I think this does a great job of introducing the concept of a charter city to audiences with little prior exposure to these ideas.
That said: I know this is for a YouTube video and I might just be too immersed in academic/research culture and hedging, but this feels a little too much like an advertisement to me.
As a report by RethinkPriorities points out, there’s a number of reasons to think Charter Cities are not the most effective way to alleviate poverty:
Lack of tractability, mostly caused by difficulties of coordination between many stakeholders
Indirect effects might be huge, but are hard to measure: “We could not find a comprehensive argument for the value of these indirect benefits being large.”[1]
Nearest empirical analogue (SEZs) seem to only marginally outperform host countries
Large development cost
You choose one example of a Charter city that could be deemed to be a success, but omit mentioning those that are widely considered “failures”. According to the aforementioned RP report, Paul Romer—who you mention—turned away from the idea because of these failures in Honduras and Madagascar (a conclusion you may agree or disagree with, but that maybe deserves to be mentioned).
I will happily concede that some of these failures can be explained away by certain political circumstances rather than by flaws inherent to the concept of charter cities, but if the goal of this is to inform, not to persuade, I would love to see some of those limitations mentioned in the video. I say this less as an argument against charter cities, but as an argument for carefully considering the circumstances under which charter cities do or don’t work.
Furthermore, there are many debates about whether charter cities will end poverty[2] or exacerbate social inequality and threaten social cohesion[3], but they are absent from this video, which mostly seems to rely on the perspective of advocates for charter cities.
Thanks for this feedback! For more context, the tone of the video is intended to be a kind of middle ground between persuasion and EA-Forum-style information, which I’d describe as “introducing people to a cool and intriguing new idea, as food for thought”. (I also see this video as “making sure RationalAnimations has enough interesting variety to keep pulling in new viewers, even though many of our upcoming videos are going to be about more-technical AI alignment topics”.) So, the video is definitely trying to be informative and somewhat evenhanded rather than a purely persuasive advertisement for charter cities. But we also want to be less hedgy than if we were writing on the Forum or directly responding to stuff like Rethink’s report. I am ideally aiming for the same kind of positive-but-not-propaganda, “here’s an inspiring new EA project” vibes of something like Vox’s “Future Perfect” column on EA topics. (But, like I said, I am a huge fan of charter cities, so it’s plausible that I’ve steered too close to propaganda!)
Some thoughts below, arranged in order from “this will definitely influence how I revise the script” to “this won’t fit in the script but I just want to argue about / advocate for charter cities because it’s fun”:
Political Tractability
I actually had sections in an earlier draft that brought up objections related to SEZ’s and political tractability, but these ended up getting cut for space. Now I am thinking that I should add back in at least some stuff about tractability—maybe a couple sentences along the lines of “Of course, if the motivation behind charter cities was to get around the political difficulties of fighting to pass lots of little reforms, consider that it might be even harder to pass one BIG reform to create the city—especially when creating a charter city requires the host government to voluntarily give up some of its authority to set regulations...”, and then mentioning how Romer was involved in those efforts in madagascar which ended up going nowhere.
(Personally, I think that political tractability is definitely an issue with charter cities, but political tractability is also an issue for lots of promising policy interventions in the developing world, and also for many interventions in the “improving institutional decisionmaking” space (like switching to improved voting systems, legalizing prediction markets, etc). The hope of many charter city advocates is that, once there are a few successful projects to point to, political tractability will increase. Over the coming decade, we’ll find out if they’re right or not!)
Or are you perhaps thinking of tractability from a different perspective, less about the political difficulty of getting a host government to agree to allow charter cities, more about the intrinsic difficulty of managing city development? I feel like there are lots of historical examples of city development going successfully, and the bigger question mark is how to get the authority to design your own governing institutions and write your own regulations. But I would welcome more thoughts on this.
Special Economic Zones
As for Special Economic Zones, I am worried that lots of RationalAnimations viewers won’t be familiar with them, so mentioning them either in support (“It might seem crazy to carve out a special area where normal regulations don’t apply, but actually lots of developing countries do this all the time in SEZs!”) or in opposition (“This idea is just SEZs all over again, and SEZs haven’t changed the world.” [except for the couple times when they have changed the world, like in Shenzhen]) For what it’s worth, here are the differences that charter city advocates point to between an ideal charter city and a model SEZ:
Since no charter city projects have really been tried at scale so far (you mention Madagascar and Honduras as failures, but these were failures to get a project off the ground in the first place—it’s not like we spent a billion dollars to build a city and then it went bust), it’s hard to say which of these, if any, would provide most of the additional benefit over SEZs. Personally, the appeal of deeper governance reforms & administrative autonomy (which feels like a really fundamental change that could enable lots of innovation and dynamism), feels like a bigger deal to me than the larger / multi-industry scale of charter cities (which just seems like “doing SEZs but physically bigger, so you just get the moderate SEZ effects but over a larger area, and hope you maybe get an agglomeration bonus on top”).
