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The geographic transience is the hardest, that I have personally dealt with. Almost all of my close friends I've known for over a decade have moved away. Many of them want to come back because they're lonely, but constraints of work / family / finances make it difficult.
It's a very stupid and annoying cultural situation that everyone moves all the time. Sigh.
Geographic transience in America overall is overstated - the median American lives 18 miles from their mother.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html
I'd imagine among the sort of intellectual elite class the numbers are FAR higher. Anecdotally for me it's well over 50% for the well off amongst my friend groups.
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Maybe I'm an outlier, but this is not true at all for my community in Baltimore. Every single person I know, except for my boss who moved his parents here when their health started to decline, lives more than 18 miles from their mom.
The Baltimore region seems to have a higher median fwiw.
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The use of median rather than mean suggests a selective approach to characterizing transience relative to other parts of the world.
I don't know how it's characterized in other parts of the world, but median makes intuitive sense given that the distribution has a long right tail and it tells you what the situation of the typical American rather than an ""average"" American who may not exist in any large numbers.
It's precisely because the distribution has a long right tail that you want a mean rather than a median if you want to discuss relative differences. The relative differences are themselves located in the nature of the right-end tail.
Mean, median, and mode are all forms of averaging, but imply different things and thus serve different demonstrative / comparative purposes.
Median average is just '50% of the population is below this number, and 50% is above.' It's decent for centering on clusters, but when spectrums are non-symmetrical it's also non-representative. This can be a good thing- it's a way to ignore outliers- but it can also be a bad thing- because it ignores outliers. In the structure the claim- 'American transience is overstated'- the very premise is about the nature of the outliers (if Americans are more transient than others), but the model of averaging chosen specifically omits the role of outliers.
A mode-average is just the most common category in a set. If you broke the average distances of [distance from mother] in 20km blocks (0-20 km,20-40, etc.), a mode-average could tell you which category was the most common, but not actually what a mean or even median average was. After all, there is only 1 20-unit blocks between 0 (co-located with mother) and 20, but there are potentially infinite blocks beyond 20, but as long as more people in the single 0-20 block than in any single 20-unit block beyond it, it wouldn't matter if a hypermajority of people lived beyond 20 units from their mothers, the 'average' would still be 0-20.
Median averaging is where you'd expect to the differences in cultural differences show up in data, because the nature of the right tail is itself going to be that difference. Being a long right tail is itself a demonstration of transience compared to a population which has a short right tail. However, only a median-average would be expected to capture that if/when mode-groups or medians are skewed towards a hyper-concentrated left.
This is especially true when you consider reasons why mother and adult-child might live close other than a lack of transience. The article / you worked with an assumption that it's because people never move away in the first place (non-transient), but a transient-lifestyle could alternatively simply move back after some point (to take care of an elderly parent)... or see the parent move after the child (moving closer to the grand kids). Transience could be very high, but the median being used (heh) wouldn't reflect it. This is something that only a highly transient, but also exceptionally rich, society could do. It would have very different implications from a society where the generations never left the home village at all, even if both fit the same median average.
It's not that median-average doesn't serve very important roles, but for comparing different populations- and thus the validity of macro-trends such as relative transience- you need means.
On the contrary - it is representative in that half the people you meet will be above that number, and half below. A mean would represent a much more unusual case.
The claim is not about the nature of the outliers, it's about the nature of the median experience. The other comments in this thread talk about all or many/most people being transient and not living in a particular place for a long time. The median speaks directly against that in a way that the mean does not, because you're more likely to encounter a median American than a mean one
As for cross country comparisons, I didn't say anything about those at all. Obviously you should compare means with means and medians with medians. My point is that 18 miles is not very far, and that stands regardless of what happens in other countries.
This is a legitimate point and I'd be interested to see more data that looks at this side of the equation.
The transience of Americans being transients isn't based on how much Americans move in and of themselves- it is how much Americans move compared to non-Americans.
What happens in other countries is what matters when characterizing a relative characteristic of a country-level population (Americans), just as minority difference in the face of overwhelming similarity are key distinguishing factors in other forms of overall-population comparison.
This can go from comparisons of GDP per capita (we don't go with a median income), to comparisons of intelligence (the interesting difference in a 100 vs 120 IQ is not the 100 they have in common), to even species (the DNA overlap between humans and monkeys sharing 99.8% DNA would not imply a difference if you took a more median-concept basis of comparison).
That both Americans and non-Americans have 50% of their populations that live in the same pattern isn't what would indicate whether Americans and non-Americans significantly diverge in ways that drive a population-level characterization.
Again, I never implied anything about any relative characteristics. My point is that 18 miles is not much in an absolute sense.
Median income is often more useful for the same reasons I describe above, and the same goes for the rest of your points (although I must again stress that between country comparisons have nothing to do with my claim).
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Probably "hours of travel" to one's mother is a better metric, as the functional difference between living in LA and living in Chicago for me would be an extra two hours spent on the plane, whereas the difference between Trenton and Montauk is larger than the mileage would indicate. Like, the difference between Philly and Richmond is pretty linear to distance, but the difference between Richmond and Chicago and LA are unmoored from it.
I think this is a salient concern when discussing two regimes (driving distance vs flying distance) but less salient when we're really just focusing on the driving regime. I'd be surprised if there's any plane route that you can take that's faster than driving 18 miles anywhere in the country (excluding perhaps LA at rush hour?) once you account for driving to the airport, security, waiting, baggage claim, driving from the airport, etc.
Differences come back around at very close distances within urban areas. Around me ten miles is practically a neighbor. The fifteen miles from Brooklyn to Yankees Stadium is a trek, no matter how you do it.
A big part of this data is captured by "more people live in cities than is popularly imagined by middle class Americans."
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Yep, I think this is at the root of much of the problem, even more so than TV, and would explain the early data from Bowling Alone where there wasn't very high TV penetrance.
Looking back I wish I had just gone to the University of Chicago and either got a job in the city afterwards of went to grad school at Northwestern or something. Right now I'm kind of stuck between my parents living in Chicago (and wanting to move back to the UK where my sister lives), my college friends in Boston or the Bay, and others randomly scattered all over.
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