People Are Slowly Giving Up on America — And It’s Getting Terrifying to Ignore

In 2024 about 11% of Americans changed their address, the lowest rate recorded since the census started tracking it in 1947. In the 1960s it was 20%. In the 19th century roughly one in three Americans moved every single year. The moving truck was this country's release valve, and it has been closing for five decades. That number on its own is a curiosity. It becomes something else when you notice every other measure of American restlessness fell at the same time. Interstate migration dropped from 3.3% in 1990 to around 1.5%. Among 20-to-24-year-olds, the share moving in a year fell to 19% from 29% two decades earlier. The share of Americans starting businesses fell by half between 1985 and 2014. And Gallup now finds 31% of US workers engaged, a ten-year low, with 17% actively disengaged. The detail that explains the whole thing: Americans are job-hunting at the highest rate since 2015 while satisfaction with their current employer sits at a record low. People aren't content and they aren't leaving. They're staying in place while emotionally relocating somewhere else. This video explains why none of that is laziness. Every one of those behaviours used to pay, and the payoff has been shrinking for forty years while the cost has been rising. We break down wage convergence, housing costs exceeding wage premiums, dual-earner households, and why economists call the missing ingredient dynamism. We also cover the counterargument, including the fact that the alarming 2026 labour force participation drop turned out to be mostly a statistical rebenchmarking rather than people quitting the workforce. Sources include the US Census Bureau, the Richmond Fed, the St. Louis Fed, Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026, and Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. How many times have you moved in your life? Drop the number below. #Economy #USEconomy #Economics #LaborMarket #Housing The opening three sentences are the whole pitch above the fold, and the 1-in-3 historical figure is what earns the expand click — it reframes the present number as a collapse rather than a statistic.