The economic journalist David Warsh, in a recent column assessing a book in which leading economists make predictions about the next 100 years, concluded:
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, CharlesTiebout 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.
Just in time to make Warsh look prescient comes this news from the International Tax Blog, via Tax Prof Paul Caron:
Today the Treasury Department published the names of individuals who renounced their U.S. citizenship or terminated their long-term U.S. residency ("expatriated") during the first quarter of 2014.
The number of published expatriates for the quarter was 1,001. This is the second highest quarterly number of published expatriates ever and is only surpassed by the second quarter of 2013. ... Last year there was a record setting 2,999 published expatriates. With just over 1,000 expatriates in the first quarter, 2014 may very well set another record.
I suppose a more accurate measure would take into account not just the raw number of expatriates but the number for every 100 million Americans, or something like that, so that the record-setting relates not just to normal population growth but to some conditions that make other places unusually more attractive relative to America. But even with that caveat, "voting with one's feet" is indeed an important way to vote.