I’m not sure how much stock to put in that result, which uses happiness data “to estimate how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income increases using an iterated maximum likelihood procedure, assuming a constant relative risk aversion utility function.”
But there do seem to be a lot of indications that the famously footloose and risk-tolerant citizens of the U.S. are becoming less willing to take leaps into the unknown. Along with the entrepreneurship decline mentioned above, median job tenure has risen markedly since 2004 and the percentage of Americans who change residences each year has been in a long decline. As the New York Times reported last week, the “typical adult” in the U.S. now “lives only 18 miles from his or her mother.”
Can we blame all this on population aging? Probably not. I would bet other factors weigh heavier -- and whatever those are (economic insecurity, high housing costs, high education costs, you name it), we probably have a better shot at doing something about them than we do of stopping America from getting older.