It might be worth mentioning SEZs somehow, if only briefly (”...charter cities are in some ways a variation on the existing concept of special economic zones, but they envision deeper governance reforms and a larger physical area...”). I’ll try to think about this more.
High Cost of Building New Cities
“Large development cost” feels like a very legitimate concern from the perspective of OpenPhil considering whether to charitably fund a charter city project themselves, but not as much of a drawback for individuals who want to get excited about the idea and maybe work to make charter cities a reality. In my experience, most charter city concepts are expected to be funded by private investment, and the whole thing would be a moneymaking enterprise (just like how large development projects like Hudson Yards in NYC are funded by private developers). To the extent that I think EA should be helping the charter cities movement, it is by doing high-leverage and public-goods-provision things like spreading awareness of the idea (hence this video), maybe providing support for organizations that try to solve coordination problems between potential charter city stakeholders/developers, etc—not by spending billions of dollars to build the actual infrastructure for some new-city project. So it makes sense why this was in the Rethink report, but I don’t think it would make as much sense in the video.
Uncertainty of Indirect Effects
Rethink says they couldn’t find an argument that the indirect effects of charter cities (like what I describe in my “Wider Benefits” section) would be large. I guess I agree with Rethink that these benefits are uncertain, but they are also what I find most inspiring and compelling about charter cities—for instance, the potential for charter cities to come up with totally new governing institutions that could then inspire many nations around the world. I think a “hits-based approach” is worthwhile here: it’ll be hard to figure out how big the spillover effects of charter cities will be without just trying it a couple times, so I feel like somebody should try it (although again, it shouldn’t literally be funded by EA megadonors), and we EAs should support them where we can! On a more practical note, RationalAnimations covers a lot of speculative far-future topics (longtermism, AI, theories about “grabby aliens”, upcoming videos about whole brain emulation, etc), so I almost feel like the fact that charter cities are big, risky bet, is kind of understood from the context of the channel! One of the worries I had with this script is that even the wildest charter-city projects (like Prospera) might bore viewers with bunch of in-the-weeds policy details about development economics and libertarianism, when they come to the channel to learn about big melodramatic sci-fi topics like human extinction and plans to colonize the galaxy!
Overall, I guess I am also just pretty convinced by the basic intuition that it’s often important/effective to improve long-run economic growth, even if it’s hard to do or uncertain. For more info on this, see the post “Growth and the case against randomista development”—the fact that this is one of the most upvoted Forum posts of all time indicates to me that many people think economic growth interventions are underrated within EA!
Anyways, thanks again for your feedback, and thanks doubly for reading this comment! I will try to work some mention of SEZs and tractability into the draft.
So, the video is definitely trying to be informative and somewhat evenhanded rather than a purely persuasive advertisement for charter cities.
If this is your goal, I’m afraid to say you have not succeeded. I apologise if the following sounds harsh, but you have a platform and a commensurate responsibility towards accuracy.
Ask yourself the question: “Is the viewer coming away from this video with a broadly accurate picture of the facts and the most relevant expert opinions on this topic”? I think the answer is a clear no. If an audience member is persuaded by your citation of “Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Romer”, and then later finds out that Paul Romer no longer supports the idea, they are going to feel deceived and betrayed, and no longer trust your channel. Similarly, it is wrong to leave out discussion of charter city projects that have been tried and failed.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to have the opinion “charter cities are good”, and to argue persuasively for that opinion, nor that you have to exhaustively list every single critique of the concept. But you should engage with major criticisms if they exist (and are in the realm of reason). By doing so, you both increase the knowledge of the audience, and even strengthen your own argument, so it doesn’t wither away the first time someone does a google search.
@MvK and @titotal , here is the new section about political tractability:
“A bigger problem is political feasibility. The whole concept of giving a city the ability to write its own rules is to make reform easier, but in order to get that ball rolling, you first need to find a nation willing to give away lots of their own regulation-writing authority in order to enable your charter city project. This isn’t completely unheard of—in many ways, charter cities are just a bigger and bolder version of “Special Economic Zones”, where a port might be granted lower tarrifs or streamlined permitting for the sake of spurring industrial development. Nevertheless, asking for broad autonomy to create an entire city is a tall order.
Indeed, Paul Romer was originally involved in efforts to create charter cities in Madagascar and Honduras, but later abandoned both projects. Despite being invited by each country’s president, the idea became politically controversial in both nations, and the project in Madagascar fell apart when the president’s party was voted out of power. In Honduras, a law authorizing charter cities was passed after years of political wrangling, but Paul Romer distanced himself from the result, saying that Honduran corporate special interests had corrupted his original vision.”
