The Social Geography of Interstate Mobility and Persistence

We introduce a new model of geographic mobility that maps the underlying contours of sociocultural space after purging the confounding effects of distance, inertia, contiguity, and population size. In conventional models of geographic mobility, these confounding effects are intentionally conflated with sociocultural forces, since the objective is to fashion an abstract social physics of mobility that is based on a unitary and all-encompassing distance function. We argue that known features of the social landscape should be entered explicitly into mobility specifications. This approach yields new insights into (1) the net holding power of regions, subregions, and states; (2) the effects of macro-level variables on propensities for immobility and exchange; and (3) the influence of seemingly minor variations in the shape of regions on gross patterns of immobility and exchange.