The Final Recession was in 2008

I received an email from the U.S. Census Bureau today as part of preparations for the 2020 Census. There was a special report on the problem of under counting young children. One factor listed was that families with small children had moved since the previous Census, into or out of what they called "complex households."

Included in many of the data sets was one called Geographic Mobility. I had just the previous day finished a blog post over at Safe Work Space called Job Losses in 2019 which focused on the Retail Apocalypse of stores closing. It got me thinking about why the stock market keeps going up and the main-stream media keeps reporting how good the economy is, but things are not as they seem.

It occurred to me that the geographic mobility of families over time might be evidence of the truth, so I downloaded the data and made this chart:

This demonstrates that geographic mobility has been declining since the mid-1980's. It didn't seem to make sense, until I came across a YouTube video of the Jimmy Dore Show with featured guest Michael Hudson, who until this moment I never heard of, despite my familiarity with Richard Wolff and Chris Hedges. After watching it, another video interview of Michael Hudson popped up from Democracy at Work including this quote I made into a graphic which explains everything about the above chart:

Michael Hudson is the author of J is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception