Get Up and Go

We're a country of go-getters. Yet, recent studies show that getting and going anywhere is becoming a thing of the past.

"Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles."

That's what the man said: Idlers and imbeciles. Just where in the West, specifically, was he thinking? California? Oregon? Colorado? Don't know.

This advice was given by the American author Horace Greeley in 1833, and it became a catch-phrase for westward expansion. Greeley hated the high rents, bad food and deplorable morals of Washington, D.C., and encouraged people to hit the road and make a life for themselves in the fertile farmland of the West.

For generations, people did this. But today, people are staying put.

"Sometime in the past 30 years, someone has hit the brakes," write Todd and Victoria Buchholz in The New York Times (March 11, 2012). "Americans -- particularly young Americans -- have become risk-averse and sedentary." To support their case, the Buchholzes point out that the likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped over 40 percent...