Foot Voting > Ballot Voting
2020-05-14 · Guest: Ilya Somin (George Mason University) · 52:12
Foot Voting Migration and Political Freedom
This episode features Professor Ilya Somin of George Mason University discussing his book, Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. Bob and Ilya explore why “foot voting”—the ability to choose which government to live under by moving—is often a more effective and informed mechanism for political freedom than traditional ballot box voting. They also delve into the economic and moral implications of internal and international migration, as well as the regulatory barriers like zoning and occupational licensing that restrict human mobility.
Topics: Foot Voting, Federalism, Migration, Occupational Licensing, Zoning, Economic Freedom, Constitutional Law, International Migration, Zero-Sum Fallacy, Kelo v. City of New London
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Ilya Somin
Enumerated vs. Unenumerated Rights [00:00]
Intro Voiceover: You’re listening to the Bob Zadek Show, a full hour of libertarian discussion with the smartest guests on radio. Live, spontaneous, and thoughtful, it’s the show of ideas, not attitude. Now, your host, Bob Zadek.
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. We are this Sunday live, every Sunday live. Thank you so much for listening this morning. We are always the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, protect all of us positively against the intrusion of government in our lives. And we are granted in the Bill of Rights what are called enumerated rights. Enumerated rights such as freedom of speech, of worship, of assembly, petition the government—they are positive, they are positive rights granted to us, and the government is forbidden from interfering with those important and cherished rights.
In addition to the enumerated rights, those specifically set forth in the Bill of Rights in the first eight amendments to the Bill of Rights, there are acknowledged to be, by strong Supreme Court precedent and political tradition, unenumerated rights. Rights that we clearly have that cannot be taken away from us except in the most extreme circumstances. Among those unenumerated rights, rights not specifically set forth in the Constitution but there nevertheless, is the right to travel, the right to move from one place to another. And as we will learn this morning, this is a right as important, if not more important, than even the right to vote. In fact, the right to move is the right to vote, but the freedom to move—voting with our feet—is a far more meaningful right for all of us to have because it gives us much more control over our political environment, over our lives in general, than the mere, dare I say mere, right to vote.
Defining Foot Voting [01:30]
Bob Zadek: To help us understand the importance, the significance of voting with one’s feet, the right to move from place to place, I’m happy to welcome back to the show this morning our guest, Ilya Somin. Ilya is a professor of law at George Mason University, and he is the author of, just published, Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. He has also written Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. He has also written The Grasping Hand, when he wrote about the infamous case of Kelo v. City of New London, which as we all know dealt with the issue of eminent domain. He’s co-authored A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Helo Conspiracy and the Healthcare Case. Ilya, you’ve been busy writing books. Thank heaven for that. Every time you write a book, I cannot wait to have you share what you have learned with our friends out there. So welcome to the show this morning.
Ilya Somin: Thank you very much for having me.
Bob Zadek: Now Ilya, your book Free to Move—that sounds like you may have borrowed a phrase from that wonderful Milton Friedman series on PBS called Free to Choose. Perhaps and perhaps not. Maybe “free to do anything” is an important topic for a book, but we sure are glad you wrote the book. Now tell us, please, for our friends out there, the concept of foot voting. What is the concept of foot voting, and why is it so important for us to preserve freedom in America, and why is it so important for our political and economic well-being?
Ilya Somin: Foot voting is simply your ability to choose what government policies you want to live under by deciding where you’re going to live or, in some cases, what kinds of governments or other services you want to make use of. So you can vote with your feet by deciding where you want to live in a federal system, in a different state or county or city. You can also vote with your feet through international migration. And indeed, the vast majority of Americans, they are in the US today because they or their ancestors voted with their feet for the United States over other countries.
And finally, I think in many cases you can vote with your feet in the private sector by, for example, choosing what private schools you might attend, choosing churches or other civil society organizations, and also often choosing to live in a private planned community like a condo association, for example, as almost 70 million Americans already do.
