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and https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/blog-posts/honduras-repealed-its-charter-city-law-what-happened-and-what-happens-next/ ).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.
It’s a pretty logical thought if you really think AI is as dangerous as nuclear weapons!