Paul Romer's "Charter Cities"
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
My original example used failed states, but can you image pitching this to Alabama or Massachusetts? Perhaps we can speculate that the difference between a successful charter city and industrialized world cities is too small to be worth it. I'd still like to see this in Massachusetts, but let's accept the premise.
Then perhaps a developing nation like any one of the East European states, I'm originally form one of those and would LOVE something like that. Too bad no present government in that area will let it happen. But think of all the benefits, why not? Because again, if the people in charge acted rationally according to economically beneficial facts we'd already have economically booming cities.
Even in Greece, the Mogadishu scenario would be the good outcome, not that EU human rights laws and what not would ever let it go that bad, but then at least people could be deported. But the bad scenario is success, now you have a bunch of economically successful foreigner on your home soil! The next best thing would be high taxes, the most likely next thing would be much worse and typical of Balkan history.
And the sad thing is this has been done. Mainland China did it with it's economic free zones, what now 20-30 years ago? And it has been spectacularly successful. So everybody's rushing to copy this, right?
Well India is dipping its toes in it. very slowly with tiny zones, and they are not nearly as un-regulated as they could be, but at least it's something. The only other example I can think of is actually North Korea, where because of Kim's train's tours of booming China, some tiny tiny faintly capitalist zones have been set up. And that's about it.
Best of luck to the effort, but I just think it's so naively idealistic, childish almost.
Summary: There is an English word for charter city, and it is colony.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cr...
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.
This problem is endemic to MM's work, but I still consider him worth reading. It's important to read him critically.
The shadows of Thucydides, Aristotle and Polybius (among others) may question the quality of the "informed opinion" ...