Foot Voting vs. Ballot Voting [03:55]
Ilya Somin: So foot voting has two major advantages over conventional ballot box voting, which is usually seen as the main mechanism that we have for political choice. One is that when you vote at the ballot box, you have only a tiny chance of actually determining the outcome. The chance that your vote will make a difference to the result of an election is extremely small, maybe about one in 60 million in a presidential election, for example. On the other hand, when you vote with your feet, that’s a choice that actually has a high likelihood of making a difference.
And in addition, precisely because voting with your feet is much more likely to make a difference, on the whole, people are more informed when they vote with their feet than when they vote at the ballot box. Lots of evidence indicates that most voters, when they vote at the ballot box, they know very little about the issues at stake. They often don’t even know very basic things about how the political system works, such as which officials are responsible for which issues. On the other hand, when they vote with their feet, on the whole, they take that much more seriously. They acquire more information because they know the decision will make a difference. If you’re like most people, you probably spent more time seeking out information the last time you decided what car or what smartphone to buy than the last time you decided who to vote for for president or in any other election. And that’s because you knew that the decision about the smartphone would actually make a difference, whereas if you flip on the smartphone and go to a news site and see the president, the chance that you can affect who that is is infinitesimally small.
Private Sector Foot Voting: Gated Communities [05:54]
Bob Zadek: Your example of moving or selecting a condo association or a condo in which to live, and therefore subject yourself to the rules of the association, was very helpful to me in really getting an intellectual grasp on the issue. And I said to myself, there are so many gated communities in America. Gated communities are simply communities that are organized where when you buy a house within the gated community—and I’m not focusing on the gated part of it, but I am focusing on the fact that once you do that, you sign on to some rules that actually limit your freedom. The rules might say you cannot have a pink house, unlike Ms. Kelo, you cannot have a pink house, or you must mow your lawn or else you get a fine, or things like that.
Now, if those rules sound annoying, well, you have no right to complain because you signed on to them. Everything was voluntary. So by moving into a gated or a private type community, you are voluntarily making a decision that overall, living with those rules and with the corresponding benefits are worth it. So you have voted with your feet. And in fact, I dare say gated communities and condo associations would see their market share decline if their rules were offensive or not, as we say in business, were not the market, were not what the market would expect. So in fact, we do have in America and in the rest of the world, I presume, competition where part of the competition, besides physical location and weather and golf courses and things of that nature, the competition is: move into our system because our rules are designed to provide benefit to the group and do not constrict your freedom so much that you will not want to live here. So voting with your feet is such an everyday event, as you have pointed out, for so many of us.
Historical Context and Federalism [08:20]
Bob Zadek: Now, voting with one’s feet happens in, and it’s especially important in, our system of federalism, where we have hopefully a substantial amount of the laws regulating us are passed at the state level under the state police power—although of course we have, Ilya, you and I would agree, too much power at the national level, which diminishes the value of foot voting because now the choice is to change countries, a far more dramatic activity than simply moving from state to state. So this, of course, the concept of foot voting goes hand in hand with the concept of federalism.
And we have had in our history, as you point out in your book, Ilya, from the Pilgrims on down—the Pilgrims were voting with their feet, of course, and we sort of take it for granted, of course they were. Indeed, Ilya, in our conversation, you mentioned that the only ones who didn’t vote with their feet were perhaps the Native Americans, but I think I read they crossed the Bering Strait from Russia, or many of them did, so they also voted with their feet, although they didn’t think they were doing that. So tell us about why foot voting is such an interesting concept in regulating, by people actually voting with their feet, the behavior of state governments and how important that has been in our political history.
Incentivizing Better Governance [09:50]
Ilya Somin: Foot voting does have an effect on the behavior of state and local governments in that if a state or locality is very unattractive to people, they will tend to lose population to other jurisdictions, and that in turn tends to erode their tax base and incentivizes them to improve their policies. There are examples of this actually happening. I don’t want to say this is by any means the only factor in the civil rights movement, but the South did lose a lot of its black population to the North and West in the first half of the 20th century, and this was part of the impetus for some people in the South beginning to be willing to rethink racial discrimination. Obviously, there was also pressure from the federal government on that.
