There is a problem in the US that fewer people are moving from one state to another. This lack of movement has significant negative repercussions for the economy, in that people are less likely to move to find work, making labor markets less efficient, and that they end up living surrounded by people with little experience of other places and ways of thinking and little tolerance of difference. National culture becomes fragmented, and the possibility of meaningful dialogue goes away. Wealth mobility is also decreased, since assortative mating is exacerbated by people pairing off with people from their immediate surroundings.
In previous generations, exogenous forces have limited how sedentary people could be. Throughout the 20th century, wars repeatedly uprooted people and communities, mixing people from all over the country together, making life barely recognizable for those left at home, and leaving the returning soldiers unmoored and with a community built during their service and distributed around the country. This made moving much less daunting, and assortative mating was greatly decreased following major conflicts where a draft was instituted.
To restore the effects, but without the costs of war, we should implement a program in public schools that would enable students to spend time in other communities. The program would provide free or significantly subsidized travel and room and board, and place students randomly around the country, prioritizing cultural and geographic mixing. Schools could opt in to the program, and students could opt in to participating. Schools would receive as many students in exchange as they send away. Randomization would prevent concentrating these exchanges in ‘sexy’ locations (e.g. major tourist destinations), and efforts would be made to separate students coming form the same school or even town (though this would be limited by the fact that population centers would be sending more students than relatively sparsely populated areas.
Such a program would give students a chance to get out of their home town, which by itself should significantly increase the likelihood that they will relocate later in life. They will be allowed to build a geographically distributed community, and an appreciation of the life and concerns of others. The mixing would have many subtle social effects, encouraging non-assortative mating, cultural exchanges that will tend to spark innovations, and, over generations, decreases of inequality and political polarization which are fed by increasing social and economic complacency.