently who posted about getting their accounting degree and wondering if they should look in a better job market in the Midwest instead of in Florida where they graduated. If the alternative is not having a job, then I’d figure moving to the cultural vacuum would be a bit better at least.
I’m willing to settle for a job in Vermont, one year’s cash, and Keira Knightley.
Nuclear weapon calibration?
That’s Nevada, not Nebraska.
Yep, I can’t wait to leave California where my marriage is legally recognized and move to Nebraska which won’t even recognize my husband as even a partner. Or I could move to a state where I could be fired on day one of my new job just for being Gay. Even if I was unemployed, I don’t think I’d be packing my bags…
I meant as the target during the test launches under project “Nuclear Whipping Boy” when all allied nations simultaneously fire on Nebraska in order to calibrate their weapons.
My understanding is that in the Industrial Midwest, home ownership is a tremendous incentive to stay put. And it’s not the people who are underwater on jumbo mortgages: those you can walk away from. It’s the people who own houses free and clear, or close to it.
Look at it this way: you worked at a factory for 20 years and made good money. You bought a house and have made payments for 20 years. It’s not a McMansion, it’s just a 40 year old working class house. Right now the payments are very modest: a couple hundred bucks a month. You get laid off,and it’s basically impossible for you to ever find work again.
You could move. But if you move, you’ll have to walk away from the house and you’ll lose your equity. In the new place, you’ll have to pay housing costs, which will be much higher than what you’ve been paying, so it’s not enough to get a job, any job in the new place: you’ve got to get a better job than what you had before to break even. And if you lose that job, you’ll be actually homeless.
Or you have not a few people out there that live in houses they own free and clear that they inherited. Again, we aren’t talking about nice houses. We are talking about houses that have a paper value of under $50K and that you couldn’t actually sell for anything. But those people have no housing costs. That’s a huge disincentive to take the risk to move anywhere.
Moving costs also are considerable. Even if you are a renter and just abandon your stuff and take a greyhound, you’re going to have to pay new deposits, new fees, etc. Also, you’ll have to buy all new stuff–and even at goodwill, the price of a household adds up. If you actually want to move possessions, it gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. It’s hard to see how you could move a family across several states without it costing a couple thousand in upfront costs. And for a lot of people, a couple thousand might as well be a couple million.
But I do agree that for people with professional skills, the absolute refusal to move can be baffling. We went through 5 interstate moves when I was a kid, so I was certainly raised to keep my walking shoes on.
This question chills me to my bones.
They can’t all move to Calgary! 
I think part of the attitude might be because people are afraid to move to some place that they’ve always looked down on (being from Saskatchewan myself, I know the attitude you’re describing). The midwest (as an example) is right out without even doing any research into it because of preconceptions that might or might not be true.
I agree, please don’t come to Wyoming. You would hate it here. Yep, just stay away.
Doesn’t Nebraska have weapons silos? Or is that not a place for calibration?
That explains a lot. Canada is recovering. The US is still in a little depression.
Canada has an unemployment rate of 7.4%: estimates of the rate of unemployment that won’t speed up inflation range from 7 to 8 percent. The US has an unemployment rate of about 9.1%. Their NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) was south of 5.5% when the financial crisis hit.
Unlike the US, Canadian regulators subjected proposed financial innovations to the laugh test. So they didn’t permit liar loans. And Canadian banks didn’t pile up the phony AAA exotica like European and US banks did.
So if you want better job prospects, forget about Vermont (pop. 620,000). Move to Canada, which has a population of 34 million. (There are some dopers who have done this: I don’t know how hard it is.)
Japan achieved high growth with a high national savings rate. Prior to say 1980, the US had a substantially higher savings rate, IIRC. Seriously answering your question would involve a longer argument and deeper analysis. But my intuition, FWIW, is that long run economic growth is positively related to national savings, although proper macroeconomic policy would involve budget deficits during recessionary times, and very high but temporary budget deficits during depression.
Word. When I was laid off of my job in Cleveland, all the offers I got on my house were tens of thousands of dollars below what I still owned on it. And, yes, I had a conventional 30 year mortgage with 20% down, not some oddball zero-down ARM. The move to where I did find a job literally cost $20K, considering the money I spent to pay the mortgage, utilities, taxes and yard care while the house sat empty, and the thousands of dollars in improvements I made beforehand to increase curb appeal. I eventually pulled the house off the market. Today I rent the house out, and it’s still at a loss; the rent I get (after the management firm’s cut) is about $150-$200 a month less than the mortgage, insurance, and maintenance.
Also, with my move away from Cleveland, I had to end a LTR because my girlfriend didn’t want to move away from the region. If I stayed in Cleveland, I’d be married now.
Some people who belong to certain groups that cluster in specific areas may also be reluctant to move. Consider Jews; even Reform Jews are fairly limited in where they can go if they still want to attend services every so often. Most American Jews won’t even stray far from Jewish neighborhoods, even if it means a longer commute to work. Would they be willing to move from … oh, New York, to a state where the number of fellow Jews is in the very low triple digits?
Too late to edit. That being said, I agree with the OP when it comes to those just out of college, with no houses, no committed relationships. Not everybody with a newly minted college degree can end up in a major metro. They need lawyers, engineers, teachers and architects in Minot, too. The only problem with such relocation is that jobs in small towns may not pay enough to cover student loans. My own field, urban planning, is notorious for huge salary disparities between different regions, even where the cost of living is similar.
Don’t forget that your house is underwater, too – you’d have to pay to sell it.
Bootstraps!
That’s something I would have never considered. I guess I’m so used to living in areas where Jews are everywhere (well, almost everywhere :)), I take for granted that it’s not like this all over.
And I guess the same can kinda be said for any minority group that has strong cultural ties to their community. It was nothing for me to go from Atlanta (chocolate city) to Newark, NJ (chocolate city with rougher edges), to Miami (not chocolate city, but enough diversity where I didn’t stick out like a sore thumb) to Richmond (milk chocolate city :)). Even while I’ve often been the only “one” at work, I have always been able to go out on the street and see black people.
Now, I don’t particular care if I don’t see black people every single day, but it is nice being able to blend in every now and again. If I had to go to a place where I would be the only one in an entire town? That would be a foreign and unnerving experience.
I don’t know if that concern would make me not take a position offered to me, but it would make me less enthusiastic about taking it. And if I had kids, it would probably make me even less enthusiastic.
Especially if it’s a cold place. I hate the cold.
Yeah, no shit. Hence my question. As well as my corollary question of: is this where we are?
Seriously, do you think there are enough people with that cushion already who can keep it viable? If not, is it plausible that further growth can be put on hold until there are?