In more recent years, high-tax states, also states with very high housing costs, have in some cases begun to make reforms in part because they lost population. But I would add that even if states and localities make no reforms whatsoever in response to foot voting pressure, there is still a lot of value to foot voting in that even if state and local policies are purely random or they’re purely determined by factors that have nothing to do with competition, still the opportunity to vote with your feet between jurisdictions with different policies offers you greater freedom than you would have through ballot box voting alone and enables many more people than would be the case otherwise to live in areas where they like the policies more. So I think when there is competition, that makes foot voting even more valuable, but even where there is not, it still has tremendous advantages.
Bob Zadek: And of course, in our history, we all know the story of the migration to the West as Americans living on the East Coast found the quality of life not to their liking and they moved West until they ran out of West and the West became populated. So that is a rich part of our history, and that was clearly foot voting. Also, we have the story of the Mormons who left the Northeast because they felt oppressed and they moved all the way to the Salt Lake City, to the Great Salt Lake area. That was nothing other than foot voting. And we have, of course, as many people are aware, there have been a well-publicized movement of New Yorkers or others from the highly taxed Northeast to low-tax states in Florida, of course, and others. So foot voting has always been an important part of our history, and it does—it takes place every day. I would refer our listeners to an article in today’s New York Times discussing and analyzing the movement, the coronavirus-induced movement, of course, of people, perhaps temporary, perhaps permanent, we’ll find out, to Florida and other states.
Constitutional Protections and Modern Barriers [13:00]
Bob Zadek: Now, you have mentioned in your book that even the mere fact that people can move, even if they don’t do it, is a factor that has an effect, perhaps more than people appreciate, in the behavior of governments. Tell us a bit about the mere threat or the possibility of people being able to move as it itself affects the behavior of governments. And also, Ilya, if you would, help us understand how that freedom of movement is discussed, is either enhanced or not, by the Constitution.
Ilya Somin: If the governments care about maintaining tax revenue and a labor force and the like, then the possibility that people can move if they don’t like their policies, to some extent at least, can deter them from enacting harmful policies in the first place. I don’t want to make too much of this because it isn’t always the case that state and local governments actually raise all or most of their own tax revenue; sometimes they can get a lot of it from the central government, so that may tamp down these incentives to try to anticipate what foot voters might want.
But at the margin, I think it certainly has an effect. How is this enhanced by the Constitution? Well, at least as interpreted over the last 150 years or so, the Constitution does give people a right to freedom of movement within the United States, and that prevents state governments or local governments from either fencing out people or locking their people in, so to speak, and therefore enhances competition. Though as we’ll discuss a little later, it is unfortunate that many state and local governments have indirectly made movement more difficult through such policies as restrictive zoning, occupational licensing, and others. But at least we don’t have what existed during the pre-Civil War period in the US where some states actually actively excluded some people, and also of course slavery prevented millions of people from being able to move at all. And we don’t have the kind of situation that exists in some developing nations where regional governments make migration extremely difficult. Obviously, our system could use improvement on that front because we do have some indirect barriers to mobility which have become a real problem.
Restrictive Zoning and Entry Barriers [15:45]
Bob Zadek: And just a few examples, Ilya—there are so many—of how much governments, whether they are state governments or national governments, countries, fear foot voting. Think of nothing other than the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was built in fear of foot voting. Nobody was particularly happy living on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall in East Germany. It was a failed government, and a great majority would have loved to have left, and that was so feared a wall was built to keep them in. Think about pre-fall of the Soviet Union, fall of the USSR, when the USSR prohibited outward immigration. It barred many of its citizens from leaving the country because it was going to suffer, it knew it, a massive brain drain.
