IN PERSON EVENT: Who Leaves, Who Stays, and How Culture Changes

We will explore a deceptively simple question with far reaching consequences: who leaves, who stays, and how does that choice reshape a society over time? Migration is usually framed in economic terms, but this conversation looks at something deeper, cultural self selection.

Drawing on Anne Sofie Beck Knudsen’s study of Scandinavian emigration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850 to 1920), we will examine evidence that people with more individualistic dispositions were more likely to leave. When they did, they did not just shape the cultures they moved into. They also subtly transformed the cultures they left behind. Over generations, this produced lasting shifts toward collectivism and even cultural convergence across regions.

What makes this work especially compelling is how it measures culture historically, using first name choices as a proxy for individualism and conformity. Small personal decisions, repeated at scale, reveal how movement and absence can reshape values over time.

This meetup will explore migration not just as movement through space, but as a filter on culture, with implications for how societies evolve and for how we think about mobility, choice, and identity today.

Source
Anne Sofie Beck Knudsen, Those Who Stayed: Individualism, Self Selection and Cultural Change during the Age of Mass Migration (2019)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DTgY0xb6OwRkTjGRdDsZxzkCC50nQngp/view?usp=sharing

Questions to Think About

1. If more individualistic people are more likely to leave, what kinds of cultures are unintentionally created among those who remain?
2. How does this challenge the common assumption that migration naturally spreads values like independence and autonomy?
3. What modern parallels might exist today in digital migration, professional mobility, or selective communities where exit quietly reshapes culture at home?
4. Should we think of migration not just as movement through space, but as a mechanism of cultural selection over time?