Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Perhaps the most psychologically significant kind of movement that an individual can make is geographical relocation of his home. This dramatic form of geographical mobility is also strikingly evident in the United States and the other advanced nations. Speaking of the United States, Peter Drucker has said: "The largest migration in our history began during World War II; and it has continued ever since with undiminished momentum." And political scientist Daniel Elazar describes the great masses of Americans who "have begun to move from place to place within each [urban] belt ... preserving a nomadic way of life that is urban without being permanently attached to any particular city ..."

Between March 1967 and March 1968 – in a single year – 36,600,000 Americans (not counting children less than one year old) changed their place of residence. This is more than the total population of Cambodia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Iraq, Israel, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Tunisia combined. It is as if the entire population of all these countries had suddenly been relocated. And movement on this massive scale occurs every year in the United States. In each year since 1948 one out of five Americans changed his address, picking up his children, some household effects, and starting life anew at a fresh place. Even the great migrations of history, the Mongol hordes, the westward movement of Europeans in the nineteenth century, seem puny by statistical comparison.

While this high rate of geographical mobility in the United States is probably unmatched anywhere in the world (available statistics, unfortunately, are spotty), even in the more tradition-bound of the advanced countries the age-old ties between man and place are being shattered. Thus the New Society, a social science journal published in London, reports that "The English are a more mobile race than perhaps they thought ... No less than 11 percent of all the people in England and Wales in 1961 had lived in their present usual residence less than a year ... In certain parts o€ England, in fact, it appears that the migratory movements are nothing less than frenetic. In Kensington over 25 percent had lived in their homes less than a year, in Hampstead 20 percent, in Chelsea 19 percent." And Anne Lapping, in another issue of the same journal, states that "new houseowners expect to move house many more times than their parents. The average life of a mortgage is eight to nine years ..." This is only slightly different than in the United States.

In France, a continuing housing shortage contrives to slow down internal mobility, but even there a study by demographer Guy Pourcher suggests that each year 8 to 10 percent of all Frenchmen shift homes. In Sweden, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the rate of domestic migration appears to be on the rise. And Europe is experiencing a wave of international mass migration unlike anything since the disruptions of World War II. Economic prosperity in Northern Europe has created widespread labor shortages (except in England) and has attracted masses of unemployed agricultural workers from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries.

They come by the thousands from Algeria, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia and Turkey. Every Friday afternoon 1000 Turkish workers in Istanbul clamber aboard a train heading north toward the promised lands. The cavernous rail terminal in Munich has become a debarkation point for many of them, and Munich now has its own Turkish-language newspaper. In Cologne, at the huge Ford factory, fully one-quarter of the workers are Turks. Other foreigners have fanned out through Switzerland, France, England, Denmark and as far north as Sweden. Not long ago, in the twelfth-century town of Pangbourne in England, my wife and I were served by Spanish waiters. And in Stockholm we visited the Vivel, a downtown restaurant that has become a meeting place for transplanted Spaniards who hunger for flamenco music with their dinner. There were no Swedes present; with the exception of a few Algerians and ourselves, everyone spoke Spanish. It was no surprise therefore to find that Swedish sociologists today are torn by debate over whether foreign worker populations should be assimilated into Swedish culture or encouraged to retain their own cultural traditions – precisely the same "melting pot" argument that excited American social scientists during the great period of open immigration in the United States.

There are, however, important differences between the kind of people who are on the move in the United States and those caught up in the European migrations. In Europe most of the new mobility can be attributed to the continuing transition from agriculture to industry; from the past to the present, as it were. Only a small part is as yet associated with the transition from industrialism to super-industrialism. In the United States, by contrast, the continuing redistribution of population is no longer primarily caused by the decline of agricultural employment. It grows, instead, out of the spread of automation and the new way of life associated with super-industrial society, the way of life of the future.

This becomes plain if we look at who is doing the moving in the United States. It is true that some technologically backward and disadvantaged groups, such as urban Negroes, are characterized by high rates of geographical mobility, usually within the same neighborhood or county. But these groups form only a relatively small slice of the total population, and it would be a serious mistake to assume that high rates of geographical mobility correlate only with poverty, unemployment or ignorance. In fact, we find that men with at least one year of college education (an ever increasing group) move more, and further, than those without. Thus we find that the professional and technical populations are among the most mobile of all Americans. And we find an increasing number of affluent executives who move far and frequently. (It is a house joke among executives of the International Business Machine Corporation that IBM stands for "I've Been Moved.") In the emerging super-industrialism it is precisely these groups – professional, technical and managerial – who increase in both absolute number and as a proportion of the total work force. They also give the society its characteristic flavor, as the denim-clad factory worker did in the past.

Just as millions of poverty-stricken and unemployed rural workers are flowing from the agricultural past into the industrial present in Europe, so thousands of European scientists, engineers and technicians are flowing into the United States and Canada, the most superindustrial of nations. In West Germany, Professor Rudolf Mossbauer, a Nobel prizewinner in physics, announces that he is thinking of migrating to America because of disagreements over administrative and budgetary policies at home. Europe's political ministers, worried over the "technology gap," have looked on helplessly as Westinghouse, Allied Chemical, Douglas Aircraft, General Dynamics and other major American corporations sent talent scouts to London or Stockholm to lure away everyone from astrophysicists to turbine engineers.

But there is a simultaneous "brain-drain" inside the United States, with thousands of scientists and engineers moving back and forth like particles in an atom. There are, in fact, well recognized patterns of movement. Two major streams, one from the North and the other from the South, both converge in California and the other Pacific Coast states, with a way station at Denver. Another major stream flows up from the South toward Chicago and Cambridge, Princeton and Long Island. A counter-stream carries men back to the space and electronics industries in Florida.

A typical young space engineer of my acquaintance quit his job with RCA at Princeton to go to work for General Electric. The house he had purchased only two years before was sold; his family moved into a rented house just outside Philadelphia, while a new one was built for them. They will move into this new house – the fourth in about five years – provided he is not transferred or offered a better job elsewhere. And all the time, California beckons.