And Ilya, as you have mentioned, states also in recognition of the power of foot voting, they have become somewhat clever, dare I say sinister, at coming up with tools—governmental taxation tools—to prevent or punish foot voting. Tell us, Ilya, in your research, what you have discovered that states have come up with to deny people the right to vote, albeit vote with their feet. What are some of the tools that states have invented to build their own taxation-type Berlin Walls?
Ilya Somin: Today, most of the problems that we have with state and local policy that impede foot voting are not so much barriers to people leaving as barriers to people entering. Just as we have the Berlin Wall internationally, which is an effort to keep people from leaving, we also have, of course, things like the wall that Trump is trying to build on the southern border or other migration barriers to keep people from entering. And at the state level and local level, we often have that as well. There are a variety of policies which function that way, but the most significant in terms of its effect is restrictive zoning, in that in many places which would otherwise be very attractive to migrants, state and local governments, particularly local governments, have set up barriers to the construction of new housing.
This is particularly true in large cities in California and also some on the East Coast where, because it’s extremely expensive and very difficult to build new housing, if more people want to move in, housing prices rapidly increase and there’s little or no ability to build new housing to meet the new demand. As a result, many millions of people are priced out of living in places like the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, and elsewhere where otherwise there would be attractive job opportunities for them. That is a major barrier to foot voting. It also, of course, makes all of us poorer because those people end up being trapped in parts of the country where they’re less productive, and that not only reduces their incomes but also makes all the rest of us poorer because, of course, if those people are less productive, that’s a diminution of the entire economy, not just of their own particular incomes.
The Problem with Occupational Licensing [18:50]
Ilya Somin: There are a number of other barriers as well. For example, states have state-by-state occupational licensing. About 30% of Americans have to have a license to do their jobs, and often the way state occupational licensing works, it’s a kind of protectionist barrier protecting incumbent workers in that profession from competition from others that move in from other states. So what we have is these indirect barriers. Often they weren’t necessarily set up for the specific purpose intentionally of keeping out migrants; there are various complicated political forces that led to their establishment, though in the case of early zoning at least, often that was in fact the goal to keep poor people out or keep African Americans out. But whatever the motive, it does have that effect, and it’s a kind of indirect border barrier, if you will, that if it’s not possible for you to find housing in the place that you want to move to, often that’s almost as effective a barrier as if you’re physically prevented from moving there.
Bob Zadek: And without spending too much time on the issue, Ilya, you are so aware of which is occupational licensing and all of the negative consequences of that system. Without spending too much time on it, it is a system which harms the public at large. It harms most people to benefit the few because it builds monopolies—it’s a guild mentality—and it denies most citizens access to the competition among professionals, which means better quality service and lower prices. So it is a system which governments impose upon citizens done because of regulatory capture, because certain powerful occupational groups are able to persuade the legislature to protect their livelihood, protect their income. It is a case of what economists call concentrated benefit and diffuse cost. The cost to the public is kind of hard to see—it’s unseen, in the words of Frédéric Bastiat—it is an unseen but very pervasive cost, but nobody feels it day by day. But the benefits are given to a few people whose occupation is protected and therefore the few people who benefit can afford to spend a relatively large amount of money to lobby for those benefits. So it is a somewhat obscene system which is starting to wither and to fall. Many organizations have been attacking it frontally with growing success.
So occupational licensing, Ilya, is kind of strange because it prevents—it doesn’t allow a license to be a nurse to transfer from one state to another even though there’s no reason to think that standards vary very much. And as a result of which, during the virus, when a lot of these rules were rescinded, albeit temporarily, it was rescinded because states didn’t have enough nurses. So it was a very—the effect of the virus on licensing statutes has been quite interesting during this period of the virus.
