eli_sennesh comments on Non-standard politics - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.