How to Money · Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Joseph Moore emphasizes the historical importance of mobility for wealth creation in America, noting that in the 19th century, one in three people changed addresses annually. He encourages modern individuals, especially younger generations, to be open to moving to where opportunities exist, rather than expecting opportunities to come to them.
“One of the things that also struck me reading the book and then kind of looking at what happens today in America is that people used to to move at much in much greater numbers in America one hundred hundred and fifty years ago. We don't really move in the same way as And some of that's fine, right for opportunity, but like maybe we want to be close to family and we want to stay and we're willing to take a job that doesn't have as much opportunity as we could get if we were to move somewhere else.”
“In the eighteen hundreds, one in three people changed addresses every single year, and you think, oh, that's back then the old West. Okay, in nineteen fifty it was still one in five. So we were a really mobile country for a really long time. People just expected there's opportunity somewhere, but I have to go where the opportunity is. Now that stat is one in thirteen, and a lot of the one in the thirteen is old people going to Florida and Arizona, so it's not even like one in thirteen young people.”
“You may have to go where it is, and that is an expectation in the eighteen hundreds, in the twentieth century America just had you had to go where the opportunity was, and we have the sense now, I think that the opportunity is supposed to be where I am, And that is a hard it's a hard you know, that's a hard conversation to have with somebody that the opportunity for you to go ahead.”