Mobility as a Field of Economic Research

Abstract

The history of all industrial nations has had several things in common. One of the more important common characteristics has been the declining significance of agriculture in the national economy. In the United States the rapid advances in agricultural technology, the high birth rates in farm areas, and the slow growth of demand have necessitated a large transfer of labor from agricultural to urban employment. The magnitude of the farm-to-urban migration, and the large reverse movement, may well surprise many. Between 1920 and 1946 some 45 million people moved from farms to nonfarm areas. About 28 million did exactly the opposite -returned from cities and villages to the farms. Yet the net movement of 17 millons must be considered to have been large. Large as the net of farm movement was, not until World War II was any substantial reduction achieved in farm population.1 Consequently at the beginning of World War II there were in agriculture far more people than could earn satisfactory incomes. This was true of even the best agricultural areas. Even after the large reduction in farm population during the war, at least half-perhaps more-of American agriculture is still subject to serious excess supplies of labor. The excess supply of labor in agriculture is significant from two points of view. One is the effect which the excess employment in agriculture has upon the total national product or income, or, put another way, the efficiency with which the nation's resources, particularly labor, are used. A second point of reference is the impact of a too large supply of labor upon the level of per capita farm incomes. Not all of the inefficiency existing in agriculture, nor all of the low incomes, are due to a larger population in agriculture than can obtain a level of earnings equivalent to that received by labor of comparable skills elsewhere. Yet so many of the forces leading to inefficiency and low incomes are related to excess supply of labor that one must accept the overwhelming importance of migration and mobility in seeking a solution to the resource and income problems in agriculture. The social and political significance of the problems related to migration and mobility are alone sufficient to warrant extensive research investigations. But research in mobility is important from another standpoint. Mobility, as an empirical aspect of human behavior, has had the interest of social scientists in several different disciplines. Consequently, for this reason and because of the nature of the problem, mobility and migration offer considerable opportunities