Nobody's Pulling Up Stakes Anymore

Kathryn: We pivoted to a growth industry, podcasting, getting on the ground floor, but we did pivot.

Robin: I think you can name your bookstore Pivot and I’m gonna, I’m gonna name my yoga studio, pivot

Kathryn: Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I’m economist Kathryn Anne Edwards.

Robin: I am editor Robin Rauzi.

Kathryn: And on this show, we believe the US economy can be better and we talk about how to get there one problem and solution at a time.

Robin: Today on Optimist Economy, we’re gonna talk about moving and not just because both of us have moved in the last year or so, but because I think it’s really, uh, I think it’s interesting and I think, um, even more than a tax story, I like a demographic story.

Kathryn: Yes.

Robin: And, uh, you know, they often don’t pan out. People make a lot of guesses on demographic stories, but, uh, I think they’re, they’re fun. They’re always like trying to figure out what’s, what’s happening and why, looking at, who’s doing what, kinda like economics in general, I guess. I guess.

Kathryn: Demography is the study basically of births, deaths, and moves. And I, I trained at a demography institute as part of my PhD in Wisconsin. And I remember a really very famous and prominent demographer told me like, the fun thing about demography is you can’t be wrong, but you’re rarely right. Because people, they just do a lot of stuff.

So you can almost always get at something. Not clear it’s the thing you wanted to get at. That’s our goal today. To not be wrong

Robin: too much.

Kathryn: Right.

Robin: Excellent.

Kathryn: Before we get to that announcements, do we have any?

Robin: I don’t, I don’t have any announcements.

Kathryn: Great, let’s go to Retcon. I’m gonna live there for the next 20 minutes or so.

Robin: Okay.

Kathryn: We got two letters about the show that I wanted to share. The first one was from a researcher at the Institute for Race Power and the Economy at the New School in New York, and his letter pointed out something that we didn’t stress on the show, which is that the idea of like a child saving account or child development account that was pioneered by Michael Sherraden is almost like the, the kind of generic version.

Baby Bonds is, it’s worth emphasizing are a different brand, and that they are a policy that is geared more towards countering wealth inequality. So child Savings accounts when they were originally proposed, were about getting out of the cycle of poverty and offering savings vehicles in a way that our social safety net did not.

Baby bonds and the iteration that, that came from the Institute for Race Power and the economy’s, lead Darrick Hamilton, are about using savings and government policy to address gross wealth inequality that exists between black and white Americans. Rich and poor Americans, but also black and white Americans. So I put them all together as the same evolution, but

Robin: But they have sort of different ideas at their, at their heart. Okay.

Kathryn: Yeah, the other letter we got was from Michael Sherraden and himself who said that he liked the show. He appreciated our conversation and to leave you with a little bit of optimism, he said, we are working diligently to make the design of the quote unquote Trump accounts as effective as possible, including what you mentioned the most important part, auto enrollment.

Robin: Great.

Kathryn: So like teacher’s pet right here. I’m dying.

Robin: Excellent.

Kathryn: Very happy about that. So we should wrap. I don’t think the show can go up from here.

Robin: Well, I wanted to add on the, Trump account, front that I did read this story yesterday that for all of you that are concerned about whether wealthy people are gonna game the system, you’ll be happy to know that there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal on exactly how to max out this entire thing.

Uh, if you’re rich enough to put in $5,000 a year and then convert it all to a Roth, when your kid is in their twenties, that basis of the $5,000 a year will turn into over $3 million when they turn 59 and a half.

Kathryn: It read like a how-to.

Robin: Oh, it was a how-to. It was 100% a how-to and how to avoid being, you know, making sure that you do this when your, young person is at a age where, it’s their tax rate, not your tax rate that gets used you know, when the penalties will be lowest. I mean, it was…Rich people gonna rich.

Kathryn: Rich people gonna rich. That’s, that’s very true. We could put that on a t-shirt. Um, right?

Robin: Yeah. Yeah.

Kathryn: Alright. The second Retcon had to do with our AI episode where we talked about the impending job loss and what it means. You know, that show was less about AI and more about how do we deal with job loss throughout our careers. And we spoke a lot about pivoting and I think another listener pointed out, in a way that was kind of hilarious, how are you talking about career pivots between you and Robin and not bring up that you have both pivoted in the last two years?

