Brooks wrote a column in Saturday’s NYT in which he attributed a substantial part of our ongoing inequality and wage stagnation problem to the increasing lack of mobility of American workers in areas with few or low-paying jobs. He then suggested some remedies for this problem that, for me, were pretty thin gruel.
From 20,000 feet, Brooks is largely right; I have little doubt that it would be more cost-effective to find ways to pay people to leave depressed areas than to make huge public investments in these areas with a very uncertain return. That said, his column ignored some serious issues:
1. It is perfectly natural for mobility to decrease as both the population and the country age. It wasn’t terribly hard to people to leave places that their families had only inhabited for a generation or two. It is much harder when your family has been there for five or six generations. As time goes by, the US becomes more like the Old World countries that our forefathers decided to leave than the more dynamic country they arrived in a century or so ago.
2. Housing is a big problem. It is difficult to leave a place where housing is cheap to go to a new area where it is much more expensive. A large part of the “Texas Miracle” is based on the fact that housing is inexpensive due to minimal land use regulation.
3. The GOP makes the problem worse with its politically expedient nostalgia. Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump don’t exactly encourage people to up sticks when they tell us that we can bring the good old jobs back just by getting rid of the Democrats. I’m sure Brooks is aware of that, but he is a loyal GOP member, so don’t expect him to comment on it anytime soon.