The Wilson Quarterly: From the Editors

Why Are Americans Staying Put?

POSTED: Jan 30, 2012 11:11 AM
By Cullen Nutt

“We’re becoming a nation of homebodies,” demographer William H. Frey wrote for the Brookings Institution’s blog last November, “and not by choice.” Frey was reacting to new Census data indicating that 11.6 percent of Americans moved in 2011, the lowest rate since statistics were first collected in 1948.

Homebodies indeed, but many Americans may not be complaining. Contrary to oft-cited short-term explanations—underwater mortgages, the hollow labor market, and the Great Recession more broadly—American migration has been in decline for decades, through both economic boom and bust. Economists Raven Molloy, Christopher L. Smith, and Abigail Wozniak make this point about interstate migration in a scholarly article that we highlight in an In Essence item, “Staying Put,” in our latest issue.

Molloy, Smith, and Wozniak find that virtually all demographic groups—across the spectrum of income, age, marital status, education level, and ethnic background—moved between states at lower rates in 2010 (and 2000) than they did in 1980. (The authors focus on interstate migration indicators; the new Census numbers announced in late 2011 also account for migration within states and counties.) Molloy, Smith, and Wozniak say there’s no ready explanation for the trend, let alone any evidence that the latest economic turmoil had more than a marginal impact.

Migration statistics during the years of the

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Hunting Vaucanson’s Duck

POSTED: Jan 25, 2012 02:03 PM
By Megan Buskey

In “Man as Machine," in the current issue of the WQ, contributing editor Max Byrd describes the French fascination with lifelike mechanical toys during and after the Enlightenment. Below he answers a few questions about his article.

How did you first become interested in the story of French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson and his automates?

I worked my way through my undergraduate studies at Harvard doing magic shows at birthday parties. One day about five years ago, wandering about in Paris, I came across a little basement operation in the Marais, more like a penny arcade than anything else, called the Museum of Magic and Automates. As a magician emeritus, I dug out my five euros and trotted right in. Their automates were not impressive—rather shabby and flea-bitten, if you can say that about toys made of metal. But they were fun and the encounter led me to two other museums of automates in Paris, one a private collection out in the suburb of Neuilly and the other the great Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, where there is a wonderful collection of automates and a small bookstore with much to read about Vaucanson. I was not the person mentioned in the article who bolted and ran when the dulcimer lady started to play, but I find some of the automates distinctly spooky—and therefore interesting.

You argue that Vaucanson’s mechanical duck and his project for Louis XV, the Bleeding Man, reflected a desire to test

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Of More Than One Mind

POSTED: Jan 19, 2012 11:15 AM
By Steven Lagerfeld

Four years ago, even the staunchest of pessimists might have been dismayed if they could have somehow learned that in 2012 the world economy would still be feeling the effects of recession. While the current economic downturn is the subject of a great deal of glum commentary, it has also, as demonstrated by this issue of the WQ, sparked much lively debate.

“Lessons of the Great Depression,” our cover cluster of articles, features a range of contrasting views on that calamity of the 1930s and the causes of our own current economic distress. Robert J. Samuelson finds in the Depression-era gold standard a parallel to the contemporary welfare state—a straitjacket that exacerbates economic ills. Louis Hyman answers with a historically based argument that stagnating wages and growing economic inequality are the root cause of our current distress and the source of the “debt bomb” that exploded in 2007 and 2008. Robert Z. Aliber contends that today’s “Mini-Depression” could have been avoided altogether if bank regulators and the Federal Reserve had acted to defuse that bomb, which was plainly visible amid the excesses of the last decade.

Elsewhere in the issue, journalist Zahid Hussain, the current Pakistan scholar here at the Wilson Center, offers an unusually well-informed report on Pakistan’s impoverished, little-studied tribal areas, whose status, he says, is crucial not only to his own country’s future but to

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The Arabic Hurdle

POSTED: Jan 18, 2012 05:54 PM
By Courtney Joline

With my (terrific) internship at The Wilson Quarterly behind me, I am about to set off for a semester of research and cultural and linguistic immersion in Tunisia, joining thousands of other young Americans who are traveling to the Middle East and North Africa for similar reasons.

Just as the Cold War spurred an increase in Russian language study, the 9/11 attacks and the two wars that followed have led more and more students to focus on the Middle East. Good data are hard to come by, but according to the Institute for International Education, the number of American students studying in Arabic-speaking countries soared 600 percent between 2002 and 2007, to more than 3,000. On U.S. campuses, enrollment in Arabic classes more than doubled by 2005.

The rise of Arabic language and cultural studies has two key sources: the federal government’s practical focus on promoting it and my generation’s inherent interest in cross-cultural awareness. After 9/11 and the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the State Department had fewer than 60 employees who were completely fluent in Arabic, and only five were considered up to the job of representing the United States on television programs in the Middle East. Now the State Department is channeling money into a new effort to increase undergraduate instruction in 13 languages, the Critical Language Scholarship Program. In the Middle East, it offers summer programs in Jordan, Egypt, Oman, Morocco, and

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Why Are Americans Staying Put?

Hunting Vaucanson’s Duck

Of More Than One Mind

The Arabic Hurdle

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