In this video, we describe a speculative but promising idea to boost economic growth: giving cities the ability to write some of their own laws and design their own institutions, independently from their parent countries. Jackson Wagner, the first author of this post, has written the script. Writer, the second author, has given feedback.
Below, you can find the script of the video.
Introduction
When you think about ways to help people in developing countries, you probably think of international aid—providing medical supplies, or coordinating disaster relief, or even just giving cash, like we discussed in our recent video about global poverty. These things are great, and this kind of charitable aid saves lives every day. But there’s something a little curious here, because these interventions AREN’T what helped the world’s most prosperous countries succeed in the first place.
Up until the 1700s, essentially the entire population of the planet lived in poverty. That started to change during the industrial revolution, when humanity developed more efficient, mechanized ways of producing goods and capturing energy. Hundreds of millions of people were able to live better lives thanks to economic growth—learning to use technology to more efficiently grow food, make clothes, and get from place to place.
The overwhelming importance of economic development remains true in modern times—by far the greatest ongoing reductions in poverty and suffering are coming not from international aid projects, but from development, as low-income countries find new ways to do things more efficiently and climb the ladder of technological advancement.
For example, in the year 1960, Singapore was a poor and undeveloped country, producing only $428 per citizen. Today, Singapore’s economy has grown by many times, to around $83,000 per person. Concurrently, Singaporeans’ life expectancy has climbed from 65 years to 85 years, and the literacy rate has jumped from 57% to 97%. That’s an incredible amount of progress within a single lifetime.
Almost every country on earth has made some economic progress over the past few decades, but unfortunately only a few have succeeded as spectacularly as economic-development superstars like Singapore, or South Korea. There are hundreds of millions of people still living on just a few dollars per day, like Singaporeans in 1960. So, why do some countries grow more quickly than others?
One important factor is the quality of a country’s institutions: Can the local court system make fair and speedy decisions, or do cases take years to resolve while working through a system mired in corruption? Can the local government efficiently build infrastructure for electricity, roads, and public transit? Are elections trustworthy? Can people be confident that their savings and investments are secure?
Trying to improve a nation’s existing institutions can thus be a powerful way to boost development and reduce poverty, but it can also be very difficult. When a system has been around for a long time, there will always be a lot of entrenched interests who benefit from the status quo and like things the way they are. But if you want to reform a broken institution, there’s no avoiding this kind of long, arduous political struggle, right?
The idea of charter cities, and the town of Itana
Well, in 2009, nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Romer proposed a new strategy. He argued that going through the painstaking process of fighting for incremental changes from within the existing system might not always be a country’s best choice. Sometimes, it might be easier to start from scratch, developing an entirely new city with a new legal code and new institutions, inspired by the best international examples.
Charter cities, Romer said, would be like a nation within a nation. They’ll still need to follow their mother country’s constitution, criminal code, and international treaties, but should otherwise be given the freedom to design their own legal code to encourage the growth of new industries—setting their own immigration rules, tax codes, business regulations, civil court systems, and more. The way that the city holds elections, the structure of its government, and the way it provides public services could all be designed based on the playbook of success stories like Singapore.
There aren’t many charter cities that exist today, but for a real-world example, let’s look at “Itana”, a small charter city project being spearheaded by the Nigerian entrepreneur Iyinolowa Aboyeji. Itana is a town being built near Lagos, designed to attract talented tech workers from across Africa to found their own new companies or work remotely for employers overseas. Of course, in order to realize that dream, Itana is going to need a stable supply of electricity and a strong internet connection. But that’s difficult in Nigeria, which has struggled for decades with electrical blackouts and grid collapses, only managing to provide power for less than eight hours out of each day. One of the many obstacles to better service is that the government insists power be provided very cheaply. It’s a vote-winning policy, but it makes power companies reluctant to transmit electricity that they’re forced to buy at a high price and sell at a loss. This is one reason Itana wants the ability to write its own business regulations—if Itana could choose to pay a higher price for more consistent power, that could set the stage for a brighter future.
Furthermore, in order to attract talented people from across all of Africa, it would be great if Itana could write its own, town-specific immigration rules, granting visas quickly instead of having them go through an arduous, months-long process. And for similar reasons, it’s planning to make it as easy as possible for entrepreneurs to quickly register a new business.
Objection: why whole new cities?
Now, some of you might be thinking—this sounds nice, but isn’t it overkill to build an ENTIRE NEW CITY, just to test out some better business regulations? Who would want to be the first to move there? It’s true that this might seem drastic in places like the United states, where no new large cities have been built in the last hundred years. But across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, millions of people move from the countryside to urban areas each year, with the United Nations expecting 2.5 billion new city-dwellers by 2050. Urbanization in many countries is happening so fast that it’s outpacing the ability of existing cities to build supporting infrastructure—leading to problems with providing clean water, electricity, and other basic servicesso on. Lagos, for instance, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, doubling in size over the past twenty years from eight million to sixteen million people. Building out infrastructure for new charter cities would help channel the power of this urbanization to create healthy, productive engines of long-term growth, rather than stressing existing megacities with continuing haphazard, unplanned sprawl.