Ilya Somin: Yeah, so there have been some states that were hard hit by the virus, like New York for example, which have temporarily suspended these restrictions on nurses, doctors, and other medical professionals from other states coming in and practicing medicine. To my mind, if doctors from outside of New York or nurses from outside of New York are competent to practice to deal with this novel, horrible disease that not much is known about, then it seems like they should be competent to practice in New York to deal with more conventional health problems that the medical profession is more familiar with. But we’ll see if this leads to any long-term reform in this area or not. Often measures taken during emergencies become permanent even if they’re actually harmful measures. If this becomes permanent, it would actually be a rare case of a beneficial emergency measure that became permanent, and so we’ll have to see what happens.
International Migration as Foot Voting [23:20]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, and I’m spending the hour speaking with Ilya Somin. Ilya has just published, hot off the presses, Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. In his book, Ilya discusses the powerful, the powerful—far more than ballot box voting—how powerful foot voting is or the threat of voting with one’s feet is on the behavior of governments and how crucial the right to move from place to place is to preserve freedom.
We will discuss the immigration and international effects of foot voting and how essential it is to human freedom, the right and the power to vote with one’s feet. Immigration has been in the news regretfully far too much, compliments of President Trump’s very aggressive, very aggressive campaign against what seems to be all forms of immigration. And you have written in your book and elsewhere passionately about the utter cruelty of what seems to be our present national position on immigration. And immigration, of course, is relevant because it is foot voting, but it’s not merely moving from New York to Montana. It is moving across the globe to a place where you don’t speak the language and don’t know the culture and are doing so clearly at great threat to your family and yourself just to start a new life, just to experience freedom. So tell us about what immigration tells us about foot voting and tell us how that shows how essential it is to human freedom, the right and the power to vote with one’s feet.
Ilya Somin: One of the key points of my book is that there’s a fundamental similarity between foot voting through international migration and foot voting internally within a single country in a federal system, that in both cases it provides opportunities for political freedom, also opportunity to enhance your economic situation and your liberty more generally. So it’s ironic that these two issues are usually discussed separately and that people on the right who tend to like internal foot voting and boast about, for example, how Texas is gaining migrants from blue states, they often view with great suspicion international migration. And people on the left often have the reverse set of attitudes.
So there is this fundamental similarity, but one key difference is that the gains to be had from free international migration are actually much larger than those from internal foot voting because the difference between the best American state and the worst one, whatever ones they are, that difference is small compared to the differences between countries. Even the worst American state is not nearly as bad as Cuba or Venezuela or Haiti. So a person who moves to the US from Venezuela or from Cuba experiences a massive increase in their freedom in a way that is almost impossible to replicate through any kind of internal migration or really through anything else that we could do for that person.
And in addition, there are vast differences in productivity and institutions between countries which ensure that international migration, if freed up, can massively increase the wealth and productivity of the world. We talked earlier about people moving from one state to another where there are greater economic opportunities; those gaps are much bigger between countries. So economists estimate that if we had free migration throughout the world, we could approximately double world GDP. That is, the world would be about twice as wealthy as it currently is, primarily because there are so many places in the world where people live in situations where, no matter how smart they are, how hard-working they are, they just can’t be very productive because of the horrible political institutions in those countries. If you live in North Korea or in Cuba or in Venezuela or Haiti or other countries with horrible governments, there’s very little chance that you can be productive. On the other hand, if you get to move to the US, to Western Europe, or to other countries with better institutions, almost right away you can be two, three, or four times more productive than you were before. If you multiply that out over many millions of people, you right away get this massive increase in wealth, and that doesn’t even count the fact that obviously people can improve their skills, their knowledge, and so forth when they move to a country with better institutions. And it doesn’t count how many people’s opportunities are stifled by the fact that they’re oppressed on the basis of religion or ethnicity or other factors in their home country, and if they move to countries which are freer, that both diminishes the oppression but also enables them to be more productive. For obvious reasons, for example, a woman could be more productive on the whole in a Western nation than they can be, say, in Saudi Arabia where women’s opportunities are severely restricted by the government, and there are many other examples like that. So international migration is this tremendous tool for enhancing political choice and political freedom, for enhancing freedom more generally, and for making the world vastly richer than it would be otherwise.
