Behavior: The Nomadic American

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> At any given time, half of the 18-to 22-year-olds in hundreds of towns are living away from home. Many of them never come back, except to visit.

All of this mobility, Packard believes, is destroying authentic communities and creating some monstrous non-communities. The U.S. now has 13,000 "pseudo towns based on shopping malls," efficient for merchandising but unsatisfactory as focal points for the rootless people who live around them. Trailer parks are not much better, even if they have names like "Chateau Estates": "No matter how you floss them up, most mobile homes are elongated metal boxes." Aerospace communities may look more attractive, but their ever-changing populations are often beset by infidelity and alcoholism (TIME, July 4, 1969).

Almost equally troubled, Packard says, are the towns for "company gypsies." As an example, he points to affluent Darien, Conn., "a transfer town, a bedroom town—and a traveling man's town." Once a genuine community, Darien now frequently observes the traditional small-town amenities without preserving the old warmth. One longtime resident confided to Packard that while she still calls on new neighbors, she has recently done so only when she is sure they are not at home.

In Packard's view, mobility is often associated with both physical and mental illness. He also believes that the anonymity resulting from mobility fosters "nomadic values," especially hedonism and a tendency to live for the moment. Pointing to Stanford Psychologist Philip Zimbardo's experiments in which subjects show no reluctance to give electric shocks to strangers, Packard says that "people become more aggressive when they are in anonymous roles."

Although he deliberately avoids the fashionable term alienation because it is so often misused, Packard reports something akin to it: there seem to be increasing numbers of people who are indifferent to all close associations. Apparently they have what Harvard Sociologist George Homans calls a "lowered social capacity." This may have ominous long-range implications. "Loss of group membership in one generation," says Homans, "may make men less capable of group membership in the next. The cycle is vicious."

As Packard sees it, to break that cycle is the nation's most urgent task. America must "rediscover the natural human community" to which people can feel they belong. Among his proposals: 1) corporations must stop assuming that they have a right to move people around like chessmen; 2) a minimum-income program geared to regional costs is needed to cut migration of workers in search of more pay; 3) home ownership should be encouraged through subsidies to give people "a stake in living where they are"; and 4) open housing must be accepted to eliminate white moves to suburban sanctuaries.