Robin: To doing this podcast?

Kathryn: To doing this podcast. Yeah, the journey.

Robin: Yeah. Good point.

Kathryn: She was like, it was right there in front of you. things

Robin: The Wall Street Journal had a piece on pivots from Black women in finance, information, professional business services — your typical white-collar jobs that these Black women are leaving. In the anti-DEI world that we’re in now, promotions and hires for Black women in those jobs are down from 2019.

Robin: Yeah.

Kathryn: So we’re, we’re living in a world in which it is, it was already hard to be promoted as a black woman, but it is now markedly harder and they’re leaving to start their own businesses. And I think the point that we didn’t make that I, it was like right there in front of me was it’s not just job loss that makes you pivot.

Robin: Hmm.

Also job dissatisfaction, career dissatisfaction, seeing the writing on the wall and thinking, I don’t wanna be here in five years. People pivot in their career all the time and embracing that as like a salve for when job loss does occur is something that we don’t do well in our labor market or our economy or policy, but we could do well. And that starts with embracing the pivots that we have made and that others make.

Robin: Okay. Next chapter, terms and conditions.

Kathryn: I have a real small one.

Robin: Yeah.

Kathryn: A British listener wrote in to say “chuffed” — we used it correctly.

Robin: Happy, you.

Kathryn: We said “dead chuffed,” which he says is allowable, but it’s not as delightful as “I’m chuffed to bits,”

Robin: Chuffed to bits.

Kathryn: which is, which might be the most British thing I’ve ever heard. So my optimist goal for the day is to try to be chuff to bits at some point,

Robin: I think that’s good. We should all try to be chuffed to bits every day for a little bit.

Kathryn: Chuffed to bits goal — the CTB. That’s my motto.

Robin: Okay. I like it.

Kathryn: Did you look up a real one? You looked up a real one, yeah. About the economy? Sure. Okay.

Robin: I looked up spatial equilibrium. Which I came across in a paper I was looking at, which is apparently… I don’t know. It’s like, it’s like water spreading evenly across the floor. Right? It’s, it’s that all the places, have the workers they need and, the workers have found the best place for themselves.

Kathryn: I’m trying to think of the best way to phrase it. Spatial equilibrium and the study of spatial equilibriums is almost like the steady state of where people live.

Kathryn: So why do some people live in some locations and why do some locations grow and others not? And it’s looking at like the whole board, like I wanna understand on net why everyone lives where they do. the contrasting area of research is why people decide to move or not move. So one way of thinking about Americans packing up and moving is thinking about this decision on a personal level.

The other way to think about the economics of moving is seeing the whole board — the location of where everyone lives and why they’re in those locations. It’s a very subtle difference on the outset, but the deeper you go, it’s very different questions — like, how much does moving cost?

Robin: What attracts you there?

Kathryn: Yeah, versus amenities in a location relative to others. It just leads you down a very different line of thinking — this idea of individual optimization versus the spatial equilibrium.

Robin: All right, we’ll be right back in a second. For the big Pilcrow.

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Robin: Can I give a little note here at the top about why I wanted to do this?

Kathryn: Yes.

Robin: It had to do with something that a demographer told me — gosh, it’s gotta be 10, 15 years ago now — about what he called “the great settling in.”

And that Americans, despite the myth that Americans are so mobile, have in fact been moving less and less for, at that point, decades. So just to set a little context here: in 2024, according to the American Community Survey, only 11.8% of people moved at all, and that was a 76-year low. Only 2.1% moved to a new state. Most people moved within their state or even within their community.

Anyway, we wanted to talk about why that is and is it a problem? There are certainly swaths of economists who think it’s a problem — Kathryn is waving. So, do you think it’s a problem? And if so, why is it a problem if Americans are moving less?

Kathryn: Mm. Okay. Is it a problem? I think it is the symptom of a problem, but not necessarily a problem in and of itself, it’s worth noting that like America is special in so many ways. We have such an awesome, crazy country, but moving across the country, it, it’s a very American thing.

Like we have periods in our history where you’ll just see mass migration to other states. You can think of the California Gold Rush, the Homestead Acts and the settlement of the West, the Great Migration from South to North of Black Americans through the two waves of the Great Migration that ended around 1970.