Yes, in response to MvK’s comment, I am reworking the script to add a section (in-between “objection: why whole new cities?” and “wider benefits”) about political feasibility, where I will talk about how Paul Romer abandoned the idea after delays and failed projects in Honduras and Madagascar. I’ll add another comment here when I update this Forum post with the new draft.
Do you have any suggestions as to which parts of the draft could be cut or made shorter? The current post is already getting a little long compared to our ideal video length of 10-15 mins.
I think this does a great job of introducing the concept of a charter city to audiences with little prior exposure to these ideas.
That said: I know this is for a YouTube video and I might just be too immersed in academic/research culture and hedging, but this feels a little too much like an advertisement to me.
As a report by RethinkPriorities points out, there’s a number of reasons to think Charter Cities are not the most effective way to alleviate poverty:
Lack of tractability, mostly caused by difficulties of coordination between many stakeholders
Indirect effects might be huge, but are hard to measure: “We could not find a comprehensive argument for the value of these indirect benefits being large.”[1]
Nearest empirical analogue (SEZs) seem to only marginally outperform host countries
Large development cost
You choose one example of a Charter city that could be deemed to be a success, but omit mentioning those that are widely considered “failures”. According to the aforementioned RP report, Paul Romer—who you mention—turned away from the idea because of these failures in Honduras and Madagascar (a conclusion you may agree or disagree with, but that maybe deserves to be mentioned).
I will happily concede that some of these failures can be explained away by certain political circumstances rather than by flaws inherent to the concept of charter cities, but if the goal of this is to inform, not to persuade, I would love to see some of those limitations mentioned in the video. I say this less as an argument against charter cities, but as an argument for carefully considering the circumstances under which charter cities do or don’t work.
Furthermore, there are many debates about whether charter cities will end poverty[2] or exacerbate social inequality and threaten social cohesion[3], but they are absent from this video, which mostly seems to rely on the perspective of advocates for charter cities.
https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/intervention-report-charter-cities
Mark Lutter on trying to end poverty by founding well-governed ‘charter’ cities, ft Tamara Winter − 80,000 Hours (80000hours.org)
https://verfassungsblog.de/the-danger-zone-charter-cities-citizenship-and-social-justice/
Thanks for this feedback! For more context, the tone of the video is intended to be a kind of middle ground between persuasion and EA-Forum-style information, which I’d describe as “introducing people to a cool and intriguing new idea, as food for thought”. (I also see this video as “making sure RationalAnimations has enough interesting variety to keep pulling in new viewers, even though many of our upcoming videos are going to be about more-technical AI alignment topics”.) So, the video is definitely trying to be informative and somewhat evenhanded rather than a purely persuasive advertisement for charter cities. But we also want to be less hedgy than if we were writing on the Forum or directly responding to stuff like Rethink’s report. I am ideally aiming for the same kind of positive-but-not-propaganda, “here’s an inspiring new EA project” vibes of something like Vox’s “Future Perfect” column on EA topics. (But, like I said, I am a huge fan of charter cities, so it’s plausible that I’ve steered too close to propaganda!)
Some thoughts below, arranged in order from “this will definitely influence how I revise the script” to “this won’t fit in the script but I just want to argue about / advocate for charter cities because it’s fun”:
Political Tractability
I actually had sections in an earlier draft that brought up objections related to SEZ’s and political tractability, but these ended up getting cut for space. Now I am thinking that I should add back in at least some stuff about tractability—maybe a couple sentences along the lines of “Of course, if the motivation behind charter cities was to get around the political difficulties of fighting to pass lots of little reforms, consider that it might be even harder to pass one BIG reform to create the city—especially when creating a charter city requires the host government to voluntarily give up some of its authority to set regulations...”, and then mentioning how Romer was involved in those efforts in madagascar which ended up going nowhere.
(Personally, I think that political tractability is definitely an issue with charter cities, but political tractability is also an issue for lots of promising policy interventions in the developing world, and also for many interventions in the “improving institutional decisionmaking” space (like switching to improved voting systems, legalizing prediction markets, etc). The hope of many charter city advocates is that, once there are a few successful projects to point to, political tractability will increase. Over the coming decade, we’ll find out if they’re right or not!)
Or are you perhaps thinking of tractability from a different perspective, less about the political difficulty of getting a host government to agree to allow charter cities, more about the intrinsic difficulty of managing city development? I feel like there are lots of historical examples of city development going successfully, and the bigger question mark is how to get the authority to design your own governing institutions and write your own regulations. But I would welcome more thoughts on this.
