One emblematic argument came from the writer Kevin D. Williamson in a 2016 essay in National Review. “The truth about these downscale communities is that they deserve to die,” Williamson wrote. “Economically, they are negative assets.” To Williamson, the solution was obvious: “They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need a U-Haul.”

That argument seems to have become louder and more insistent lately. In early March, Arthur Brooks, the president of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace, “The main reason that people who are older wind up being displaced and permanently displaced is because we’re getting less and less mobile.” In the old days, when Brooks was a child, he said, Americans moved all the time. Staying put, he argued, was “anathema to the American experience.” Brooks implied that the idea of staying in a town because people had family there, had lived there most of their lives, or simply loved the place indicated a profound lack of gumption.

His logic was that America was a land of pioneers in covered wagons: If the U.S. economy was going to churn once again for the benefit of all, he argued, “one of the things we also have to do is to get people moving more.”

Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, put forward a similar argument in a book released earlier this year, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. In it, Cowen stressed that this decreased mobility—for low earners as well as high earners—is worrisome. A Time adaptation of the book was headlined “The Unseen Threat to America: We Don’t Leave Our Hometowns.” Other headline writers took it even further. “How American Workers Got Lazy,” blared the Wall Street Journal. An April 25 column in the San Francisco Chronicle was topped with “Americans are lazy and complacent — here’s how.”

Packing up and moving is coming to be seen as an individual’s antidote to an unkind job market. Late last month, writing in The New York Times, the writer and New York University journalism teacher Suketu Mehta encouraged Americans to get out of their hometowns and work abroad. His pitch was directed to the well-off—who, he suggested, might be interested to learn that commercial pilots can earn $300,000 a year in China—as well as to lower earners. For this latter group, he noted, “A 150-peso-an-hour job in an automobile plant in Aguascalientes, Mexico, isn’t the same as a $40-an-hour union job in Detroit; but you will live much better than if you made $8 an hour slinging burgers in Scranton.”

When I read this, I wondered if it was satire. I thought of an acquaintance of mine, John Oatney. He wasn’t about to fly airplanes, nor build cars in Mexico. I’d gotten to know John over the course of reporting my book, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town, about Lancaster, Ohio. John and his wife, Wendy, had been struggling. She worked at a fast-food franchise. John was often out of work, or working one of a series of temporary jobs in places such as warehouses, loading or unloading trucks.