I mean, we, we are people that like pack up and go, which is special there. Lots of countries aren’t like this.

Robin: But are we people who pack up and go? I mean, I think that’s the fundamental question here.

Kathryn: So we’re still people that pack up and go, but the fact that we’re moving less would not be a problem.

Uh, let me answer it this way. Economists think that the three biggest components of why someone moves would be preferences, economic opportunity, and the net of cost. So you want to move, for some reason, you have economic incentives to move for some reason. And, the cost isn’t too high relative to what you think you’d gain.

So the preference is one. I mean, shoot your shot. If people don’t wanna move as much as they used to, it’s not clear. We should care

Robin: Right. If they’re happy being settled in wherever they are.

Kathryn: Yeah, if you’re happy and you like where you are, there might be something to gain from moving to another city, but who cares? You if you’re happy. This is why we have an economy is for you to live your best life and not for like worker bots to be assigned to their most productive place.

But moving for economic opportunity has fallen a ton, and that is a problem. The number one reason that people move is to take a new job. And the decline in moves that we’ve seen are really reflecting the decline in job opportunities writ large, that the US labor market, not just these past couple of years, but slowly since probably around 1990, we’ve had fewer and fewer job opportunities within our own life.

And the lack of mobility in the labor market hurts wages it hurts growth, it hurts innovation. It hurts development. It hurts our incomes. And not moving as like, just a reflecting back out that the labor market is not as mobile as it used to be. Uh, not mobile, as in you move to another city, but mobile as in you take another job.

Robin: Right, right. You just said the number one reason people move is to take a new job. What I was reading is the number one reason people move is actually to change houses.

Kathryn: Oh yeah, well

Robin: you mean like number one reason for people to move outta state?

Kathryn: Like a big outta state move is, is highly associated with job opportunity, often complemented by preferences, and cost

Robin: Right. Looking for a better job in a lower cost market, to buy a house.

Kathryn: Or you want to go back home and you find a job there that works. The job, the income — that’s the key component. You’re looking for income in that location. We don’t really move for benefits. We don’t really move because food stamps are more generous in one state. We move for income and job markets.

Robin: Yeah, there was an interesting Pew survey from 2008 called something like “Why do people stay or go?” And basically the gist was: stayers largely stay for family and movers largely move for jobs. Economists might be a little late to the game in studying migration, but they have, for a long time, studied labor markets within the US and differences between them. You can think of any job — and I mean any job — in the US and it will pay a different amount in different locations.

Robin: Right.

Kathryn: So, so it is a kind of like fundamental aspect of our labor market that the same job, same occupation, same industry, even the same employer could pay a different amount in different places.

So the, question that economists have long had is, if you could make more money in the same job somewhere else, why doesn’t everyone just go?

So this gets back to the spatial equilibrium of if you were to just tell someone in this like, very simplified world, I have a hundred people and a hundred jobs, and all a hundred jobs pay differently, the spatial equilibrium would be everyone makes the same amount.

Robin: Hmm

Kathryn: Right, because if a job offered more in one location, people would move there. but we don’t see that.

So the spatial equilibrium we have is much more complex of like amenities, preferences, cost families because people don’t move to take advantage of economic opportunity, even though I could move to a place that pays more money for the job that I do now.

Robin: Right. You know, I mean, in the course of just, thinking about this idea and doing a little bit of reading, I I kinda went back and forth between, we need more people to move, it’s fine that people don’t move. um, but one of the things that I, came across, which I had never thought about, was people being willing to do exactly what you’re talking about, moving from one spot to another, that it actually closes the gap between rich regions and poor regions and that this was like kind of a longstanding, um, understood macro and macroeconomic trend.

Is that exactly what you were just saying? If people are willing to leave your town to go get a job across the state line that’ll pay them more, eventually you’re gonna have to raise wages to keep people there.

Kathryn: Well, it, it’s complicated, Kind of going back to your first question, like, is it good that people move? in some level, we don’t know because we don’t randomly assign people to move.

