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.)
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.)