Why People Migrate From Less Market-Friendly to More Market-Friendly Societies

How much money you make in a sufficiently free and fair market economy is correlated with how much value you create because people’s willingness to pay for something is correlated with how much they value it. Just as how many medals you win in a sufficiently free and fair Olympic Games is correlated with how good of an athlete you are; How many citations you get in a sufficiently free and fair academic field is correlated with how good of a researcher you are; How many paintings you have in galleries in a sufficiently free and fair art scene is correlated with how good of an artist you are etc. In sufficiently free and fair domains, outcomes are correlated with skill, which means there’s an incentive to better yourself, which in turn betters society.

There are can interesting multi-level dynamics where policies tend to drift away from market-friendliness within countries because of systematic confusion about economics, while at the same time people tend to migrate from the least to the most market-friendly societies due to their increased opportunity and prosperity. Which effect dominates determines whether the world as a whole become more/less market-friendly over time.