Thread by @ElonBachman

1\ Far from an original observation, but I keep thinking about what the advent of the "Gig economy" means for the value proposition of "citizenship"

2\ Under the old model, citizens (and particularly knowledge workers) were bound by financial and commercial ties to one city or country

Politicians used these monopolies to extract taxes, in exchange for which they provided sub-par services

It was a thinly disguised shakedown

3\ Now, hipster/bourgeois culture is global

You can land most places, take an Uber (or a local clone) to an AirBNB, use a food delivery app to order a poke bowl, find a date on Tinder, and then use the cloud to collaborate with co-workers in other countries

4\ A generation ago, there were maybe a half dozen Tier 1 global cities in the cultural mainstream. You had to live in one of them.

Today, there are scores of these cities in dozens of countries, some with better public infrastructure than is available in the sclerotic west

5\ With human capital increasingly mobile, "Passport as a Service" is possible, and it is putting taxing authorities in competition with each other

Californians leaving for Texas, New Yorkers leaving for Puerto Rico or St Kitts, Africans leaving for Mauritius

6\ As ever, when suppliers compete, consumers win

When public schools must compete with e-learning, when SF must compete with Miami, when the US must compete with St Kitts, citizens win

The race is on for better government services, supplied more efficiently

7\ Nobody has to understand this process for it to "evolve" towards efficiency

Californians who move to TX may indeed vote for the same policies that ruined SF, but as long as there is emigration, there is "selective pressure" for polities that chance into good fiscal policies

8\ 200 countries means 200 Petri Dishes in which different policies can be blindly explored

Rwanda, an unthinkable dystopia 20 years ago, is today called (perhaps with a touch of exaggeration), the "Singapore of Africa"

But some countries WILL get it right

9\9 Making big macro predictions is a guaranteed way to end up looking foolish

But I can't help wondering if the globalization of human capital is following fast on the heels of globalization of trade, leading to secular decline in taxes just as global trade exported deflation