I’ve sort of been on vacation so I’m a little late with this.
Here’s Paul Romer making his case for charter cities:
The TED Blog (via Design Thinking) conveys the gist better than I possibly could. It’s about making ways to change the rules:
China, he says, demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of working with rules. They developed steel and gunpowder, but never developed rules for spreading those. Then, they developed rules that cut them off while other countries were zooming ahead. However, in the late 1970s, growth took off in China. Something changed. Romer shows that the brightest spot in China is Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a small bit of China that for most of the 20th century operated under a different set of rules, that were copied from working market and under the care of Great Britain. Hong Kong, he says, became a model people could copy when the rest of mainland moved to the market model. The demonstrated successes there led to a consensus on a market model move throughout the economy.
Romer asserts that we must preserve choices for people and operate on the right scale. A village is too small and a nation too big. Cities give you the right balance. The proposal is he conceives of is a charter city with investors to build infrastructure, firms to hire people and families who will raise children there. All he wants is some good rules, uninhabited land and choices for leaders, which he thinks should translate to partnerships between nations.
There has been quite a bit of discussion on libertarian-oriented blogs — more of a throwdown really. Will Wilkinson treated it as an issue of freedom and democracy rather than economic development, poverty reduction, and quality-of-life improvement:
What the example of Hong Kong communicates is that authoritarian, illiberal, undemocratic regimes need not feel threatened by semi-independent city states with working “liberal” market institutions. It says to rulers that their countries can get rich without granting their subjects real freedom.
That’s valid to a point but I’m more inclined to agree with Arnold Kling’s position that democracy (or certain features and connotations of democracy) aren’t necessarily required for freedom:
The exercise of voice, including the right to vote, is not the ultimate expression of freedom. Rather, it is the last refuge of those who suffer under a monopoly. If we take it as given that the political jurisdiction where I reside is a monopoly, then perhaps I will have more influence over that monopoly if I have a right to vote and a right to organize opposition than if I do not. However, as my forthcoming Unchecked and Unbalanced argues, the reality is that the amount of influence I have is shrinking while the scope of the monopolist is growing.
The idea of charter cities (or seasteading) will be a success to the extent that it creates a viable exit option vis-a-vis government. Suppose that the Chinese government loses its monopoly power, because it becomes easy for people residing in China to choose to live under alternative governments. In that hypothetical case, I would argue that those residents are free, even if those who choose the Chinese government are not allowed to vote in contested elections or to freely criticize their government. If you lived in North Korea, which would you rather have–the right to vote or the right to leave?
Either way there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of charter cities in practice. Tyler Cowen pointed to some:
Due mostly to the pressures of nationalism, the world’s most successful development experiment was ended without a second thought. And its initiation was backed by brute colonial force. Which country is most likely to allow another country to manage part of its territory in a new experiment?
But in theory, I’m totally in favour of the idea…
Simply having something like this on the table, under consideration, or simply “in the air,” ought to make people more open to some other ideas that would otherwise seem a lot more radical.
Maybe the idea of Canada taking over administrative responsibility for Guantanamo Bay will never pan out, but, at the very least, in the process of talking about it we’re also thinking about the role of cities in general (not exactly irrelevant to political debates in Canada, or at least Ontario), we’re thinking about new ways to cultivate diplomatic and cultural connections around the world, we’re thinking about and practicing new ways to think and talk about anything like this…
In other words, we’re keeping our conceptual and deliberative muscles in shape, just in case.
Maybe it’s a waste of time to go knocking on doors asking if we could build Canadaville in Cuba — I don’t know, I haven’t put much thought into it yet (and it wouldn’t be something I have much on-the-ground knowledge of anyways) — but just in case an opportunity ever emerged it would be a profound benefit to have already discussed all of the possibilities of how we might execute something like that.
We need to promote a creative political atmosphere in which it’s ok to think and talk about ambitious ideas without feeling like we have to follow through on them. Sometimes ideas are just ideas — but we can’t figure out which ones are good and which ones are bad until we’ve taken each one seriously.
So I’m looking forward to seeing where Romer takes the Charter Cities conversation, specifically the discussions on how we conceive and cope with rules.
Besides, as David Warsh warned, “nobody who has watched Romer in action will be quick to sell him short.”
