The importance of Tiebout effects
An excellent little piece of cheering news about what this coming century holds for us:
When I was done with In 100 Years, one prediction stuck in my mind more than any other. It was the mathematical economists Mas-Colell who, almost in passing, wrote, “I believe that Tiebout effects will be increasingly felt on a global scale.” He should know, having long been involved in government, in Brussels and his native Catalonia Spain. As the Wiki says, Charles Tiebout is the economist fundamentally associated with the concept of voting with one’s feet. His Tiebout model was designed to show how people choose their communities, within limits, simply by relocating and choosing to pay higher or lower taxes and prices (or immigrating, or simply fleeing, and choosing to bear greater risks). It’s the way suburbs emerge around cities – some with good schools and fancy houses, others with very low rents, and the rest at every stage in between. It covers refugee camps, too. That this ineluctable force of human nature will continue is the prediction I most confidently expect to pan out, in a century of global change.
For what this means is that free and liberal society will continue.
Think about what Tiebout really means: that people differ in their desires, differ in the trade offs they're willing to make. We all thus potter about looking for that set of circumstances that best suit us. It can be the trivial of making sure when young and dating that we live near the good booze and a decent supply of potentially willing sexual partners, moving out to calmer climes when we have chosen (or been chosen to) settle down, through to the ability of the self-appointed righteous to cluster together to congratulate themselves on their righteousness. Camden Council for example. This works on hte larger scale as well: we can and should be allowed to leave a political entity where those trade offs don't suit us.
As opposed to those (Camden again) who say that we all have to live by the same rules, make the same trade offs. And that's the cheering part of the above prediction. That if Tiebout is going to hold for this century then that means that we'll continue to have a free and liberal society this century.
Maybe.