Like, it’s not like I’ll take 10,000 people and be like, all right you guys, here you go. I’m mo I’m throwing you across the US and we’re gonna see how you do. I mean, there’s such high selection in who moves in that it’s not random. So we don’t know how beneficial moving is to people because the people who move already had some inclination and means to go anyway. Um,

Robin: To your point, though, there are also good moves and bad moves. We count them all somewhat equally. I mean, out-of-state moves and moves for jobs specifically are different, but there are also bad reasons to move — divorces, evictions, job loss — versus moving because you got a job.

Kathryn: I’m thinking of moves as really being like moving outside of your labor market, which is often outside of states. But like you, you’re in one labor market, you go to another labor market, that can often extend over state lines. So moving from like, I moved from one part of town to another part of town, or I moved from this apartment to this apartment, that part…

Robin: …that doesn’t really count for you.

Kathryn: It doesn’t matter as much as moving to take advantage of economic opportunities or moving as a function of like your economic preferences moving you to another labor market. We tend to think about it as within and without your labor

market. So economists have looked at this for a while because they want to understand how moving changes the spatial equilibrium after, say, a plant closes — a shock to a labor market or a city. The thought is that people moving from that city and going somewhere else helps people who move ‘cause they’re going to a place with higher wages. And then it helps people who stay behind because they’re like alleviating some of the joblessness from the city because it’s basically being exported somewhere else.

Robin: Right.

Kathryn: So all of these things that economists look at, people moving to take a new job, people moving, maybe it’s just ‘cause of preferences.

People moving across labor markets because of a shock. All of them are declining. And so some of it could be, I’m happy where I am, but given that this is a way to deal with an economic storm, it’s not good that people aren’t utilizing it. That that part is concerning.

This is almost like a feedback loop now: people aren’t moving to better labor markets, which makes certain labor markets a lot worse, because we don’t have this outside option that people take advantage of to keep things moving.

Let’s go back to our favorite example of Janesville. Janesville loses one of the highest paying largest employers for workers without a college degree in the city. It, it then shuts down another place of employment, which was a supplier to the General Motors factory.

You have all these people who have lost jobs, in one version of the world, some of them leave, some of them stay and find new jobs immediately, or take a long time to find new jobs after, say, a period of retraining. But hopefully not too many drop outta the labor force.

What we have seen over the past. I mean, it’s hard to say when this started. It’s, what we have seen recently, I can say that vaguely enough, is that rather than packing up and shipping out, you’re seeing just a lot of people leave the labor force and they’ll just stop work. And they won’t work again. They’ll try to get on disability, they’ll try to double up and live with family.

Or they’ll just wait it out until they get Social Security with a little bit of their savings. But they won’t go back. And that’s horrible.

Robin: Sorry, I didn’t mean, to laugh. I just didn’t see that coming, that you were going say that.. When you were gonna say that.

Kathryn: It’s horrible. Because it, I know I can sound like a cruel, heartless economist and be like, let’s get them workers and jobs. Go!

Robin: No, but it’s not, it’s not, great for anybody to not have that, option jobs are good for people, frankly.

Kathryn: Yeah, jobs are good for people. Income is good for people. Wages are good for people. We can do a little bit of scene-setting, because no doubt everybody is thinking — but afraid to say in front of me because I’m so sensitive — isn’t this because of housing?

Robin: There’s an assertion, including in a book, recently released that that’s what’s keeping people stuck in place is the, is the high cost of housing and so nobody can afford to move.

Kathryn: Yes, the evidence there is really weak. I think it’s true — this is like being a demographer, it’s definitely true — there are people who don’t move because housing is too expensive, or they’re locked into expensive housing where they are.

But people have been looking for that in kind of broader studies of economic mobility. And they haven’t really seen it.

In part because homeowners, 50 years ago homeowners moved at like a fourth of the rate of renters from various demographics. So it, if 5% of homeowners move, 10 to 20% of renters will move.

When you close your eyes and you think of the modal cross-state mover in the US, that person is in their 20s….

Robin: When I think of the, when I think of the modal cross state mover…

Kathryn: Which you often do. I often do, I think about them often of the modal cross state mover, but it’s, it’s like they’re under 35, they’re single and they rent and they pack up and go. Because all of those things, having a home, having a partner, um, having kids, all of that makes it harder to move. And that’s always been the case. It’s not like the affordability issues of the past two to five years are freezing American movement.

