Morocco would be a perfect candidate in many ways: the same family has been running the show for 400 years, with a brief interlude as a French protectorate (although even then the Sultans remained in office and oversaw the Kingdom’s spiritual affairs). But Morocco is also doing quite well economically anyway, with respectable growth and industrialization powered by French car companies setting up production there. So while a Moroccan charter city would be very cool and potentially quite viable so long as you all make your annual bay’ah, this is perhaps more of a “let’s all get rich” thing and less of an EA cause area (although of course there are huge benefits to the world from LMICs getting richer faster, so maybe it stacks up quite well anyway vs other interventions? What do I know).
Instead, though, why not think bigger? Couldn’t a major Western corporation fairly easily buy out the entire ruling class of a particularly dysfunctional but formerly well-governed state blessed with many natural endowments? Let’s say Anthropic becomes one of the world’s largest companies: you’d imagine that it could easily purchase Zimbabwe from ZanuPF, since its GDP is only around $25 billion or so, and restore the place to at least the same levels of relatively enlightened governance it profited from under previous administrations. Such a move would I think be very popular locally, especially if it enjoyed formal backing from the US government and came with concomitant economic benefits. Dario Amodei has been looking a little portly and sallow recently: I think some time in the sun experiencing the glories of Zimbabwe’s wilderness would do wonders for his constitution.
As I mention in my reply to MvK above, I agree that I don’t think charter city efforts should literally be funded by EA megadonors or ranked as top charities by GiveWell; I just think they are a potentially helpful idea that the EA movement should support when convenient / be friendly towards. Instead, since charter cities double as a “lets all get rich” thing, they can be mostly funded by investors (just like how investors already fund lots of international development projects—factories, etc).
Also agree that the benefit vs tractability of charter cities faces the tradeoff you describe, where a country with TERRIBLE governance would never even approve a charter city or let it persist for long, and a country with great governance doesn’t “need” a charter city because it’s already making relatively wise policy decisions.
But this is almost a fully general argument against every type of political/economic reforms. Of course political tractability is a problem with political reforms! Nevertheless, there are a lot of countries in a middle zone between terrible and great governance, where reforms (including charter city legislation) might be possible and might also bring significant benefits.
(Personally, since I am most excited about the potential for new types of institutional innovation and the effects of governance competition, I actually think it would be very beneficial to start a few charter cities and do more policy experiments even in developed countries with good institutions—places like the USA, Sweden, Japan, wherever. For instance, I would love to see a large city in the USA that used a Georgist land tax instead of an income tax to generate revenue, and had more liberal regulation of new medical technology but perhaps stricter regulations on food & environmental quality, and where prediction markets were legal, and etc. But this felt like too much of a niche opinion for an intro video about the charter cities concept which is usually focused on developing countries.)
This post clearly oversells charter cities, which are probably a non-starter for real governance competition and extreme poverty alleviation (vide https://devpolicy.org/why-charter-cities-have-failed-20190716/ and https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/blog-posts/honduras-repealed-its-charter-city-law-what-happened-and-what-happens-next/ ). The reason is simple: you can’t manage the expropriation risk and bad governance problems of the host country. You can only really make a charter city work, at best, in a lower-middle-income autocratic country with a long history of stable governance.
Morocco would be a perfect candidate in many ways: the same family has been running the show for 400 years, with a brief interlude as a French protectorate (although even then the Sultans remained in office and oversaw the Kingdom’s spiritual affairs). But Morocco is also doing quite well economically anyway, with respectable growth and industrialization powered by French car companies setting up production there. So while a Moroccan charter city would be very cool and potentially quite viable so long as you all make your annual bay’ah, this is perhaps more of a “let’s all get rich” thing and less of an EA cause area (although of course there are huge benefits to the world from LMICs getting richer faster, so maybe it stacks up quite well anyway vs other interventions? What do I know).
Instead, though, why not think bigger? Couldn’t a major Western corporation fairly easily buy out the entire ruling class of a particularly dysfunctional but formerly well-governed state blessed with many natural endowments? Let’s say Anthropic becomes one of the world’s largest companies: you’d imagine that it could easily purchase Zimbabwe from ZanuPF, since its GDP is only around $25 billion or so, and restore the place to at least the same levels of relatively enlightened governance it profited from under previous administrations. Such a move would I think be very popular locally, especially if it enjoyed formal backing from the US government and came with concomitant economic benefits. Dario Amodei has been looking a little portly and sallow recently: I think some time in the sun experiencing the glories of Zimbabwe’s wilderness would do wonders for his constitution.
As I mention in my reply to MvK above, I agree that I don’t think charter city efforts should literally be funded by EA megadonors or ranked as top charities by GiveWell; I just think they are a potentially helpful idea that the EA movement should support when convenient / be friendly towards. Instead, since charter cities double as a “lets all get rich” thing, they can be mostly funded by investors (just like how investors already fund lots of international development projects—factories, etc).
Also agree that the benefit vs tractability of charter cities faces the tradeoff you describe, where a country with TERRIBLE governance would never even approve a charter city or let it persist for long, and a country with great governance doesn’t “need” a charter city because it’s already making relatively wise policy decisions.
But this is almost a fully general argument against every type of political/economic reforms. Of course political tractability is a problem with political reforms! Nevertheless, there are a lot of countries in a middle zone between terrible and great governance, where reforms (including charter city legislation) might be possible and might also bring significant benefits.
(Personally, since I am most excited about the potential for new types of institutional innovation and the effects of governance competition, I actually think it would be very beneficial to start a few charter cities and do more policy experiments even in developed countries with good institutions—places like the USA, Sweden, Japan, wherever. For instance, I would love to see a large city in the USA that used a Georgist land tax instead of an income tax to generate revenue, and had more liberal regulation of new medical technology but perhaps stricter regulations on food & environmental quality, and where prediction markets were legal, and etc. But this felt like too much of a niche opinion for an intro video about the charter cities concept which is usually focused on developing countries.)