Most people prefer not to move long distances. We appreciate living in the place and the social context in which we grew up. Examples abound of geographical regions where unemployment has been high for decades and which are situated only a few hundred kilometers from other regions, within the same country, where opportunities to find work have consistently been greater. Neither high monetary costs nor linguistic or cultural differences make it difficult for people to move between these regions. Yet too few do, for the important differences in unemployment to level out even over a time span of several decades.

It thus evidently takes quite a lot to make many of us move even to familiar and nearby places. And of course it takes even more to make us move to places of which we know little, to where the move is costly and risky, and where we would find ourselves among foreign language and customs. In most instances we prefer to avoid this, if we can.

Yet over and over throughout history, many have found themselves in situations where they have thought it worthwhile to move to faraway places. After the earliest of our Homo sapiens ancestors left Africa, it took only a few ten thousand years before their descendants had colonized most corners of the Earth, even including islands that are situated thousands of kilometers into the Pacific Ocean. What most certainly drove them were possibilities to find more secure livelihoods. Resources were scarce where they were, and if they took the risk of venturing into the lesser known, they saw a chance of obtaining greater abundance. With all certainty, many such risk-takers failed. But consistently some succeeded, and kept pushing the frontiers.

Later, when numerous Europeans began moving to America by the middle of the nineteenth century, we know that it was primarily for reasons of finding secure basic livelihoods. Many among the earliest movers knew almost nothing about America. But they had heard that it was easier to survive there, for those who were lucky enough to survive the voyage and get there at all.