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Azathoth123 comments on Non-standard politics - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: NancyLebovitz 24 October 2014 03:27PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 29 October 2014 03:09:47PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Azathoth123 30 October 2014 02:37:55AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 October 2014 08:08:32AM -1 points [-]

In other words, they move to places where they can get well paying jobs (as measured against the local standard of living).

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!).