The Feudalism of Birthright Citizenship [28:45]
Bob Zadek: And of course, if one believes that humans have an inherent right to try to improve their lot and to move from place to place for whatever reason—and who can deny it?—if we believe that, then isn’t it hypocritical for us to say, “Okay, we Americans, we humans, recognize that all humans have an inherent right to move, except you can’t move to the United States because it might create competitive pressure for a job,” which Ilya, we will discuss in a moment. But just on the human level, on the “let’s not be hypocritical” level, it’s profoundly immoral to acknowledge the freedom of movement in general and yet to deny freedom of movement if the movement is into the United States. And speak, if you will, to that core, the value concept of freedom of movement on an individual level. And also, Ilya, help our listeners understand and please speak to the alleged negative economic consequences that some Americans might suffer as a result of free immigration into our country.
Ilya Somin: As you suggest, many people’s attitudes towards immigration are at odds with sort of more general principles that we apply elsewhere. One of them is that we generally assume that there’s a right to freedom of movement and that people can move, say, from California to Texas or vice versa, and we object if the government or anybody uses force to prevent them from doing that. And yet when it comes to international migration, our attitude tends to be different, and we tend to assume that people can only move if they have the permission of the government and that permission can be withheld for almost any reason the government wants.
Similarly, in most contexts, we believe that it’s wrong for the government to restrict people’s freedom based on their race or ethnicity or who their parents are. We very much object to, say, the feudal system that existed in medieval Europe where if you were a lord, you could move around freely and do what you wanted, but most people were serfs and so they were only able to move around if their master let them. And we say that’s horrible and oppressive. And similarly, we object to systems like racial and ethnic segregation where where you live was determined by who your parents are—were your parents white or black? On the other hand, our entire immigration system, most of it at least, is precisely determined by where you were born or who your parents were. If you were born on the wrong side of a line on a map or your parents were not US citizens, then most likely you’re not allowed to move or live to the United States unless you get some kind of special permission, much like serfs in the Middle Ages could only move if they got special permission or if their lord decided to free them. So it seems like this is an exception both to our principle of freedom of movement and also to our principle that your rights should not be determined by who your parents were, where you were born, or other such morally irrelevant factors that you can’t control.
The Zero-Sum Fallacy and Competition [32:15]
Ilya Somin: And in general, most of the arguments that are used to justify restricting international migration could be used to justify restricting internal migration as well. You mentioned the issue of jobs. If a person moves from West Virginia to the state of Virginia where I live, that person might compete with native-born Virginians for jobs, yet almost nobody would say that means the West Virginian should be prevented from moving. As to economic consequences, it is not my claim that nobody ever suffers negative economic consequences from international migration or for that matter from internal migration. There are some people who compete for jobs with recent immigrants. However, if you look at the studies on this, first, the number of people who suffer because they’re exposed to competition is vastly outweighed by the number of people who benefit from migration because of all the extra wealth it creates.
Moreover, with recent immigrants, the people they are most likely to compete for jobs with are actually other recent immigrants who came just before them. It’s much less common for them to compete with natives because often immigrants and natives are in somewhat different job markets, at least at first. And moreover, to the extent that you’re concerned about people whose incomes are reduced, there are lots of ways to address that short of banning migrants. I discuss several of those strategies in the book, but one obvious one is that you could simply impose a surtax on immigrant wages and use the money to subsidize whatever native workers you think are being short-changed. I don’t claim this policy is optimal, but it is certainly vastly better for both immigrants and natives than just categorically excluding people. But because immigration creates so much new wealth and productivity for the vast majority of both immigrants and natives, they will be better off, and some of that wealth, if necessary, can be tapped to address those people who are exceptions to that general principle. I would add also, again, that if you believe that people do not have a right to be protected from competition for jobs with other natives, it’s not clear why there’s a right to be protected from competition for jobs by immigrants. If somebody from West Virginia can come in and compete with me for a job, it’s not clear why things should be different if it’s someone from Cuba or from Mexico or the like. The effect on me is exactly the same.
