1. I have been having conversations with academics, thinkers & journalists today spurred by my piece on the mobility of the 1% in @CityLab today. A few more thoughts based on that.

2. State/local tax differentials are a BIG driver of these moves. But maybe there's something else, even more insidious going on. Maybe parts of the capitalist class are declaring a "capital strike" on certain progressive cities. Not saying this is the case, but hear me out ...

3. This has happened before. I started by career studying the deindustrialization of the Midwest by auto & heavy industrial companies. Why did these companies leave Detroit & other Rustbelt cities: Labor Costs & Labor Regulation ... Stock answer. Not controversial.

4. The late great Mancur Olson dubbed these institutional rigidities. When I studies cross border "transplant" investment in auto industry (wrote a book on this with Martin Kenney) we found key reason companies put plants offshore was to evade labor climate/ regulation ...

5. Now think of what has been going on in progressive cities like San Fran, NYC and Seattle. Ask yourself: what was Amazon HQ2 really about? Why move an HQ from Seattle? And why & when pull our of NYC?

6. In his book, Why Cities Lose? Jonathan Rodden documents in painstaking detail how left-leaning major urban centers have become relative to the median voter, never mind the median capitalist.

7. Now add in protests over Big Tech, protests over shuttle busses, NIMBYism, etc ... Which are the segments of capital who seem to be relocating - Big Tech and Real Estate/Finance ...

8. Maybe it's "just" taxes ... or maybe its part of the capitalist class trying to send a message. If it is the latter, hold on to your hats, because given the political make-up of superstar cities, these battles are likely to deepen.