Mobility and the economy
Are we in a "new normal"?
While I continue to wonder whether Opportunity Insights’ economic tracker will ever bring back their beloved almost-real-time consumer spending data, I decided today to highlight another one of their unique data sources: that of mobility, or time spent away from home. Mobility is tracked by Google through data from its various apps by measuring one’s “time spent outside home” - this could be at parks, shopping centers, work, etc. The data are sent into Opportunity Insight’s tracker. It offers a unique glimpse at the extent to which people are participating in the local economy, and just getting outside and socializing in general.
Here is a time series of that data for California as a whole - graph taken directly from Opportunity Insights:
Three points about this chart:
A clarification: the y-axis is a relative estimate - it measures the amount of time in a day people spend outside of the home, relative to the amount of time in a day they spent outside of the home in January 2020
Between early-March and mid-April 2020, time spent outside home plummeted 28%. As people started spending more time outside, the economy began to pick up accordingly
While mobility generally falls during the winter holidays, the 2021 holidays were marked by Omicron, and this can be seen in the severe drop in mobility, by close to 10 percentage points, in a matter of days around late-December.
The thing that strikes me most about this chart is a question, or more rather a realization: will we ever return to “normal”? Even with all the vaccines and safety measures in place today, we’re still averaging about 11% less time outside of our home, today, than we were before all of this started. With all the progress we’ve made, people have continued to make a decision to spend over an hour less of their day (24 hours minus 8 hours of sleep is 16, and 11% of 16 is about 1 hour 30 minutes) out of their house.
There are signs of this “failing to recover”, or “new normal”, in other parts of the economic data as well. Employment in some sectors fails to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Labor force participation, while great out here, is still below what it was in 2019. Can anyone think of others? In what ways do we find that we are permanently in a different place?
A permanent decline in time spent outside of the house must have all sorts of public health and other social implications, not to mention the broader economic effects of a permanently higher amount of time spent at home. While large businesses like Amazon might benefit from these trends, local businesses must undoubtedly be suffering if they cannot easily move online.