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Full Episode
This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hannah Rosen. I have moved many times in my life, across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now, and I didn't think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness. Until I read Yoni Applebaum's new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic.
The book is called Stuck, How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. In it, Applebaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American and also quintessentially hopeful about moving.
In the 19th century, moving day was like a thing, a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times when everybody would just up and move. To quote Applebaum, "...nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day." But moving isn't happening so much anymore.
Applebaum writes, every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to. So what happens to a country geographically, culturally, politically, in some ways psychologically, when mobility starts to stall? Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences?
The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities instead of being stuck where they happen to be born is America's most profound contribution to the world. The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets. It is a lethal threat to the entire American project.
Okay, let's start with the second half. Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project?
It is the thing that defines the American project because it was the first thing that anyone who got a year from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw.
But they were amazed at how often Americans moved, and they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves, want something better for their children, and to move someplace else in pursuit of it.
And you're not just describing something geographic. You're describing something psychological, right?
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