If you measure that way, you’ll mostly find that everyone prefers cheap land over all else.
Land is cities isn’t cheap and still more people move to cities than vice versa.
The interesting question is whether if someone takes a job in Dubai and then goes and pays taxes there instead of living in the US or a European country it means that he supports that political system.
Defacto he supports it but he likely doesn’t vote that way.
Furthermore if people move around mainly based on median incomes, shouldn’t politicians maximize public policy to maximize median incomes? Basically what the Chinese leadership tries to do?
The interesting question is whether if someone takes a job in Dubai and then goes and pays taxes there instead of living in the US or a European country it means that he supports that political system. Defacto he supports it but he likely doesn’t vote that way.
As you said, he likely does not have a coherent preference for Dubai’s system. I don’t see why it’s an interesting question.
Land is cities isn’t cheap and still more people move to cities than vice versa.
More people move to cities than vice-versa right now, in current employment conditions. There was a time of “white flight” from the central cities into the suburbs, you know. Furthermore, if you look at which cities the migrations are headed towards, it’s usually actually the cheaper ones: the expensive areas are undergoing a net-loss of population over time, despite being exactly the places that everyone says they want to move to.
So you could go with a “revealed preferences” model of preference measurement in politics, but I don’t think it’s very useful: economic “revealed” preferences are conditioned on people’s current available income and assets, and politics contains the business of how we assign incomes and assets as a society. If people appear to move to cheap land, this does not indicate a terminal preference for cheap land as such, it indicates that their resource availability constraints make cheap land into a subgoal stomp—they’re trading off what they really want for what they can get.
As you said, he likely does not have a coherent preference for Dubai’s system. I don’t see why it’s an interesting question.
They’re more coherent than the preferences revealed by polls. It’s fairly well known that polls can be made to produce vastly different results by slight reformulations of the question.
economic “revealed” preferences are conditioned on people’s current available income and assets
In other words, when revealed and stated preferences disagree it means that people’s stated preferences lead to results that the person isn’t willing or able to actually live with.
Land is cities isn’t cheap and still more people move to cities than vice versa.
The interesting question is whether if someone takes a job in Dubai and then goes and pays taxes there instead of living in the US or a European country it means that he supports that political system. Defacto he supports it but he likely doesn’t vote that way.
Furthermore if people move around mainly based on median incomes, shouldn’t politicians maximize public policy to maximize median incomes? Basically what the Chinese leadership tries to do?
As you said, he likely does not have a coherent preference for Dubai’s system. I don’t see why it’s an interesting question.
More people move to cities than vice-versa right now, in current employment conditions. There was a time of “white flight” from the central cities into the suburbs, you know. Furthermore, if you look at which cities the migrations are headed towards, it’s usually actually the cheaper ones: the expensive areas are undergoing a net-loss of population over time, despite being exactly the places that everyone says they want to move to.
So you could go with a “revealed preferences” model of preference measurement in politics, but I don’t think it’s very useful: economic “revealed” preferences are conditioned on people’s current available income and assets, and politics contains the business of how we assign incomes and assets as a society. If people appear to move to cheap land, this does not indicate a terminal preference for cheap land as such, it indicates that their resource availability constraints make cheap land into a subgoal stomp—they’re trading off what they really want for what they can get.
Because moving to Dubai isn’t really something you do by accident. It takes a quite deliberate choice.
People move for work all the time without their choice representing a coherent ceteris paribus preference.
They’re more coherent than the preferences revealed by polls. It’s fairly well known that polls can be made to produce vastly different results by slight reformulations of the question.
In other words, when revealed and stated preferences disagree it means that people’s stated preferences lead to results that the person isn’t willing or able to actually live with.