NBC’s The Good Place is a show about a woman who mistakenly gets placed in heaven despite being a horrible person during her time on earth. The heaven in the show is segmented into communities where everyone that made it into heaven, approximately one out of a million people, spends eternity. These communities prompted me to think about Tiebout.
In this version of heaven God perfectly places everyone to the exact community that would be a utopia for them. For Eleanor, the show’s focal character, her community is a small city with colorful buildings and no skyscrapers, complete with cool yogurt places and coffee shops. She’s been given a small house with modern icelandic interior design, and her true soulmate is even waiting for her when she gets there! Additionally each person gets a personal assistant that will tell you anything you want, how the earth was created, who really shot JFK, or anything else you want to know. Although there are many of these communities, no jobs, no externalities, perfect information, and mobile afterlife citizen-voters, the problem of preference revelation that Tiebout was addressing is nonexistent in the afterlife. God knows everyone’s preferences in advance and constructs a personal revenue-expenditure model to your exact preferences. For this reason there is never a need to move in the good place.
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