New Graphic Depicts Gains and Losses of Millionaire Migration

Plus, subway immolation not fit to print

A newly released graphic depicts the flow of capital resulting from “millionaire migration,” the movement from “authoritarian regimes” to “havens of freedom.”

I can’t vouch for the details of the analysis either in terms of descriptions of particular regimes or dollar amounts, but the graphic is, in a general sense, pretty nifty, especially since the movement of talent and capital to places where they are well treated is a long-running theme here. (“The data support theoretical frameworks like Albert Hirschman’s idea of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty or, as Walter Wriston used to put it, capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well treated. The same is true of talent.”)

Also nifty is that the graphic, at Citizenx.com/exodus, is partly a marketing effort designed to attract attention to a platform that allows individuals to “diversify your passport portfolio” by claiming citizenship in various jurisdictions (not all of which are entirely “havens of freedom”).

For plenty of people citizenship involves a level of loyalty and patriotic national pride beyond simple tax minimization or freedom maximization. But the threat of an exodus can sometimes help provide pressure for good policy, or illustrate the consequences of bad policy. CitizenX is based in Switzerland.

Subway immolation not fit to print: Monday’s print New York Times managed to fail to include news of the woman who was killed by being set afire aboard an F train.

In what the Times published online, it seemed at pains to downplay the event. “Last year, overall crime in the transit system dropped nearly 3 percent compared with 2022 as the number of daily riders rose by 14 percent. According to a Dec. 18 news release from the governor’s office, subway crime was down 42 percent since 2021 while ridership has increased 148 percent,” the Times said. The Times also says the man found with a lighter and taken into custody as a suspect in the attack “emigrated from Guatemala to the United States in 2018,” without specifying whether he was a legal or illegal immigrant.

It was already clear Sunday afternoon that this was a significant story. Rep. Ritchie Torres posted to social media about it. “In New York, dangerous people are allowed to freely roam the subway. Yet the political establishment insists on gaslighting the public with deceptive headlines: ‘crime is down’ and ‘the subways are safe.’”

New York City Council Member Vickie Paladino also posted to social media about it: “I'm willing to bet right now that the man responsible either has a long list of arrests and releases for crimes that a decade ago would have landed him in prison, or is in the country illegally, or both. It’s a virtual certainty. This is what progressives have done to us. And they don’t care….This is a deep, systemic progressive rot that permeates our entire government.”

Whatever explanatory framework you eventually place this one in, depending on what the facts turn out to be—illegal immigration, crime, deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill—do not forget the box of “decline of the New York Times’ interest in local news in New York City and in the print newspaper as a timely delivery system for that news.” You wonder if it had been an anti-immigrant Trump supporter lighting an immigrant aflame at 7:30 on a Sunday morning, or if it had happened in Park Slope or the Upper West Side rather than far out toward Coney Island on the F train, whether the Times would have found some way to get it into the next morning’s newspaper.

Read at least two newspapers: The Saturday Wall Street Journal: “Favored Measure of Inflation Increased Less Than Expected in November.”

The Saturday New York Times: “Federal Reserve’s Preferred Measure of Inflation Accelerated in November.”

The Journal does a better job of capturing how the market greeted the news, but the situation is a good reminder of why it pays to seek out multiple sources rather than rely only on one.

Recent work: “New York Times Tackles ‘The Plight of the Palestinian Scientist’” is the headline over my latest piece for the Algemeiner. Please check it out over at the Algemeiner if you are interested in that sort of thing or in need of some comic relief.

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