The decline in American movement is almost as old as I am, if not older. And the patterns of young single renters being the majority of moves is also older than I am. I mean you, you just, young people have a lot higher tolerance for things like they live in Yeah, they double up, they have roommates, they have strategies for making a city affordable. So if you look at the most unaffordable cities in the US, they are still seeing the highest rates of young people moving there. It’s New York, Houston, Atlanta, and then Chicago to some degree.

Robin: Even in San Francisco, like the most expensive place, in California, I think has seen a, a rebound of young people moving there.

Kathryn: When we say why are people moving across labor markets less, we are in some ways asking why young people are moving less. Because older people, homeowners, married people, people who are, you know, been at a good job for five years, they just, they move less frequently,

Robin: Yeah. As, and which should be expected, right.

Kathryn: Which should be expected. And then there’s also this: we have had a wild ride through housing over this century. Given the housing bubble, its crash, the number of people who were foreclosed, who were in negative equity on their homes, and then the era of almost no interest rates that people took advantage of — and this recent spike of both high interest rates and high home prices, like the worst of all worlds.

But through that variation, people have looked to see how much house lock contributes to unemployment, or how much house lock prevents people from moving. Or conversely, how much things like a housing collapse would people would take advantage of to move and to buy the cheaper home. And it’s not like they just really don’t find a lot of strong evidence.

Robin: So just to, just to make sure I understand what you’re saying, housing prices have gone up and down and, don’t seem to be causing either a, an increase in moving or a decrease in moving. That the moving is on its own trajectory.

Kathryn: Yes. The way I think about it is: if people were just moving for housing, you’d have a lot of people who moved to Nevada in 2009, which was one of the epicenters of the home-price collapse. There were houses for sale for half of what they were worth, but people didn’t take advantage of that because people don’t move solely for housing.

It’s like a joint decision where they have to find the economic possibility and then they look for housing. And so I think you, you can think of this as almost like an ordered problem where part one problem people aren’t getting as many job opportunities writ large in the US including some across labor markets.

And then the second problem would be, even if they did, it could be that housing is too expensive. But the those like, because housing is too expensive is a relative term. ‘cause you’re talking about a group of people that tend to have much lower housing preferences, uh, as opposed to homeowners.

Robin: Right. Okay.

Kathryn: You know, like it, just because there’s cheap living somewhere in the US does not mean that people move there.

Robin: Well, the other thing that’s funny to me is it would seem like it’s easier to search for a job in a remote location now than any time in the past. Right. I mean, maybe that’s good. Maybe that’s bad. Maybe it’s like, well I’ve, I’ve looked at the opportunities that are available to me in Tulsa and it’s not worth going.

Kathryn: Information matters — how much do you know about a city? There’s been some research into this. One of the papers found that we might have too much information, that part of moving across labor markets involves a degree of experimentation. Maybe like, almost like ignorance is bliss. Like, I think, I think of my brother graduating college, packing up his car, driving to LA,

Robin: Yeah. Yeah. And people do it. They do it all the time.

Kathryn: But there’s some degree to which that happens less because people, you know, they try to get a job before, or they, do a lot of research on housing and they just decide it’s not worth it.

Like, it’s almost like the amount of information that you can access about another location can scare you off. And what that probably means is that a lot of people moved and had catastrophic consequences and had to move back home. And we don’t see that. But we, you, the idea that you just, you pack up and go, happens less, I, um.

I mean, I think this is a natural place to talk about our first moves.

I’m from Texas. I went to UT Austin, and after I graduated, I spent a year living and working abroad. And I came home unemployed in the summer of 2008.

Not good timing. Bad, very bad. And I had no way of knowing — I’m just like, oh, I have a college degree, I’ll be fine.

I applied for 50 jobs and I got one callback. From a think tank in DC that did an interview over the phone. And then over the phone, they offered me a job. I started the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend, and I flew — well, that’s not true. I couldn’t afford a ticket to DC. I flew to Baltimore on a one-way ticket from Houston with a suitcase. It wasn’t even a large suitcase — it was a sad little suitcase that had in total three days of professional clothing. I had something to wear Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And I was praying that we had casual Friday.

