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Are people really reassessing their priorities in the wake of the pandemic?

In the LA Times this morning I read a piece about a couple abandoning California for the cheaper housing of their native Nebraska. It's an evergreen story, but now it features something extra: COVID-19.

For generations of young people reared in the nation’s heartland, it has been almost a rite of passage: Grow up in a small town, finish school, head out for the opportunities of cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago .... But the pandemic may be reversing — or at least slowing — that trend as many people reassess their priorities.

I'm not trying to pick on anyone here, but this business of people who "reassessed their priorities" during the pandemic is repeated endlessly these days with virtually nothing to back it up. But is it true? Did COVID-19 really cause a lot of people to reassess their entire life?

I'm not sure how we could find out, but at the very least we can take a look at people moving out of California:

Nothing much to see here. High housing prices have been the cause of increasing migration for many years, especially from the Bay Area. It's an old story. If anything, however, the growth rate slowed a little bit in 2020. And polling data shows the same thing. There's just no evidence that the pandemic has caused Californians to reassess much of anything.

We hear the same thing about workers "reassessing their priorities" as a reason why they aren't going back to their crappy old jobs. Once again, though, there's no evidence that this has anything to do with it. For one thing, compared to the average economic recovery, there aren't that many people who aren't going back to work. And among those who aren't, accumulated savings are a more likely cause than a sudden belief that they can get a way better job now than they could 12 months ago.

In any case, if we're going to keep retailing this tale of how the pandemic has changed people's life priorities, we should at least dig up some evidence to back it up. So far, I haven't seen any.

30 thoughts on “Are people really reassessing their priorities in the wake of the pandemic?

  1. rational thought

    I do not think covid itself would have changed the incentive to move to California from say Idaho or move from California to Idaho. Why should it ? If you are concerned about covid risk , it has been a little bit higher in Idaho than California in the end , either because of weather , restriction policy or vaccination differences or just luck. But see little to conclude that , if your goal is to reduce covid risk , you do not want to stay in California.

    Now I think where covid might be a factor is where the political fight over covid restrictions like masking and vaccine mandates revealed big differences in political policy and how govt affects real life . Makes it harder for a hard liberal who thinks govt should mandate masks and vaccines to want to stay in Idaho and someone who thinks govt should leave the choice up to the individual to stay in California .

    So I think it might just accelerate the self sorting of political groups and geographical divide . Eventually. But not right away or where we would see this year or last year. Because covid definitely should have reduced rates of moving overall. Hard to maintain social distancing while moving. If we see an affect, you will see it in numbers maybe next year .

    1. antiscience

      I have read a number of people who wrote that in retrospect, they felt lucky they decided not to leave their CA metro areas for the UGTR, and specifically due to COVID. They feel much, much safer here, than they would out there in the hinterlands. I mean, you still have to interact with other humans, and if you catch COVID out there, or even just break your arm, you might die.

    2. Manhattan123

      It's still impossible to find a parking spot in Manhattan, which is as anecdotal as some occasional rando moving back to Nebraska.

    3. Atticus

      Last year (2020-21 school year) there were lots of people that moved to Florida (or at least Hillsborough County, where I live) because schools were open here and were not in most other regions. My wife is a teacher and we have several fiends that are teachers (and one that's a principal) at various schools in the Tampa area. All of them had multiple new families to the area that moved from points north. All of them said the fact that schools were open here was either the primary reason or a major consideration.

  2. dspcole

    Well, I know it’s just anecdotal, but I personally started wearing a mask much more during the pandemic than I did before it occurred.

  3. jdubs

    Moves are clearly seasonal. Chart seems to show that exits were down in Q1 & Q2 2020 (covid panic), but way, way up in Q3 2020 (relative to past q3 periods).

    Q3 2020 would have been the first chance for people to reasses their priorities regarding Covid. Hard to draw conclusions from one data point, but this chart seems to be the desired evidence.

  4. dilbert dogbert

    Bet the couple headed for Nebraska can't wait to visit the Nebraska redwoods, sierras, death valley, vineyards, Disney Land and beaches. And more.

  5. Ken Rhodes

    I think the flaw in the reporting, and in Kevin's reaction to it, is to take "Covid as the cause" too literally. Covid was the instigation of a lot of changes, and some of those changes were the cause of changing other things in people's lives.

    Covid resulted in significant increases in personal savings for a large number of middle-class (i.e., middle income) people. That gave them pause to stop and think more about their options, something many of them hadn't done in a long time.
    Covid resulted in significant changes in social patterns for a large number of people. Those social patterns were deeply ingrained, and frequently not subject to much introspection before; now people had a chance to take a step back and think about how much they wanted to return to those patterns.

    etc. etc. The things we had to change for a while have caused a lot of people to think about whether they wanted to continue with those changes, instead of simply reverting to pre-Covid behaviors ASAP.

    1. cmayo

      Yup, exactly.

      And one of those things is "do I even want to live where I live?"

      I'd actually argue that moves into/out of a state is the wrong thing to be looking at here. I'm not even sure what you could look at to get at answering the question of whether the pandemic caused people to reassess their living situations or not. There are presumably plenty of folks who decided that they didn't need to live that close to their office anymore, because they don't need to go in anymore, but they still like the general metro area where they live or they have too many ties there for it to be worth cutting or some combination of reasons. Those people aren't going to exit the state and go to another state. That would probably be rather rare, as the cost of moving long distance is much different from the cost of moving across town or to the county next door.

