One of the messages of doom that were widely broadcast about what might happen should Zohran Mamdani win the mayoral election in New York City was that wealthy people might leave the city in droves because of the higher taxes he was promising to levy on them in order to fund some of the social programs that would benefit ordinary people. Such scare tactics to keep the wealthy happy are not uncommon. While some might view the departure of these people as not a bad thing, Cristobal Young, a sociologist at Cornell University, and others have looked into this claim and find that it lacks evidence in support.

I research whether high earners actually move when their taxes go up. My colleagues and I have analyzed millionaire taxes in New Jersey and California, the migration of Forbes billionaires globally and decades of IRS data tracing where Americans with million-dollar incomes live.

Top earners are often thought of as “mobile millionaires” who are ever searching for lower-tax places to live. In reality, they’re often reluctant to leave the places where they built their careers and raised their families.
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The first fact is simple: Millionaires have low migration rates.

Mobility in America is highest among people who are still searching for their economic place in life. Workers who earn the lowest wages move across state lines at relatively high rates, about 4.5% per year, often in search of more affordable housing. People making $1 million-plus a year move only half as often: Just 2.4% of them pack up each year.

When millionaires do move, it rarely appears to be for tax reasons.
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Overall, only about 15% of millionaires who move end up with a lower tax bill. That shows the rich are willing and able to move for tax reasons. But because only about 2.4% of millionaires move each year – and only a fraction of those moves reduce their taxes – overall tax migration ends up being a small fraction of a small fraction. Not never, but not often.

So who are the people who do migrate and why?

Migration is mostly a young person’s game.

The most mobile Americans are recent college graduates who are brimming with potential, searching for work and unburdened by major responsibilities. Their rate of migration from one state to another is over 12%, more than four times the rate of millionaires.

The typical adult mover is about 30 years old, while the highest income earners are typically about 50. People choose where to build their careers and families decades before they reach their peak earnings phase.

By the time someone earns enough to be taxed in the highest brackets, they’re usually late into their careers. They are almost always married, often have children at home, own their homes and, in many cases, own a business. Their social lives and their economic success are linked to local networks of colleagues, clients and connections built up over a long career. Moving away from those networks means giving up a great deal of social capital and starting over somewhere new.

Top earners know that some states have lower taxes, but for most, tax flight is simply a bad deal. The social and economic costs of uprooting are bigger than the tax savings.

They point to one time in recent history where rich people did move quite a bit to low tax parts of the country and that was in 2020 when the Covid pandemic hit.

Offices emptied out, with entry swipes in major cities dropping by nearly 90%. Time spent at work fell sharply, local amenities were shuttered, and time spent alone grew as in-person contact became a health risk. K–12 schools closed, disrupting children’s relationships with teachers and classmates.

For many households, this was also a strange form of freedom, and a chance to rethink the geography of work and life, especially for top earners who could work remotely from anywhere. Disconnected from the bonds of place, top earners moved and clearly favored low-tax destinations.
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When the pandemic broke apart so much of social life, the ledger shifted. If your office, school, friendships and daily routines no longer anchor you in place, what is keeping you in a high-tax place?

But by early 2023, as social and economic life returned to normal, we found that millionaire migration patterns mostly reverted to their prepandemic baselines.

In other words, the surge in tax flight was temporary.

He says that Mamdani’s affordability plans are aimed at recruiting the right people.

The real opportunity lies in attracting and retaining the next generation of top earners – young people who are unattached to place and looking for opportunities to build their careers and their lives. Places that draw young professionals build the pipeline of future top earners.

Those early-career folks are mobile, but they are not thinking about the top tax rate. Their salaries are low. They are trying to find good jobs, pay the rent, form relationships and start families. They hope to be successful enough to one day be paying Mamdani’s millionaire tax. For the time being, though, they need the basic costs of living to be manageable. Soon they will need affordable child care and good public schools for their kids.

If the city helps them that far along, many of them would gladly pay a millionaire tax when and if the time comes. In this light, the Mamdani plan is simply practical: Higher taxes at the top support the services and quality of life that keep the next generation in the city.

The cost-benefit analysis of moving changes over time. When I was in mid-career and the head of my university’s teaching center, I did get recruited by other universities to head their programs. While flattered, I was never remotely interested. It would involve either me moving alone or having my wife giving up her job, disrupting my children’s schooling, and leaving behind all our friends and community. The social and emotional costs were just not worth it. My move to California after retiring, though still carrying some costs, was a much easier decision since only I was paying those costs.