There is a line in Jamie Dimon’s 2025 letter to JPMorgan shareholders that reads like a warning shot aimed at high-tax state capitals. “Individuals vote with their feet,” he wrote. “You can already see a fairly large exodus of people and jobs out of some states with high taxes and high expenses.” Then he laid out the receipts. JPMorgan has cut its New York headcount from 30,000 a decade ago to 24,000. Its Texas headcount has grown from 26,000 in 2015 to 32,000 over the same period. He framed the migration plainly: “People often make this a moral or loyalty issue, but it is not. Companies need to remain competitive in this very tough, fast-moving world.”
That phrase, vote with your feet, has a strange pedigree. It is usually traced to Lenin, who used it to describe Russian soldiers deserting World War I trenches. The idea reached economic respectability in 1956, when Charles Tiebout published a model arguing that people sort themselves into local jurisdictions the same way consumers pick brands. If you do not like your town’s mix of taxes and services, you move. Aggregated, those moves create a kind of market for governance. Places that get the deal wrong lose customers. Places that get it right gain them.
Albert Hirschman gave us a more useful frame in 1970. In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, he argued that when an organization, firm, or country starts to slip, members have two basic options. They can stay and complain (voice), or they can leave (exit). Loyalty is what slows the exit down, but only for so long. The interesting part of his model is that voice and exit are partial substitutes. If exit is too easy, nobody sticks around to fight for improvement. If exit is too hard, complaints get ignored. When exit sits somewhere in the middle, the threat of leaving keeps institutions honest.
Dimon’s letter is basically a Hirschman argument in a banker’s voice. He is saying New York is losing the loyalty premium. Florida and Texas do not even need to be perfect. They just need to be cheaper, less hostile, and a direct flight away.
The numbers back him up. Between 2020 and 2024, Texas added more than 2 million net residents. Florida added about 1.5 million. New York lost over 600,000, and California shed close to half a million. The corporate moves are louder. Tesla, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise all decamped to Texas. Citadel left Chicago for Miami. Even Goldman Sachs, hardly a populist firm, has been quietly building out Dallas. None of this is mysterious. People follow rules they can live with, and capital follows people.
Here is where I think the conversation usually gets stuck. The phrase “people go where they are treated best” gets thrown around as if “treated best” means “lowest tax rate.” It doesn’t, or at least not only. Treatment is a bundle. How easy is it to start a business, hire someone, build housing, get a permit, send a kid to a decent school, walk home at night. Cheap taxes will not save you if the schools are bad and the streets feel unsafe. Expensive taxes will not kill you if the package buys something worth paying for. New York is still the most expensive city in America to run a financial firm, and financial firms keep coming anyway, because the talent pool is unmatched. A Fortune piece from earlier this month pointed out that NYC has actually been pulling top talent back from Miami in 2026, despite Dimon’s warnings. The exit threat is real. It is not destiny.
What makes Dimon’s framing useful, though, is the part where he refuses to moralize. Companies are not disloyal for leaving. People are not traitors for moving. The whole concept of voting with your feet only works if you treat the decision as legitimate. The minute you call defectors selfish, or worse, try to penalize them with exit taxes the way some states have flirted with, you have stopped competing for them and started imprisoning them. That tends not to end well. It is the lesson of Europe’s last twenty years, which Dimon also swipes at in the letter: regulate too much, tax too hard, and the next generation of companies starts up somewhere else. He thinks the United States is drifting into the same trap.
Whether you buy his diagnosis or not, the underlying mechanism is hard to argue with. Governments, like firms, now face customers who can leave. Those customers have better information than they used to, cheaper moving costs, and remote-work flexibility most of them did not have ten years ago. That is a structural change, not a political mood. The places that recognize it and adapt, by making themselves worth choosing, will hold onto their people. The places that do not will keep losing them and blaming somewhere else.
People go where they are treated best. It is not a slogan. It is just what happens when staying becomes optional.