  6. cld

    A Florida man applied for 60 entry-level jobs in a month to prove the so-called 'labor shortage' is a myth,

    https://www.rawstory.com/florida-man-job-experiment/

    . . . .
    Holz saw a discrepancy between the rhetoric of employers and the facts on the ground in Fort Myers. Many pointed to the expanded unemployment benefits as a reason they weren't seeing applicants, but jobless claims have steadily dropped and Florida ended the enhanced benefits several months before he even began applying.

    "If this extra money that everyone's supposedly living off of stopped in June and it's now September, obviously, that's not what's stopping them," he told Insider.

    He continued to find jobs tied to owners who publicly complained about a lack of applicants. He said he only received one interview, at which point the business owner attempted to walk back the pay of $10/hour offered in the listing.

    "Are they desperate for HELP? Yes, according to their loud lamentations on Facebook, but so far 1 interview (where the advertised hours and pay were misrepresented) after 58 applications says y'all aren't desperate for workers, you just miss your slaves," he concluded in a Facebook post that has since gone viral.

  7. cld

    I was wondering if any increase in moving out of California could be attributed to smokey air.

    Because haze from the fires ended up here last summer and it was bad enough at one point I didn't spend any time outside for a week.

    1. HokieAnnie

      I could never live in California because of this. Heck back in college at VA Tech next to the Jefferson National Forest, there were some wildfires one summer when I was taking some courses to graduate in four years instead of five and the dorm where I was staying did not have A/C so open windows, normally not a problem as it was cool at night but I got the worst case of bronchitis ever.

      This summer as the smoke from CA drifted all the way here, I was hacking a lung out.

  8. colbatguano

    I'm sure a couple of the reporter's friends may have moved out to the suburbs and they just added a bit of pizzazz to the story.

  9. anniecat45

    OK, this is anecdata, but it's on the ground facts, not a reporter bloviating.

    I live in San Francisco. I know 2 couples who moved as a result of Covid-19. One couple were in their 20s, both worked in the tech industry, and did not have to go to the office. So they decided to travel and work remotely.

    The other couple -- with 2 kids -- had a business that was marginal even before the pandemic. The shutdown did make them take a hard look at the business and move to another city in the extended Bay Area -- where relatives would rent them a house for a low rent.

    Then there's another couple who moved here, during the pandemic. They had wanted to try another part of the country so they moved there in 2015. They hated it. The moved back in the summer of 2020, with their 3 kids. The husband loves working from home, and plans to continue to do that but as far as he's concerned he'll never move out of California again.

    1. Lounsbury

      So in fact it is 100% the same as journos repeating the same story only you are doing it as a blog commentator. Exactly the same confusion of anectdote and the narrative selection bias that is behind the journalists piss poor non-analysis.

      Without macro numbers and data it is all just-so stories in either direction.

  10. kahner

    this may be somewhat pedantic, but it all depends on what their/your definition of "many people" is. in a country with 350 or so million people, "many people" are doing just about everything at every moment. I'm sure many people are reassessing their priorities re: where they live, and many of those are doing it in part because of covid. whether it is a large % of people or that % changed significantly, yeah, who knows.

  11. Lounsbury

    Journalists and the confusion of Anectdotes of several people they have talked to among their connections etc and Data.

    1. Ken Rhodes

      “Data” is the plural of “datum.” Each anecdote provides a datum. Tell an anecdote and you have a story. Collect some anecdotes and you have data.

      1. Perry

        Except for the selection bias pesent with many anecdotes, if only because they are convenient and accessible to the person collecting them.

  12. kenalovell

    The Australian media has been obsessed for years with telling stories about city folk who decided to abandon their lucrative but stressful corporate lives for a 'sea change'. More recently, this has extended to include 'tree changers' - people who move from the city to an inland country town. It's noteworthy that the people concerned tend to have been high earners. In their new lives, they don't go and work in child care or fast food. They do things like open upscale restaurants ("Combining fresh seafood with Australian bush tucker has always been a passionate hobby of mine!") or farm exotic animals ("We saw in our time in Italy the market opportunities for fine alpaca wool").

    But somehow, the relentless population drift to the cities continues. Or to be more accurate, the cities relentlessly extend in area, swallowing what used to be smaller regional towns nearby.

    Having said that, I'm sure a few million Americans getting close to retirement age lost their jobs in early 2020, and a year later, having reviewed their finances, decided not to bother trying to get back into the labor force. It's likely to be a nothing but a temporary dip in the participation rate.

  13. HokieAnnie

    In my neck of the woods a lot of folks have made changes. Two of the contractors supporting my team relocated out of the DC area, one back to his home state of Michigan, got married, wife got pregnant and he's now a happy dad in a house he would have had to spend a ton on if located here. The other person moved down to NC to be closer to her daughter's family and into a cheaper house.

    Also a ton of folks who were in their 60s have retired some to move out of the area.

  14. Jasper_in_Boston

    I'm likewise skeptical of the "the pandemic changes everything" narratives we've been hearing for the past eighteen months. I does look like restaurants are tougher to operate, though.

  15. Perry

    I moved out of CA to CO in Feb 2021 because of (1) smoke and fire, (2) my husband died at the beginning of covid, (3) I had family elsewhere, (4) house prices increased dramatically during covid making it a good time to sell, (5) who needs a big house with only 1 person, (6) easier to get a covid shot in CO than CA at that time, (7) driving and traffic were increasingly a problem, (8) my income was indepedent of where I was living, (9) CA is more expensive in nearly every way than anywhere else. CO is a much more beautiful state in terms of mountains and scenery (only lacking an ocean) and it is nice not to have an earthquake hanging over your head.

    If I had to sum up all of my reasons for leaving, covid would be a big part of both instigating the move and providing reasons. The stimulus payments were incidental.

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