Tucker Carlson vs. the Evidence of Russians Voting with their Feet

During his visit to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin, right-wing former Fox News talk show host Tucker Carlson made waves by praising the supposed abundance and low prices at a Moscow supermarket. He said the experience "radicalized" him against US leaders, and that Moscow is "so much nicer than any US city."

How can we tell if Carlson is right about life in Russia being better than in the US? Try the evidence of people voting with their feet. When people choose what government they want to live under through foot voting, they have much stronger incentives to make good decisions than ballot box voters—or media pundits.

Since 2022, over 1 million Russians have fled Vladimir Putin's increasingly repressive regime. They are willing to go to even such relatively poor countries as Armenia and Kazakhstan. Many thousands have tried to move to the US by way of the Mexican border,  despite the very real risk of  detention and deportation. Many more would emigrate to the US and other Western nations if only we would let them (as we should!).

By contrast, Americans who want to emigrate to Russia are few and far between. Last year, the Russian government floated a plan to build a village for disaffected expatriate American right-wingers. But they seem to have quietly mothballed the idea, probably for fear it wouldn't attract any significant number of takers.

Why are so many Russians eager to flee to the West? One major factor is that, despite Carlson's claims, Russia is actually a poor nation. As of 2022, per capita GDP was about $15,270, less than one-fifth the US figure of $76,300. And that's despite the fact that Russia has some of the world's largest deposits of oil and precious metals. The average monthly wage in Russia is about 73,800 rubles (an annual salary of about $9700 at current exchange rates). Some 20% of Russian households lack indoor plumbing.

It's also worth noting that Moscow is the richest city in Russia. And even there, Carlson (like many other visiting westerners) probably didn't see much of the parts where  ordinary people live, as opposed to sites frequented by foreign tourists. Had he done so (as I have), he would have seen Third World-like poverty. And that poverty is much worse in smaller cities and in rural areas.

One of Carlson's errors was at least somewhat understandable. I once made a similar one, myself. I am a native of what was then the Soviet Union, and a native speaker of Russian. Back in 1995, I visited Russia for the first time since emigrating in 1979. Like Carlson in 2024, I noticed that many prices were lower than in the US. When I pointed this out to a Moscow-based Russian relative of mine, she got angry: "Stop saying the prices here are low," she admonished me. "They are not low compared to our incomes."

She was right. Part of what I (and later Carlson) saw is the strength of the US dollar, which enjoys  highly favorable exchange rates because many foreigners want to hold dollar-denominated assets as a "store of value" (by contrast, few non-Russians have a similar demand for rubles). Another relevant factor is that prices for many goods and services are lower in poor nations, in part because labor is much cheaper (having fewer alternative opportunities).

Relative to income, food prices in Russia are actually much higher than in the US, not lower. In 2021, the state-run news agency TASS (which certainly does not want to make the Russian government look bad!) reported that 75% of Russians spend half or more of their income on food. Things have likely gotten worse since then, with the inflation and shortages caused by the war against Ukraine. In the US, by contrast, the average American spends about 11.3% of disposable personable income on food. Even for the poorest quintile of the population, that rises to only 31%.

Even as Carlson was praising Russia's food abundance, the government was urging Russians to start growing their own bananas, to make up for anticipated shortages resulting from Putin's restrictions on imports. Perhaps Carlson can do a special program on how Russia's climate is great for raising bananas. Thanks to Putin, the country is on its way to becoming the world's greatest banana republic!

In addition to widespread poverty, Russia also has horrific repression. You can get  up to 15 years in prison just for referring to the "special military operation" in Ukraine as a war. Just today, Russia's most prominent opposition leader, Alexi Navalny, died in prison. Other prominent dissenters,  such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin are also behind bars, often under terrible conditions. Carlson claims to be a great free speech advocate. If so, he shouldn't be defending Putin.

Carson also fantasizes about how the US government might draft his children to fight in Ukraine, even though there is no real prospect of any draft here. Russia, however, actually does have a draft, in which thousands of young men are forced to fight in an unjust war, primarily the poor and non-Russian minorities.

Growing repression and conscription are additional reasons why so many Russians are voting with their feet against their government. If you want to know what conditions in Russia are truly like, you should listen to them, not Tucker Carlson.