
Paul Romer's "Charter Cities" - kingkawn
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/can-charter-cities-change-the-world-a-qa-with-paul-romer/
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biohacker42
This is profoundly silly, only very intelligent people can be this silly.

 _Q.

What makes you confident that land and a good charter are all it takes?_

His answer is long but it boils down to _Because!_

My god, if only it were that easy to create competition among governments, if
only it were that easy to create the peace and stability necessary for
economic growth.

If only you could just convince Mugabe or Kim Jong Il to give a chunk of land
and let you administer it for everybody's benefit.

This is a variation on the underpants gnomes' strategy. But instead of step 2,
step 1 is missing.

Step 1. ????

Step 2. A safe piece of land with attractive legal and/or physical
infrastructure.

Step 3. Profit.

~~~
barry-cotter
Eh, I agree on the low likelihood but I think the massive value creation from
a success renders the expected value high enough for it to be worth
campaigning for. The problem of binding a sovereign is very real whether the
titular sovereign (whoever, Namibia, Haiti, Cuba) or the world-sovereign (the
US, obviously) to their stated policy is, ah, rather difficult.

Also, Dubai. Not shining bright at the moment but really 30 years ago there
was practically nothing there and it hardly has Western standard rule of law
even now, but look at what's there.

One way of setting this up I could see would be some country with massive
illegal immigration problems setting up an SEZ without freedom of movement to
the metropole, and allowing free immigration to that along with some very
minimal law enforcment. I know Greece has insane immigration from illegals and
it's not going to stop. Imagine they take some barren Agean rock, ~ Manhattan
sized and allow free immigration with no minimum wage or constraints on
voluntary contract for people over x years of age. Eastern Mediterranean New
York in 15 years.

I think you overestimate the difficulty of physical infrastructure, that's a
solved problem, throw money at it.

~~~
hughprime
_I know Greece has insane immigration from illegals and it's not going to
stop. Imagine they take some barren Agean rock, ~ Manhattan sized and allow
free immigration with no minimum wage or constraints on voluntary contract for
people over x years of age. Eastern Mediterranean New York in 15 years._

What if the result winds up looking less like New York or Hong Kong and more
like Mogadishu? There are no guarantees that this bold social experiment might
not wind up going wrong in all sorts of ways. What will Greece do if it finds
it suddenly has an impoverished crime-ridden city on its sovereign territory?

~~~
barry-cotter
Deport everybody. Or just leave it there. Mogadishu/Somalia isn't even that
destabilising to East Africa which _mostly_ has more or less functional
states. Also, the only reason Somalia doesn't have a stable internationally
recognised government at the moment is that the US has a hate on for Islamists
of any stripe. If they hadn't put so much effort into the puppet Transitional
Government and the invasion of Somalia by their Ethiopian client Somalia
(possibly absent Puntland, probably absent Somaliland) would no longer be a
failed state, it would just be a _really shit one_.

Seriously, imagine the Cosa Nostra take over the running of AgeanManhattan,
protection rackets and all. Now, what do you call them? The government.
They're a subsidiary government of Greece, which holds ultimate,
internationally recognised sovereignty over AgMan, but whosoever holds the
monopoly over the use of force is thus legitimate and sovereign.

Also, seriously Greece is not a terribly impressive first world country but it
is one. I wouldn't be surprised if they had paramilitary police units
sufficient to subdue a dense, networked city of 6 million. I figure 20K would
do it easily. They would more or less definitionally have total air
superiority, which combined with large well trained, armed and co-ordinated
police/soldiers would render any putative contest grotesquely one sided.

Also, these people wouldn't be citizens, they'd be guests/subjects. No vote,
no political power, no constituency. The Greek police don't play very nice
with _Greeks_. I imagine the Greek Army would be nastier.

(Leaving to go to bed, will reply to any reply tomorrow, hoping there's a
discussion here when I get back, ciao)

~~~
hughprime
_Deport everybody._

I'm not too familiar with Greek politics, but I'm sure there's a sufficiently
large bleeding-heart constituency which would oppose any cruelty to the
huddled masses just offshore.

 _I wouldn't be surprised if they had paramilitary police units sufficient to
subdue a dense, networked city of 6 million. I figure 20K would do it easily.
They would more or less definitionally have total air superiority, which
combined with large well trained, armed and co-ordinated police/soldiers would
render any putative contest grotesquely one sided._

Well yes, I'm sure they're militarily capable of doing it, but it's still
enough of a headache that it seems to push the risk/reward ratio of this
Aegean Manhattan firmly into the "not worth the effort" category.

------
barry-cotter
An incredibly long, well reasoned and cited, highly vitriolic and personally
insulting to Romer take on the "charter city" idea. (Really, I'm not kidding
it is _incredibly_ long.)

Summary: There is an English word for charter city, and it is colony.

[http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-
cr...](http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cromer-to-
romer-and-back-again.html)

~~~
mr_luc
I disliked almost everything about the tone and content of that article -- at
first. His vitriol at the beginning is juvenile, bombastic, etc.

When he starts citing the case of the Belgian Congo is where the article
becomes readable.

But when he writes in the imagined voices of Cromer et al -- well, that's good
reading. He was making his points there, and not (just) bloviating. (<\-- new
word)

Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often
engenders, he drifts into 'papau new guinea people are neanderthals', and 'all
third-world countries are dependent on foreign aid and protection,' etc. Huh.

The guy writes like a crank.

But, hey, some people call Wolfram a crank, and yet I'd rather have read him
than not.

~~~
llimllib
> Then, carried away by the religious zeal that unpopular truths to often
> engenders, he drifts into [falsehoods]

This problem is endemic to MM's work, but I still consider him worth reading.
It's important to read him critically.

------
ableal
_Think about the truly important changes in political systems. Back in the
middle ages, suppose that someone described a legal system that enforced rules
and contracts that everyone had to obey, even the country’s leaders. What
would informed opinion of the day have been? Great idea, but it will never
happen. No question it was hard to pull off, but it did happen._

The shadows of Thucydides, Aristotle and Polybius (among others) may question
the quality of the "informed opinion" ...

------
javert
I loved this. Don't understand why all the other top-level comments are so
negative.