Robin: I also graduated into a recession, so I had a really low-paying hourly reporting job. And then I actually did an internship after that at the LA Times. And then I went to graduate school in Ohio. And I could not get back to LA fast enough. I applied for a job at the LA Times at peak circulation — just before the internet broke everything about the news media. And they paid for me to move. They sent a moving truck to my parents’ house, put me up in a studio apartment until I found a place to rent. Nobody gets to move like that anymore.

Kathryn: Oh my God, Robin.

Robin: I mean, you know, it was a long time ago.

Kathryn: Oh my God, that first job somewhere else. I was living with a cousin. I didn’t have a place of my own for almost three months, which is kind of crazy because she was very pregnant and I’m basically in the baby’s room. They were so kind to put me up, and I don’t know how I would’ve been able to move if they hadn’t — if I didn’t have cousins there, if I hadn’t gotten the job over the phone.

Robin: Moving is hard. When you’re young it’s an adventure, but — you and I have both moved in the last year. You moved under a year ago. I moved just over a year ago.

Kathryn: It’s pricey,

Robin: It’s expensive. It’s, and we weren’t even changing jobs. I can understand why like the speculative move to a new place for a, for a new career is just beyond people’s reach right now.

Kathryn: Or you just get to a certain age and comfort level and you’re like, I’m fine. This is spatial equilibrium — I know I could make more money there, but I don’t wanna go there. I’m happy here. Who wants to make new friends at 40? I can tell you it’s not easy.

Robin: Yeah.

Kathryn: You know, and leaving people behind, leaving networks behind — it all has a cost. I think what I find troubling about moving is that the decline in moving aligns so well with the decline of worker power in our labor market.

Robin: Mm.

Kathryn: The problem there, going back to spatial equilibrium, is that we are starting to see this lack of mobility, almost like compound across cities where cities that have the high wage markets, that have lots of job opportunities become more and more expensive Mm-hmm. to low wage cities. And that this, this lack of movement essentially is skewing our spatial equilibrium.

Where it should be that people are moving back and forth — one in search of high wages, one in search of lower cost of living — you’re starting to see cities really, really, really pull away from each other.

And that’s not just housing, that’s also labor market policy. You know, since the federal government stopped caring about the minimum wage or labor law enforcement, that’s now all set on a local level, which like, great if you live in one of those places, bad if you don’t.

Like the acceleration of wage growth in a place like Seattle would both make it harder to move to a place like Seattle and less appealing for someone from Seattle to move to say, Akron.

Robin: Mm-hmm.

Kathryn: And like maybe they’re from Akron and they wanna move back. But like the diff like the, just like, the like,

Robin: Pay cut they’re gonna take to do it?

Kathryn: Yeah. And the, the pay cut and the cost of living cut is, this is too much. But I mean it’s definitely an argument for why remote work could help a lot of places because if you didn’t have to give up as much salary but could move other places, people would move.

I would say case in point, you know, my husband and I moved to Houston, which is by no means a struggling city. but we moved here because we kept our jobs. We were able to pick out where we could go, which is why despite having kids and a mortgage, and being married, we were able to move labor markets because we, we kept our employer, um, not employer in my case, but

Robin: Yeah. Yeah. No, I, we did this, I mean, we did the same thing in Spokane. I could work remote and I did for two and a half years.

Kathryn: Working remotely — I think we all went through it on some level. Even if you didn’t have a remote job, you knew that people were working remote. And then employers called it back, and I got asked by so many journalists: why are people going back to work?

Like, what is the reason? And I was like, yeah, workers have less power and employers gave an amenity away for free that workers really valued that they could translate into so many aspects of their lives of easier commute, better house, lower cost of living.

I mean, it was a massive amount of power that employers gave to workers in a crisis and almost as soon as they could clawed it back with all the intensity of like, we have to be there five days a week because of culture of like, sure, sure.

But employers rarely give away something for free. And I think that working remotely is a great example of like how people had mobility and it was reduced. And this worsens our prospects for things like moving,

Robin: I was sort of surprised how little of that actually happened — again, it’s a little bit of how journalism isn’t always reflective of reality. There were so many stories about remote working and people moving to someplace lower cost. But most remote work really now is people working from home two or three days a week, still working for a local employer. There aren’t a lot of people who’ve done these formal “we give you $10,000 to move” programs — even the famous one in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which draws remote workers to a new city with the idea that they’ll bring income into the city and maybe start new businesses. I don’t know, it’s some very small number of people.