Objection: isn’t this politically intractable?
A bigger problem is political feasibility. The whole point 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 tariffs 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.
Wider benefits: inspiration, competition, and experimentation
So, charter cities are difficult to get off the ground, and since most of today’s projects are still in early stages, we don’t know for sure how effectively they’ll boost growth. But these uncertainties should be weighed against the immense potential benefit—the chance to lift millions of residents out of poverty through improved governance and sustainable economic growth.
And, it gets even better, because it’s likely that the growth-boosting benefits of charter cities could spread to far more people than just the residents who move there. There are three main ways this could happen: inspiration, competition, and experimentation.
First, seeing legal reforms work well on a small scale could inspire larger national changes. For example, Hong Kong’s economic policies during the 20th century didn’t just help the city of Hong Kong itself grow into a thriving metropolis of several million people. Provinces in mainland China were also inspired to imitate Hong Kong’s success, and this economic liberalization eventually lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
Second, is the idea that charter cities could spur “governance competition”. If you give people lots of options about where and how to live, people will naturally flock to the places that offer them the most freedom, safety, and prosperity. Unfortunately, right now, lots of people don’t have many good options, and that makes it easier for governments to restrict people’s rights or otherwise exploit their citizens. In a world with lots of charter cities, fewer people will have to put up with that kind of abuse, and would-be exploitative governments will be pressured to start treating their citizens better, lest they start losing all their best people to the city next door.
Finally, experimenting with totally new types of law could bring huge benefits. What about going beyond just imitating the best practices of developed countries, and instead trying to do even better? Since charter cities are building whole new laws and institutions from a clean slate, it’ll also be easier for them to experiment with radically new concepts which, if successful, could become leading examples for the whole world.
For example, Prospera is a charter city that’s currently operating within a special economic zone in Honduras. They’ve implemented a completely novel legal framework that enables rapid innovation across industries. Alongside benefits for areas like finance and biotech, Próspera’s legal platform enables architects to design modern, eco-friendly buildings connected by parks and walking paths, in a way that wouldn’t be possible under the zoning rules of most American cities.
There are all kinds of new policy ideas that charter cities could potentially explore. The new-city project of Telosa is planning to base its economic system around the philosophy of “Georgism”, taxing land in a way that will help fund city services while eliminating economic distortions around land use. A city could also try out improved ways of voting, like “liquid democracy” where there’s no strict distinction between ordinary voters and elected representatives, or they could take inspiration from a previous video of ours, and have the city government use prediction markets to help inform important public decisions. All of these ideas would be considered huge, fundamental reforms to the status quo of today’s rich countries. Trying them out on a small scale in a charter city would be much easier.
Conclusion
The idea of building charter cities with new legal systems to boost economic growth is strange and untested. Today’s projects are small, with uncertain prospects. But consider this: two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was small and uncertain. It was experimenting with a bizarre, Classical-era style of government called “democracy”, and nobody knew if it would really work. But over time, democracy proved so successful that countless nations around the world made the switch—and this new system led to greater peace, faster economic growth, and more human freedom.
If some of today’s charter cities are successful, then maybe the idea of semi-autonomous cities could spread across the world just like democracy did. A century from now, maybe the idea that promoting governance competition leads to faster growth and greater liberty, will seem just as obvious as the idea that an elected president usually provides better leadership than a dictator or a king. Charter cities today are focused on making life better for the people who choose to move there. But if we’re lucky, they might also help make our entire civilization wiser, richer, fairer, and better able to navigate future challenges.
Call-To-Action
If you loved this video, consider checking out the website of the Charter Cities Institute to learn more. The Charter Cities Institute does research to understand the detailed legal frameworks and governmental best-practices that new cities can use to set themselves up for success. They also consult with interested governments and city developers, spreading the word about the charter cities idea and helping new projects get off the ground.
On their website, you can read their research and learn the history of development superstars like Dubai and Shenzhen. You can also listen to podcast interviews with the people involved in some of today’s most exciting new city projects.
Another fun resource is the “Startup Cities Map”, where you can learn about dozens of innovative special economic zones and ambitious new-city projects underway across the developing world.
And as always, we have detailed links in this video’s description, so if you want to read all about Prospera Honduras’s 3D voxel-based property rights, or watch the original TED talk where Paul Romer first introduced the idea of charter cities, you can check out those links!
