“Doesn’t anyone stay in one place any more?” So sang Carole King back in 1971, and that lament
still resonates with people troubled by the ever-more transient nature of American life. But here’s the
weird thing, says Claude S. Fischer: US society is not becoming more transient. When King sang
those words, “Americans had been moving around less and less for generations”, and that trend has
only accelerated. Census surveys show that in the 1950s – a time people look back on as an era of
stable communities – about 20% of Americans moved house from one year to the next. That figure
has steadily dropped, and is now just 11%. The proportion of people migrating across state lines has
also fallen substantially since the 1950s. What explains today’s “great settling down”? It’s mostly
because advances in transportation and communication have made moving less necessary, as has the
“increasing physical and economic security of US life”. Those advances have also made it easier for
people to ignore neighbours in favour of friends outside their area: they can gossip by Skype with
someone “on the other side of the globe, rather than chat over the fence”. Hence, perhaps, why
Americans insist on believing, against the evidence, that they live in an ever-more transient society.
