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eli_sennesh comments on Non-standard politics - Less Wrong Discussion
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I would have to say: consequentialist, reflectively-coherent socialist. Marx's critiques of capitalism are mostly correct, the Soviet Union is entirely wrong, and for God's sakes, you don't get a correct politics by a priori political philosophy, you get one by looking at what makes a society people actually prefer to live in.
How do you measure what people prefer to live in, by where they move when given the chance, or by how they vote? The two tend to be very different.
I would say: usually by how they vote. While it's quite noisy, where people move is, to my best knowledge, driven strongly and chiefly by the ratio between real-estate prices and median incomes (as a measure of income distribution location, of course). If you measure that way, you'll mostly find that everyone prefers cheap land over all else.
In other words, they move to places where they can get well paying jobs (as measured against the local standard of living). So I would argue that the policies that lead to a society that people what to live in are those that are conducive to economic prosperity.
Those are not equivalent words for the same thing. In fact, they describe more-or-less the exact opposite phenomenon: land values push people to move to places where they personally will be further up in the local income distribution, and thus more able to purchase real-estate, rather than places with a higher expected productivity. If you don't believe me, go check the numbers: the Sun Belt areas (presuming we're talking about the USA) to which large amounts of migration happen have cheap land but low per-hour productivity, compared to California and the BosWash Corridor, which have very expensive real-estate but much higher per-hour productivity (in fact, which produce the mode of the value in the American economy!).
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.
Actually, hold on, jump out, meta-level question: why are you privileging the hypothesis that "voting with their feet" represents a reflectively-coherent all-else-equal preference anyway? It usually involves changing several variables quite a lot, all at once, some by the choice of the person moving and others for other reasons, with close correlations between many of these variables. In terms of extracting uncorrupted information about preferences, it's about as bad as any randomly-chosen Life Choice, and a lot worse than ushering a person into an isolated booth to have them anonymously fill out a questionnaire about their preferences over possible societies.
What evidence do you possess that locates "migration patterns reflect people's real preferences over societies" in the hypothesis space?
Well, for one thing "voting with one's feet" doesn't have the rational ignorance problem that voting does.
Which is not evidence regarding migration as a preference indicator. You're playing politics, not rationality.
What definition of "preference" are you using there? If I pick the vanilla rather than the chocolate ice cream, would you agree that this is evidence regarding my ice cream preference?
That depends: what system of incentives, ranging from monetary payment to a gun to your head, is acting to make you choose vanilla? People's real preferences are the ones they possess and exercise without external compulsion or incentive making some possibilities easier than others.
That's still evidence that the value of said incentives is larger than any preference I have for chocolate over vanilla.
Which is actually why those incentives are confounding factors when we're trying to measure your actual preferences.
Not if those same factors also show up it the decision you're planning to make based on those preferences.