Special Economic Zones
As for Special Economic Zones, I am worried that lots of RationalAnimations viewers won’t be familiar with them, so mentioning them either in support (“It might seem crazy to carve out a special area where normal regulations don’t apply, but actually lots of developing countries do this all the time in SEZs!”) or in opposition (“This idea is just SEZs all over again, and SEZs haven’t changed the world.” [except for the couple times when they have changed the world, like in Shenzhen]) For what it’s worth, here are the differences that charter city advocates point to between an ideal charter city and a model SEZ:
It might be worth mentioning SEZs somehow, if only briefly (”...charter cities are in some ways a variation on the existing concept of special economic zones, but they envision deeper governance reforms and a larger physical area...”). I’ll try to think about this more.
High Cost of Building New Cities
“Large development cost” feels like a very legitimate concern from the perspective of OpenPhil considering whether to charitably fund a charter city project themselves, but not as much of a drawback for individuals who want to get excited about the idea and maybe work to make charter cities a reality. In my experience, most charter city concepts are expected to be funded by private investment, and the whole thing would be a moneymaking enterprise (just like how large development projects like Hudson Yards in NYC are funded by private developers). To the extent that I think EA should be helping the charter cities movement, it is by doing high-leverage and public-goods-provision things like spreading awareness of the idea (hence this video), maybe providing support for organizations that try to solve coordination problems between potential charter city stakeholders/developers, etc—not by spending billions of dollars to build the actual infrastructure for some new-city project. So it makes sense why this was in the Rethink report, but I don’t think it would make as much sense in the video.
Uncertainty of Indirect Effects
Rethink says they couldn’t find an argument that the indirect effects of charter cities (like what I describe in my “Wider Benefits” section) would be large. I guess I agree with Rethink that these benefits are uncertain, but they are also what I find most inspiring and compelling about charter cities—for instance, the potential for charter cities to come up with totally new governing institutions that could then inspire many nations around the world. I think a “hits-based approach” is worthwhile here: it’ll be hard to figure out how big the spillover effects of charter cities will be without just trying it a couple times, so I feel like somebody should try it (although again, it shouldn’t literally be funded by EA megadonors), and we EAs should support them where we can! On a more practical note, RationalAnimations covers a lot of speculative far-future topics (longtermism, AI, theories about “grabby aliens”, upcoming videos about whole brain emulation, etc), so I almost feel like the fact that charter cities are big, risky bet, is kind of understood from the context of the channel! One of the worries I had with this script is that even the wildest charter-city projects (like Prospera) might bore viewers with bunch of in-the-weeds policy details about development economics and libertarianism, when they come to the channel to learn about big melodramatic sci-fi topics like human extinction and plans to colonize the galaxy!
Overall, I guess I am also just pretty convinced by the basic intuition that it’s often important/effective to improve long-run economic growth, even if it’s hard to do or uncertain. For more info on this, see the post “Growth and the case against randomista development”—the fact that this is one of the most upvoted Forum posts of all time indicates to me that many people think economic growth interventions are underrated within EA!
Anyways, thanks again for your feedback, and thanks doubly for reading this comment! I will try to work some mention of SEZs and tractability into the draft.
If this is your goal, I’m afraid to say you have not succeeded. I apologise if the following sounds harsh, but you have a platform and a commensurate responsibility towards accuracy.
Ask yourself the question: “Is the viewer coming away from this video with a broadly accurate picture of the facts and the most relevant expert opinions on this topic”? I think the answer is a clear no. If an audience member is persuaded by your citation of “Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Romer”, and then later finds out that Paul Romer no longer supports the idea, they are going to feel deceived and betrayed, and no longer trust your channel. Similarly, it is wrong to leave out discussion of charter city projects that have been tried and failed.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to have the opinion “charter cities are good”, and to argue persuasively for that opinion, nor that you have to exhaustively list every single critique of the concept. But you should engage with major criticisms if they exist (and are in the realm of reason). By doing so, you both increase the knowledge of the audience, and even strengthen your own argument, so it doesn’t wither away the first time someone does a google search.
@MvK and @titotal , here is the new section about political tractability:
(With footnotes going to https://nationalpost.com/news/year-in-ideas-professor-touts-special-economic-zones-known-as-charter-cities and https://devpolicy.org/why-charter-cities-have-failed-20190716/ )
I’m still thinking about what from the existing draft could be cut or condensed, if you have any suggestions!
Yes, in response to MvK’s comment, I am reworking the script to add a section (in-between “objection: why whole new cities?” and “wider benefits”) about political feasibility, where I will talk about how Paul Romer abandoned the idea after delays and failed projects in Honduras and Madagascar. I’ll add another comment here when I update this Forum post with the new draft.
Do you have any suggestions as to which parts of the draft could be cut or made shorter? The current post is already getting a little long compared to our ideal video length of 10-15 mins.
I think it’s too long, YouTube etc. People get bored quickly