America Petrified

Route 66, the most famous road of the United States, the ‘Mother Road’ of “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck’s novel — supposed to have lead Tom Joad and his family, hit by the Great Depression, from Oklahoma to Californian prosperity — is only ever traveled by tourists now. Americans, renowned for their ability to uproot themselves in continual pursuit of a better life, seem to have come to a standstill. They have become petrified.

Someone who lost their job in New York or Detroit no longer looks for one — no longer wants to look for one? — in San Francisco or Chicago. The latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that in 2010, interstate migratory movements had not been so low since 1947, when the statistical records began. The recession? “When times get really hard it gets really hard for people to up and move,” Kenneth Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, recently explained in The New York Times.

The economic difficulties of the United States do not explain everything, far from it. The waning of internal migrations has been continuous since the 1980s, as was revealed by a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, published in August 2011. The image of the responsive American as opposed to the sedentary European has been seriously compromised.

Across the Atlantic, where the economic model of the Old Continent is rarely cited as an example, this observation is not only upsetting, it is also a dramatic one: the population’s lack of fluidity only serves to increase the unemployment rate — today over 8 percent. The paralysis of households is actually perfectly correlated to the rise of long-term unemployment, notes Evariste Lefeuvre, an economist at Natixis, in New York. The first world economy no longer seems to be able to absorb, faster than anywhere else, the shocks in the labor market. And away drifts the notion of the superiority of capitalism based on flexibility and resourcefulness, over an excessively generous social system leading to welfare dependency.

What happened? Has America become weary? Mark Perry, professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, sees here one of the perverse consequences of the housing crisis. The dream of everyone owning their own home has led Americans into debt, sometimes beyond what is reasonable, in order to buy a house. Today, they are unable to move as long as their mortgages are not repaid: they would have to sell their house at a discount, because of the price drop, and only if they could find a potential buyer. Even in Manhattan, estate agents are complaining about a crash in property sales.

What about the young people? They have no financial or family constraints, are able to get their driver’s license before they are allowed to vote, yet the “kids” still remain tied up to their birthplace and its surroundings. Have young people forsaken their dreams of conquest, fortune and wide open spaces? American writers Todd and Victoria Buchholz think so, believing that a “Go-Nowhere Generation” is being born. They described this sociological evolution in a column published in the New York Times on March 10. Hit by a sort of languor, young people, they explain, no longer even bother trying to get their driver’s license or buy a car, which has become, truly unaffordable. The recession has rendered them defeatist and apathetic to the point that they bank on a stroke of luck to succeed in life. Nothing else.

The albums of Bruce Springsteen, a prolific rocker and incarnation of blue-collar America, sum up this shift themselves. In the 1970s, he was releasing “Born to Run.” In 1995, the Boss released “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Today, he brings out “Wrecking Ball.”

David Card, an immigration specialist from the University of California-Berkeley, gives a diagnosis more disconcerting still. To him, the inertia of young people would be linked to the lack of financial assistance given to those who find themselves without a job. He reminds us that once the unemployment benefits have run out, a young person without dependent children does not receive any benefits. Left destitute, young adults would then be forced to go back and live with their parents. “We are turning into Italians!” warns Card. But without the “mamma”…