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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 8, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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When people move long distances in the US, their primary consideration seems to be "jobs". But what does that actually operationalize to for people who aren't professionals or otherwise in some extremely niche industry? Let's say you don't hope for much more than working at Costco or maybe as an administrative assistant at some small business, or as some random entry-level lab technician. What sort of metrics are you even supposed to look at when deciding on a destination?

  • Something like income per capita or unemployment rate seem too crude to be useful. Perhaps Region A has higher income per capita than Region B because of a thriving industry (e.g., diesel engine manufacturing) that has no relevance to your skills.

  • A random snapshot of job listings on indeed.com seems too unrepresentative. Job openings come and go all the time, and it seems unwise to write off a whole area because the current job openings don't suit you.

  • A region's level of educational attainment seems meaningless, except perhaps for some highly skilled professions, because a less-educated region has fewer workers who might compete for the white collar job you want. And it doesn't seem obvious to me that less-education regions would have fewer white collar jobs relative to the population of qualified candidates.

  • A region's rate of growth seems irrelevant. What's the difference between a region that has grown 30% in the last decade from 100,000 to 130,000 to a region that has grown only 10% in the last decade from 118,000 to 130,000? If it's because there's something more desirable or economically healthy about the former, then look at that metric and skip the middleman. (And what is that metric, and why does it matter for the prospective mover?)

I'll talk about Canada because I think it's similar to the US in this respect and I'm more familiar with it. A lot of people in my area (the east coast) move out west, particularly Alberta, for work. People don't look at statistics. People just hear stories about friends who have moved out west and make a lot more than they do here. This has been going on for decades, so it's just generally well understood that if you want to make more money, you should out west. I think there are just certain places where people know the jobs are and anyone ambitious moves there. Before it was western Canada, it was Montreal and Toronto, and before that, it was New England.