How can you keep on moving?

Imagine an economy where the unemployment rate is low generally, but where a large number of the job openings restrict what kind of people can apply—No Catholics, or No Blondes, or No Homosexuals. As a consequence, the unemployment rate is disproportionately high amongst Catholics, blondes, and homosexuals. Imagine then, in this made-up world, that an economist comes along with a solution: if the unemployed people don’t match the jobs available, well, then the unemployed people could just as easily change to match the jobs. You can renounce your Catholicism; you can dye your hair brunette; you can undergo gay-conversion therapy or just stay in the closet. If Catholics and blondes and homosexuals want to be employed, they should give up on those features that are making them unemployable.

We would all, I hope, recoil from such a suggestion, and, to their great credit, no real-life modern economist would ever make one quite like it. One should not be required to quitclaim one’s identity in order to find a job—indeed, the equality of all in the eyes of the market is one of the most attractive features of purely-conceived free-market liberalism. Yet, with a subtle twist, this very same suggestion is a commonplace amongst left and right-leaning economists alike. The twist? Rather than identity based on religion, or body features, or sexuality, substitute identity based on geography.

Yuma, Arizona, has a 22.5% unemployment rate. In Midland, Texas, the rate is 2.7%.¹ The two cities are less than a day’s drive apart. To the rational economist, this is a no-brainer: labor ought to flow ought of depression-stricken Yuma into petro-boom Midland until the two cities’ unemployment rates come into a closer equilibrium. This is why economic orthodoxy over the past fifty years has stressed the importance of policy which promotes labor mobility. Easy-to-cross borders and fluid housing markets are at least theoretically better for both employee and employer alike, for they enable surplus labor to migrate to places where labor is scarce.

But there is something callous—and, I might add, illiberal—about coldly commanding “get up and move” to the person who has spent decades building a life in a place which has been left behind by the unpredictable stagger of the free market. Place-identity is not as closely-held or as immutable as certain other kinds of identity, like religion or sexuality. It is not, however, as purely abstractable as the economists might like.

We should not idolize stability and settledness. In fact, many people prefer to move around and live geographically unhitched. Places, however, in their full purpose as communities, are not just temporary receptacles for workers to sleep at night. They emerge through the kind of long-term commitment, coupled with financial and emotional investment, which stirs together the identity of the people who inhabit a place and the place itself. The inhabitants thus become attached to the place in through a bond which is not merely woven of sentimentality. We would raise a justified cry against the economist who told the gay job-seeker to turn straight. But would we do the same against the economist who told the Arizonan job-seeker to turn Texan?