Kathryn: But what’s funny is that those programs have existed for very low income people. Um, Kentucky had a program, RAP relocation assistance program where if you got a job somewhere and you were on welfare, they would pay you to move. It was like a thousand bucks.

Robin: That’s, sounds kind of nice, but also kinda like, get your lazy ass out of here.

Kathryn: Yeah. You could either view it as kind or unkind. Unkind: you’re poor and on welfare and we want to pay for you to leave. Kind: if you get a job that you can’t take, isn’t that against the whole idea of getting people off welfare? And they found that people who took advantage of it did have higher earnings in the long run. I think there’s going to be a lot more salience for relocation assistance in the future. I’ve thought for a long time that if you’re on unemployment insurance, you should be able to take it as a one-time payout and you can move. I mean, in the future you might see policies where you basically get a cash payout to go somewhere else. And that would be very good for the economy and for that person, to be able to leave a bad labor market. Helping people start a new life is good.

Robin: Yeah. You know, I think that’s one of the reasons I first started thinking about moving again — that conversation about unemployment insurance. And I did find that there was a bill proposed in 2019, which of course disappeared in the great wash of the pandemic, but it was a $2,000 credit for people who had suffered job loss to relocate to a place to get another job.

Kathryn: They might not thrive in that life. It’s not a guarantee that they’ll have a better job and better everything, but they could do better.

I guess the other aspect of optimism here — so I said at the beginning, it’s preferences, it’s economic opportunity and income, and then it’s cost. Policy can’t do anything about preferences, but it can do a lot directly about cost.

And I think the optimism for me is knowing how much of this is about the labor market and how making the labor market better for somebody else does help you.

Robin: Mm-hmm.

Kathryn: Your labor market — which is dynamic and complex and exists in every locality — is better off when there aren’t people in it who don’t have sick days, when there aren’t people who could be making $7.25 an hour.

That helps you. And I think we see so much of policy as what flows through me, but the broader slowdown in labor mobility is not fixed through just targeting you.

We are so interconnected, and the labor market is where that’s most obvious. So that, to me, is optimistic. I mean, even at its height, non-competes — the estimates vary, but it was like 15% of workers, and yet it is pointed to as a major chokehold on job-to-job mobility.

Not because 100% of people had non-competes, but because maybe 15% did. So what does that say about a policy targeted toward mobility in one part of our labor market — that it could have massive dividends for you?

Robin: If you could increase things 15% that you could really move a needle.

Kathryn: You can move the needle. And the labor market — sometimes it’s easy to move the needle in both directions, and we should be doing it more on workers’ behalf. We haven’t done it so much lately. But that means we could. It’s hard to quantify the benefits of these kinds of small improvements to our labor market, but people would move more, and that would help. I’m, again, a capitalist at heart, but also a labor economist at heart. I do think the labor market is everything, and we can make it a lot better. And it would help with things like this.

Robin: All right, I, well, you reached an optimistic note. I think we should stop there.

Kathryn: Okay. And we will actually stop.

Robin: We’re, we’re gonna take a quick break and we’ll be right back with executive orders and spiritual sponsors.

And we’re back. Kathryn, it’s time for executive orders.

Kathryn: I’m like looking at our show notes and I feel like mine’s really long.

Robin: Your executive order?

Kathryn: Yeah. Bar bet. Can Kathryn make her executive order less than 10 minutes long? We’ll see fam, I’m not gonna go into how much I outlined. I will just say that

My executive order is that we need to do through one of the streaming platforms. Um, obviously it needs a box office release, but I would like to do a four part series on Frances Perkins. And every episode is a movie that’s a different part of her life. I envision she’s played by four different actresses starting from when she’s like a young social worker on the street to like, she’s retired and she’s at Cornell.

I’ve got people in mind, I’ve got plots in mind, I’ve got storylines. I have like pivotal moments. I definitely have the trailer for the first one, live and rent free up here. And thank you production for this question. Frances Perkins was the first female cabinet member. She was the labor secretary under FDR.

