American Migration Reaches Record Low

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

The share of Americans who move their homes in a year has reached a record low, the Census Bureau reported today.

Dollars to doughnuts.

From spring 2010 to spring 2011, just 11.6 percent of the people moved residences, the lowest rate since the government began keeping track of migration in 1948. The difference between that rate and the 2009 rate of 12.5 percent was not statistically significant, but it was a far cry from its heights in the mid-20th century. From 1951-52, for example, 20.3 percent of Americans moved.

The record low moving rate was primarily driven by a drop in the share of people moving from one home to another within the same county.

Many economists are much more concerned, however, by the low share of Americans who are moving between counties and between states. Declines in this type of migration have been partly blamed for continued high levels of unemployment: stuck in underwater homes they cannot sell, many unemployed workers are unable to move to areas where there are more job opportunities.

Among the people who moved within the same county, 18.6 percent did so for job-related reasons; among those who moved between counties, 35.8 percent followed job opportunities.

Of the 6.7 million people who moved between states, the most common migrations were:

Many Americans have stayed put for their whole lives, regardless of economic ups and downs. As of 2010, 59 percent of Americans lived in the state where they were born. The state with the highest percentage of residents who were born there is Louisiana, at 78.8 percent, followed by Michigan (76.6 percent), Ohio (75.1 percent) and Pennsylvania (74 percent).

Nevada, by contrast, had the most outsiders, with less than a quarter (24.3 percent) of its residents born in the Silver State.

Here’s a map, provided by the Census Bureau, showing states by their share of native-born residents:

Lessons From the Financial Crisis

BOSTON — What did the financial crisis teach central bankers?

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Tuesday that the great lesson was the need to juggle two jobs: the traditional work of managing the pace of inflation and the forgotten job of maintaining financial stability.

Mr. Bernanke’s speech largely amounted to a defense and explanation of the Fed’s conduct during the crisis. The lessons he described included the propriety of the Fed’s existing approach to monetary policy and the necessity of its various innovations, including lending dollars to other countries.

But the Fed chairman acknowledged, as he has before, that the Fed and other central banks had neglected the work of financial supervision.

“The crisis has forcefully reminded us that the responsibility of central banks to protect financial stability is at least as important as the responsibility to use monetary policy effectively,” Mr. Bernanke said at an annual policy conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

One of the great questions left by the housing crash is whether the Fed could have popped the bubble at an earlier stage, limiting the damage. Mr. Bernanke said Tuesday that the Fed does have a responsibility to address emerging problems, something that central bankers long described as impossible or inappropriate.

Mr. Bernanke said, however, that he agreed with “an evolving consensus” that this work required different tools than those for monetary policy.

“In my view, the issue is not whether central bankers should ignore possible financial imbalances — they should not — but, rather, what ‘the right tool for the job’ is to respond to such imbalances,” he said.

The Fed, by adjusting interest rates, can deflate the economy, but there is no obvious mechanism for focusing the impact on a specific asset class, like housing.

Instead, Mr. Bernanke said that the tools of financial regulation were the best means for maintaining financial stability, through limits and requirements on the ways financial institutions lend and borrow.

Mr. Bernanke said that the crisis had tested what he described as the consensus model of monetary policy but that in his view it had emerged largely unscathed.

He described this model as “flexible inflation targeting,” meaning that the Fed seeks to maintain a steady rate of increase in prices and wages of about 2 percent a year, with a willingness to make short-term adjustments to encourage employment growth, and an emphasis on communication and transparency.

He closed with a reminder that it would take some time to fully understand the lessons of the crisis. Perhaps he was thinking of his own academic career, devoted to the mechanics of the Great Depression, 80 years ago. Or perhaps it was a recognition that this crisis remains very much in progress.

The Top 1%: Executives, Doctors and Bankers

The “99-percenters” protesting at Occupy Wall Street should think about occupying the C-suites across America as well, at least if their primary complaint is about income inequality.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

That is one implication of this fascinating paper on the occupations of the top 1 percent of Americans, which I came across via Mike Konczal. The paper is by Jon Bakija of Williams College, Adam Cole of the Treasury Department and Bradley T. Heim of Indiana University, and is based on tax data from 2005 (so, before the financial crisis).

Dollars to doughnuts.

It finds that about a third of Americans in that top percentile were executives, managers and supervisors who work outside of finance. The next biggest share, at 15.7 percent, went to medical professionals, followed by those in financial services with 13.9 percent.

The share of 1-percenters who work in finance has been rising, as you can see. In 1979, the earliest year analyzed, just 7.7 percent of those at the top percentile worked in finance, about half the share in 2005.

As we’ve written many times over, the total share of income going to the top 1 percent has increased in recent decades. In 2005, the top 1 percent of earners received 16.97 percent of total income distributed to all households across the United States.

The C-suiters accounted for about a third of that chunk received by the top percentile. Put another way, the nonfinance executives, managers and supervisors at the very top of the income distribution received 6.35 percent of all income received by all Americans in 2005.