Billionaire Moves Forward with Plan to Build Utopian City for 5M in Desert

Governed by "equitism?"

Get this guy a copy of Jason Brennan's Against Democracy where he argues that a more competent government could be achieved by having policy decisions made by trained professionals in the same way cities are designed by city planners.

You wouldn't want an untrained surgeon but we're ok with electing someone who has no experience with writing policies that have major consequences for people's lives?

Doing a bit of research on "equitism" before commenting, leads to [1], [2] and [3], which leads me to suspect that this concept warrants a much broader conversation than can be hosted in comments threads. It may not be for everyone, but the fact seems to be that there are thoughtful people willing to explore alternatives to the status quo.

It's not at all clear to me where they are going to get the water and energy necessary to pull off their big idea, especially here in a region known for its persistent lack of rainfall; waiting for the 1000-year big event is not a solution. Answering that question alone makes it worth looking deeper at this project.

[1] https://www.atlasmovement.org/equitism?locale=en

[2] https://cityoftelosa.com/about/

[3] https://codetomove.com/manifesto.html

I think it's an interesting idea although one likely pretty much doomed to fail in the current highly ambitious form. There certainly seems to be room for innovation in the space with co's like Culdesac developing new niche communities, but building a net new city of this size in the U.S. seems insanely hard to pull off. If you're considering a move somewhere, why would you choose this city over all alternatives? If you're an American, you're blessed with a ton of optionality not just domestically from LA, SF, Miami, Tulsa, and a thousand other cities but also a much easier process to move abroad to many more places. However, I am bullish on new cities like Talent City in Nigeria or Nkwashi in Zambia where both trends on population growth and urbanization are in the right direction for net new development and competition is less difficult (in the U.S. having a city with stable power and clean water is not as much of a value prop as it is in Africa).

Also, nitpicky but I'm pretty sure that the governing principle is much more similar to Georgism rather than, "... a mashup of democracy, capitalism and socialism." as the article states.

This will most likely fail. Like all the other “utopian” societies experimented with in the past. Having said that, it most definitely will be interesting to watch the details of how it fails. And if somehow one of them succeeds, despite the odds, that would be even more interesting!

The beginning of the end of nation states and the rise of city states is upon us.