She oversaw the creation and implementation of the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act — three broad and vitally important pieces of social legislation that were the heart of the New Deal. So she is the New

Robin: Right, and it —

Kathryn: And she took the New Deal to FDR. It wasn’t like, “Hey, Franny, can you do this?” She was like, “Yo, Frank, I’m not taking this job unless I get to do all of this.” She has lots of cool moments in her life. I think this is the part I just want to see on film. I’m gonna keep it to a tight 20, don’t worry. Like, she’s

getting lunch with a friend when the Triangle Shirtwaist fire happens and she runs to the scene of the fire. She watches it from the street — she’s just not that far away when it happens. And then she becomes head of the Industrial Safety Committee in New York, inspired by that moment, because she just doesn’t think it should happen again.

Robin: I’m just, I’m just saying we don’t need to, like, I don’t work at Netflix. You’re not pitching me this right now.

Kathryn: Or, hold on. How about this: when he gets elected to a fourth term — it’s like ‘44 — she’s passed everything, but the war has stymied her efforts. She’s been 12 years there and she’s like, “Franklin, I am resigning. You need to pick somebody else.”

And on inauguration day, she’s like, okay, this would be the moment to say in a press release, who you was going to replace me? I would like to quit now. And he says, you can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t do it without you and you can’t leave. And then they both sob while holding hands in the Oval Office. And he dies a few months later. Right?

Like do, have you seen that? I mean, like, how many people want an Oscar out there? Ladies? Like, let’s make this happen. I mean, there’s an Oscar worthy moment in every one of the chapters I put out. Okay? So I talked for a long time, God dammit, Kathryn. I just get so excited.

Robin: All right. So my executive order is that I have am empowered with the ability to generate the storyline. A lot of production notes, casting decision authority in veto for,

what? What’s again, your executive order is Give me a movie studio.

Kathryn: Give me my executive orders that I need to be in charge of some like labor oriented movie studio. Uh, this is another one of my projects.

Robin: Okay.

Kathryn: What is your executive order?

Robin: My executive order is stop telling me how early you get up in the morning. All of you. I don’t care how early you get up in the morning. I need sleep. I don’t wanna be sleep shamed. Uh, I have one more, which is from Marco in Seattle. Marco says election day should be a federal holiday, which I think we can all just agree, but he also says it should be on Friday so that everyone has the whole weekend to party with the results or just get over it by Monday. Which I was like, good reasoning. I like it.

Kathryn: I love it. I love it.

Robin: Okay. Spiritual sponsors.

Kathryn: My spiritual sponsor is the motto of the National Consumers League, back in their heyday of being at the frontier of social work and social legislation in the us which was, uh, investigate, agitate, legislate.

Robin: Put that on a T-shirt.

Kathryn: Put that on a T-shirt.

Robin: My spiritual sponsor this week is the Angel City Football Club, which is currently topping the rankings of the National Women’s Soccer League — at least right now — and right behind us, the Houston Dash. I don’t know if that will still be the case by the time this airs, but it’s been a long four years of not great results for this team. So enjoying these early weeks of the season.

Kathryn: Y’all, Robin, add another 10 — and that’s where Houston is. But if this is the final episode of Optimist Economy, it is because Angel City and the Dash are one and two in the rankings and they play each other on Friday. So honestly, Robin —

It’s been great. I feel like we gave people optimism and it falls apart over a petty rivalry. That’s okay. But this has been great.

Robin: OK

Kathryn: Credits. Is it mine first?

Robin: I rewrite the credits every week so that just to keep you on your toes. Have you noticed that?

Kathryn: I did notice that — look at the end of episode two, where I’m like, “The podcast Economy Optimist is edited by LA and Andy Sophie.” Okay.

The Optimist Economy Podcast is edited by Sofi LaLonde. Andy Robinson edits all of our videos, which you can find on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. We’re also on Substack, where even our free subscribers can post to our chat and where fellow optimists share news articles and thoughts.

Robin: This podcast is a production of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is Optimist Economy, and it is still entirely supported by listeners like you. At optimisteconomy.com you can support the show. And ladies, I want you to know that we also have a women’s T-shirt for sale — just for you.

Thanks, Andy. Thanks, Sofi.