One of the authors of the charter cities report here. I’ll just add a few remarks to clarify how we intended the quoted passage. I’ll highlight three disagreements with the interpretation offered in the original post.
We should care if neocolonialism is real, if it’s bad, and if it’s induced by Charter Cities. If so, that should impact the cost-effectiveness estimate, not just factor in as a side-comment about PR-risk.
(1) We absolutely care whether neocolonialism is bad (or, if neocolonialism is inherently bad, we care about whether charter cities would instantiate neocolonialism). However, we only had ~100 research hours to devote to this topic, so we bracketed that concern for the time being. These sort of prioritization decisions are difficult but necessary in order to produce research outputs in a timely manner.
We should cite and engage with specific arguments, not imagine and then be haunted by some imagined spectre of Leftism. The authors mention the “neocolonialist critique” three times, never bothering to actually explain what it is, who advocates for it, how harmful it is, or how it could be avoided.
(2) The neocolonial critique of charter cities is well-known in the relevant circles, though it comes in many varieties. (See, among others, van de Sand 2019 and citations therein.) We probably should have included a footnote with examples. The fact that we didn’t engage with the critique more extensively (or really, at all) is some indication of how seriously we take the argument. We could have been more explicit about that.
The question of PR-risk is a purely logistical question that should be bracketed from discussions of cost-effectiveness. In the case that an intervention is found to have high cost-effectiveness and high PR-risk, we should think strategically about how to fund it, perhaps by privately recommending the intervention to individual donors as opposed to foundations.
(3) I’m not entirely sure why PR-risk needs to be excluded from cost effectiveness analysis (it’s just another downside), though I’m not opposed in practice to doing this. I agree that there are ways to mitigate PR risk. At no point in the report did we claim that PR risks ought to disqualify charter cities (or any other intervention) from funding.
I’m not entirely sure why PR-risk needs to be excluded from cost effectiveness analysis (it’s just another downside), though I’m not opposed in practice to doing this.
PR risk is a lot weirder and more complicated than a lot of people take it to be. Breaking it off into a separate discussion, or a separate bucket, seems wise to me in a lot of cases.
Thanks! Really appreciate getting a reply for you, and thanks for clarifying how you meant this passage to be understood.
I agree that you don’t claim the PR risks should disqualify charter cities, but you do cite it as a concern right? I think part of my confusion stems from the distinction between “X is a concern we’re noting” and “X is a parameter in the cost-effectiveness model”, and from trying to understand the relative importance of the various qualitative and quantitative arguments made throughout.
I.e., one way of interpreting your report would be:
There are various ways to think about the benefits of Charter Cities
Some of those ways are highly uncertain and/or difficulty to model, here are some briefly comments on why we think so
We’re going to focus on quantitatively modeling this one path to impact
On the basis of that model, we can’t recommend funding Charter Cities and don’t believe that they’re cost-effective for that particular path to impact
In that case, it makes less sense for me to think of the neocolonialism critique as a argument against Charter Cities, and more sense to think of it as an explanation for why you didn’t choose to prioritize analyzing a different path to impact.
Is that about right? Or closer to right than my original interpretation?
I think part of my confusion stems from the distinction between “X is a concern we’re noting” and “X is a parameter in the cost-effectiveness model”
The distinction is largely pragmatic. Charter cities, like many complex interventions, are hard to model quantitatively. For the report, we replicated, adjusted, and extended a quantitative model that Charter Cities Institute originally proposed. If that’s your primary theory of change for charter cities, it seems like the numbers don’t quite work out. But there are many other possible theories of change, and we would love to see charter city advocates spend some time turning those theories of change into quantitative models.
I think PR risks are relevant to most theories of change that involve charter cities, but they are certainly not my main concern.
One of the authors of the charter cities report here. I’ll just add a few remarks to clarify how we intended the quoted passage. I’ll highlight three disagreements with the interpretation offered in the original post.
(1) We absolutely care whether neocolonialism is bad (or, if neocolonialism is inherently bad, we care about whether charter cities would instantiate neocolonialism). However, we only had ~100 research hours to devote to this topic, so we bracketed that concern for the time being. These sort of prioritization decisions are difficult but necessary in order to produce research outputs in a timely manner.
(2) The neocolonial critique of charter cities is well-known in the relevant circles, though it comes in many varieties. (See, among others, van de Sand 2019 and citations therein.) We probably should have included a footnote with examples. The fact that we didn’t engage with the critique more extensively (or really, at all) is some indication of how seriously we take the argument. We could have been more explicit about that.
(3) I’m not entirely sure why PR-risk needs to be excluded from cost effectiveness analysis (it’s just another downside), though I’m not opposed in practice to doing this. I agree that there are ways to mitigate PR risk. At no point in the report did we claim that PR risks ought to disqualify charter cities (or any other intervention) from funding.
PR risk is a lot weirder and more complicated than a lot of people take it to be. Breaking it off into a separate discussion, or a separate bucket, seems wise to me in a lot of cases.
Thanks! Really appreciate getting a reply for you, and thanks for clarifying how you meant this passage to be understood.
I agree that you don’t claim the PR risks should disqualify charter cities, but you do cite it as a concern right? I think part of my confusion stems from the distinction between “X is a concern we’re noting” and “X is a parameter in the cost-effectiveness model”, and from trying to understand the relative importance of the various qualitative and quantitative arguments made throughout.
I.e., one way of interpreting your report would be:
There are various ways to think about the benefits of Charter Cities
Some of those ways are highly uncertain and/or difficulty to model, here are some briefly comments on why we think so
We’re going to focus on quantitatively modeling this one path to impact
On the basis of that model, we can’t recommend funding Charter Cities and don’t believe that they’re cost-effective for that particular path to impact
In that case, it makes less sense for me to think of the neocolonialism critique as a argument against Charter Cities, and more sense to think of it as an explanation for why you didn’t choose to prioritize analyzing a different path to impact.
Is that about right? Or closer to right than my original interpretation?
The distinction is largely pragmatic. Charter cities, like many complex interventions, are hard to model quantitatively. For the report, we replicated, adjusted, and extended a quantitative model that Charter Cities Institute originally proposed. If that’s your primary theory of change for charter cities, it seems like the numbers don’t quite work out. But there are many other possible theories of change, and we would love to see charter city advocates spend some time turning those theories of change into quantitative models.
I think PR risks are relevant to most theories of change that involve charter cities, but they are certainly not my main concern.