“The chart above made me think of that. Florida is like Clayton. It is going to enjoy a virtuous cycle in which more wealth comes to the state, tax revenue rises, and the government just has to be halfway competent to keep the state attractive. Meanwhile, the deep Blue jurisdictions controlled by teachers’ unions will be like U. City. They will suffer from a vicious cycle of losing wealthy taxpayers, leading them to have to raise tax rates and cut public services.”
This why it is so important to the Blues that they control the Federal government. Then they can use the taxing and regulatory power of the feds to disadvantage Texas and Florida, for example, and prop up New York and California. Does an open border with Mexico cause chaos in Texas? Then the Blues favor open borders.
1) SALT was the glue that kept the local blue governments going. It's easier to ignore bloated spending then 1/3 of it is getting lobbed off your federal tax bill.
2) The best piece of advice I could give a young person is to move to where they want to live long term since that is harder to change then getting another job in your city where you live.
3) At the same time it's hard to forecast what a place is going to be like over a lifetime. I liked the place I grew up then but wouldn't like it now (it also wasn't always a one party dem state). California used to be the Reagan Dream and nots is Newsome's California. The same things could happen to Florida or TX long term.
4) It seems like my own small town went though a change in the last decade. Newcomers from DC voted in a new mayor that is leftist and anti-development. Many of them don't have families here and don't even live here every day (its like a vacation home on the weekends from Alexandria), but they vote.
5) One of the main problems in the south is they have very large school districts. In the Northeast most school districts are town based (each town has its own elementary, middle, and high school). This leads to better governance, but the less populated south did school districts at the county level.
In my experience the decisive factor is demographics - the neighbours. I don’t refer to race, but to standards of hygiene, behaviour, respect for the local and others, criminal activity.
What makes the NY/CA situation different from what you would predict is the role of the federal government. The worse the citizenry in NY/CA, the more federal money comes in. They are optimizing for federal subsidies (hence pro-indigent policies etc.) and not for anything like economic growth.
I exited MoCo for a low-tax state. I miss the amenities of my old neighborhood, but to paraphrase something Bret Weinstein said about leaving Portland, I wouldn't patronize a restaurant that billed me for a meal that it never provided. Crime was on the rise. When car thefts escalate to armed carjackings, it is time to leave. Being mugged in another region of the country back in my youth taught me that affluent areas can be a magnet for criminals from less affluent surrounding areas, so living in 'very white neighborhoods' in the DC area doesn't necessarily insulate you from crime. With Governor RINO gone, I figure the last remaining restraint on wasteful spending at the state level is also gone. Another concern was the seemingly endless pipeline of 'luxury' high-rise apartment buildings that were mushrooming all over the neighborhood. The development model seemed to embody a 'field of dreams' mentality that doesn't make any sense to me.
I have a lot of confirmation bias with all of this, especially as an adopted Floridian, someone with too much mood affiliation, and my vast preference for exit over voice. But I question the importance of the wealth movement chart because of the tax base of Florida being so reliant on regressive consumption (sales) taxes and property taxes. Also, some 15 to 20 years ago the biggest predictors/correlates for population growth within the US were higher mean temperatures in January and home prices. People looked at the sunbelt growth and talked about taxes probably more than was warranted.
In the end, exit to a different town or state won't matter- the federal government will grow and grow and grow. Increasingly, Texas will turn purplish as Georgia and Arizona has undergone the last decade, then blue (Florida is already purplish and has been for almost 3 decades). That is the thing about progressives- they don't tolerate the existence of non-progressive jurisdictions, and they control the education of the children pretty much everywhere today.
Looking at a St. Louis map, University City is almost right next to Clayton. I find it hard to believe house prices could be so different. Arnold, I'd love to see you run the experiment again with present data. (I don't know how to get the data and am not willing to put in the time and effort to learn how.)
Arnold don’t get me started on the people’s republic of MoCo. I’m holding on until my last kid graduates high school and then going to Colorado.
Seems to me that “voicing” one way and “exiting” another way is the definition of “luxury beliefs.”
“The chart above made me think of that. Florida is like Clayton. It is going to enjoy a virtuous cycle in which more wealth comes to the state, tax revenue rises, and the government just has to be halfway competent to keep the state attractive. Meanwhile, the deep Blue jurisdictions controlled by teachers’ unions will be like U. City. They will suffer from a vicious cycle of losing wealthy taxpayers, leading them to have to raise tax rates and cut public services.”