Bob Zadek: And to just to embellish a little bit your point that you cannot look at the single job that’s lost, every industrial innovation—the combine replacing the plow, the plow replacing the hoe—every innovation, there were people who lost their job. Does anybody out there think we have to criminalize innovation lest somebody lose their job? Well, obviously not because the collective benefit is overwhelming. So therefore you cannot focus on the individual job which is lost. And just one more comment: I despise the comment of “my job,” a person’s job. Nobody owns a job. Nobody owns the right to employment, putting aside artificial aspects like union contracts and the like. You only are entitled to a job if the person you are working for, the person you are serving, has decided that you are the best person at the lowest price to perform a function. You never own a job; there is no such concept as “your job.” It happens to be the place you are working at the moment and so long as you continue to be entitled to that economically, it’ll remain your job, otherwise not.
COVID-19 and the Future of Urban Agglomeration [36:30]
Bob Zadek: Now Ilya, just because it’s been in the news a lot, obviously, the coronavirus. Now there have been at the state level lots of movement of people from state to state. We can’t tell if it’s temporary or permanent as a result of the virus. I commented on an earlier show and we discussed briefly the fact that it looks like fewer people will be working in downtown offices—that’s a movement that’s just beginning—working from home. Once you work from home, you don’t have to live near where you work, therefore there’s no reason to live in a crowded apartment in New York City; you can live anywhere and do the same job. I speculated that whether that will result in a permanent movement of humans from crowded downtown cities to more comfortable living environments somewhere else in the country, whether that will result in a loss of economic power, a loss of political power, a dispersion of power throughout the country and away from the cities—I got pretty excited about that. You kind of calmed me down a bit, Ilya. Now help our friends out there understand your view of maybe that I’m a bit off, maybe a lot off, on my somewhat excited prediction.
Ilya Somin: So predictions are dangerous or difficult to make, particularly predictions about the future. We don’t really know yet what will be the long-term effects of the coronavirus crisis. I partly agree with you that it is likely that there are some jobs that can be done as well or almost as well from home as they can be from an office in a big city, and maybe the crisis will accelerate our recognition of those jobs. On the other hand, there’s a lot of evidence that many people can be more productive if they live in areas where there’s lots of other people, either in the same industry or in closely related industries. There are what economists call agglomerations, like Silicon Valley, for example, that many people in the high-tech industry, they can be more productive if they live there than if they’re, say, in the middle of rural Montana or somewhere else. And there’s a lot of situations where face-to-face interaction with other people in the same job improves your productivity, makes you happier, and so forth. I think this isn’t true of every industry, certainly, and maybe over time technology can reduce the need for it.
But overall, I think setting aside the virus for a moment to the extent that’s possible, we’re still in a situation where it’s a bigger problem that there are serious barriers like zoning that we talked about earlier to people moving to places where they can take advantage of agglomeration more, than that there’s the flip side of some people being in agglomeration areas who probably don’t really need to be there to be productive. So I think we have some of both, but I’m for the moment at least skeptical that the real problem is that too many people are living in big cities or in agglomeration areas. To the contrary, my concern is that too few people have access to some of those places. Now obviously, if the virus is a problem that will be here for many years, if we don’t get a vaccine or other ways to mitigate it, then that’s a downside to living in dense urban areas that is relatively new and therefore might be an additional reason for people not to do it. But if so, I think that would be something of a tragedy in that essentially it would mean that this public health threat is a barrier both to human happiness and to human productivity.
Bob Zadek: Ilya, we’re going to run out of time. I just want to take our last few minutes to thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time. Ilya’s book is a must-read: Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. Thanks so much to my friend Ilya Somin for sharing his wisdom with us, and thanks to my friends out there for joining us.
Ilya Somin: Thank you very much for having me.
Bob Zadek: I’ll be back again next Sunday.