This why it is so important to the Blues that they control the Federal government. Then they can use the taxing and regulatory power of the feds to disadvantage Texas and Florida, for example, and prop up New York and California. Does an open border with Mexico cause chaos in Texas? Then the Blues favor open borders.
"Tiebout competition also should promote efficiency. ... New York and California are losing customers, but I don’t see them reforming any time soon."
So Tiebout is wrong about efficiency gains. Isn't that the takeaway?
Caplan has a nice slide deck and several posts about Tiebout:
https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/Tiebout.pdf
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/12/where_tiebout_g.html
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/12/absurdities_of.html
1) SALT was the glue that kept the local blue governments going. It's easier to ignore bloated spending then 1/3 of it is getting lobbed off your federal tax bill.
2) The best piece of advice I could give a young person is to move to where they want to live long term since that is harder to change then getting another job in your city where you live.
3) At the same time it's hard to forecast what a place is going to be like over a lifetime. I liked the place I grew up then but wouldn't like it now (it also wasn't always a one party dem state). California used to be the Reagan Dream and nots is Newsome's California. The same things could happen to Florida or TX long term.
4) It seems like my own small town went though a change in the last decade. Newcomers from DC voted in a new mayor that is leftist and anti-development. Many of them don't have families here and don't even live here every day (its like a vacation home on the weekends from Alexandria), but they vote.
5) One of the main problems in the south is they have very large school districts. In the Northeast most school districts are town based (each town has its own elementary, middle, and high school). This leads to better governance, but the less populated south did school districts at the county level.
In my experience the decisive factor is demographics - the neighbours. I don’t refer to race, but to standards of hygiene, behaviour, respect for the local and others, criminal activity.
I wonder - did they control for the wealth of the "progressives" vs "conservatives"?
Seems there is an obvious conflation as conservatives are on average less wealthy. ¿no?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/15/upshot/migrations-college-super-cities.html
COVID destroyed coastal blue cities. At first the lower middle class moved away but not college grads don't want to live there either.
What makes the NY/CA situation different from what you would predict is the role of the federal government. The worse the citizenry in NY/CA, the more federal money comes in. They are optimizing for federal subsidies (hence pro-indigent policies etc.) and not for anything like economic growth.
I exited MoCo for a low-tax state. I miss the amenities of my old neighborhood, but to paraphrase something Bret Weinstein said about leaving Portland, I wouldn't patronize a restaurant that billed me for a meal that it never provided. Crime was on the rise. When car thefts escalate to armed carjackings, it is time to leave. Being mugged in another region of the country back in my youth taught me that affluent areas can be a magnet for criminals from less affluent surrounding areas, so living in 'very white neighborhoods' in the DC area doesn't necessarily insulate you from crime. With Governor RINO gone, I figure the last remaining restraint on wasteful spending at the state level is also gone. Another concern was the seemingly endless pipeline of 'luxury' high-rise apartment buildings that were mushrooming all over the neighborhood. The development model seemed to embody a 'field of dreams' mentality that doesn't make any sense to me.
Good essay, but it seems to mix different issues:
Rich progressives move away from diverse cities and neighborhoods?
Rich progressives move away from poor value for money cities?
Non-rich, non-progressives move away from poor value for money cities?
The foot-voting is something urbanists don't/won't talk about. A quick hand-wave and on to the next topic.
I have a lot of confirmation bias with all of this, especially as an adopted Floridian, someone with too much mood affiliation, and my vast preference for exit over voice. But I question the importance of the wealth movement chart because of the tax base of Florida being so reliant on regressive consumption (sales) taxes and property taxes. Also, some 15 to 20 years ago the biggest predictors/correlates for population growth within the US were higher mean temperatures in January and home prices. People looked at the sunbelt growth and talked about taxes probably more than was warranted.
In the end, exit to a different town or state won't matter- the federal government will grow and grow and grow. Increasingly, Texas will turn purplish as Georgia and Arizona has undergone the last decade, then blue (Florida is already purplish and has been for almost 3 decades). That is the thing about progressives- they don't tolerate the existence of non-progressive jurisdictions, and they control the education of the children pretty much everywhere today.
Looking at a St. Louis map, University City is almost right next to Clayton. I find it hard to believe house prices could be so different. Arnold, I'd love to see you run the experiment again with present data. (I don't know how to get the data and am not willing to put in the time and effort to learn how.)