Unfortunately, the game of power is about ruling a territory, not improving it. It took me many years to internalize this idea. “Surely the elite would want to improve things?” No. Putin could improve Russia in many ways, but these ways would weaken his rule, so he didn’t. That’s why projects like Georgism or charter cities keep failing: they weaken the relative position of the elite, even if they plausibly make life better for everyone. Such projects can only succeed if implemented by a whole country, which requires a revolution or at least a popular movement. It’s possible—it’s how democracy was achieved—but let’s be clear on what it takes.
Yup, there are definitely a lot of places (like 99+% of places, 99+% of the time!) which aren’t interested in a given reform—especially one as uniqely big and experimental as charter cities. This is why in our video we tried to focus on political tractability as one of the biggest difficulties—hopefully we don’t come across as saying that the world will instantly be tiled over with charter cities tomorrow! But some charter cities are happening sometimes in some places—in addition to the examples in the video, Zambia is pretty friendly towards the idea, and is supportive of the new-city project Nkwashi. (I think Charter Cities Institute considers Nkwashi to be their biggest current partnership?) Democracy was achieved, after all, even if it still hasn’t won a total victory even after 250+ years.
The comments are almost nothing but great takedowns of the idea. Eg:
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This doesn’t work because it doesn’t actually solve the incentive alignment issues that cause multinational corporations to be misaligned optimizers. If there was a version that did, it might be promising—but it would need to be specifically designed to prevent big interests from benefiting, and would therefore likely get attacked by them. the biggest problem with starting your own thing is that you either get big from toxic funding—or you don’t get enough funding.
Some things that might be components of a version that actually has some shot at working:
https://www.grassrootseconomics.org/ is a currency system specifically designed to be hyper-local and not connected long distance, unlike typical alternate currency systems like global cryptocurrencies, because this disconnection limits international interests’ incentive to manipulate the currency for their own powerseeking. interesting videos about the motivation and design on https://www.youtube.com/@WillRuddick/videos—importantly it’s intended to be a secondary currency used in small groups where another currency is also in use.
https://www.actu-environnement.com/media/pdf/ostrom_1990.pdf or https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Governing_the_Commons or https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ostrom+governing+the+commons—there’s solid research on designs for organizations that do not rely on the typical libertarian individualist approach and could use something more peer to peer and cooperative. I have a high opinion of many libertarian principles, but the “everyone is completely separated and nothing is managed through resource sharing systems of any kind, it’s all assumed to be one-gatekeeper-per-resource” seems like a recipe to get all the resource holders hodling at the expense of non-resource-holders, which is the core issue anticipated by commenters.
if you want to defend this idea further, I’d suggest integrating some of this into the next video on the topic, so that it can head off criticisms from many perspectives, not just criticisms from liberal and libertarian perspectives, which seem to be all that the current one has discussion of. I’d suggest you watch most of the videos from https://www.youtube.com/@unlearningeconomics9021 to get a sense of what another perspective might look like that you’d need to defend against, because almost all the comments seem to be people who understand the left’s criticisms and the video doesn’t seem to be made with those criticisms in mind. (Note that I do not generally believe the old fashioned left have solutions, just good criticisms. Only specific slices of the modern left have actual ideas for how to implement stuff that might actually work. and for clarity, left != liberal. left here is anything left of liberal.)
In general, the idea that “faster growth” is in any way good for the common person is considered propaganda for corporations at this point. If you want to change that, you’d have to show a mechanism for it to be different.
I will definitely check out that youtube channel! I’m pretty interested in mechanism design and public-goods stuff, and I agree there are a lot of good ideas there. For instance, I am a huge fan of Georgism, so I definitely recognize that going all-in on the “libertarian individualist approach” is often not the right fit for the situation! Honestly, even though charter cities are somewhat an intrinsically libertarian concept, part of the reason I like the charter city idea is indeed the potential for experimenting with new ways to manage the commons and provide public goods—Telosa is explicitly georgist, for example, and even hyper-libertarian Prospera has some pretty interesting concepts around things like crime liability insurance, which in the USA is considered a pretty left-wing (or maybe “far-liberal”? idk...) idea for trying to reduce gun violence.
But yeah, a lot of common leftist critiques of society/capitalism/etc can feel kind of… shallow, or overly-formulaic, or confused about the incentives of a given situation, to me? So I’d like to get a better understanding of the best versions of the leftist worldview, in order to better appreciate what the common critiques are getting at.
This seems to be a show stopper.
Couldn’t the country’s Supreme Court just decide anyways one day that the existing ‘legal code’ apply regardless of what the original intentions of the founders are or what the founding documents say?
It would need a constitutional amendment to credibly enshrine its special status. But why would a supermajority of the politicians and citizens from existing political boundaries ratify that?
In China’s case it was clear, they had nothing left to lose in 1978 after hitting rock bottom, but I highly doubt most countries would even exist after 120+ years of the deepest misery and suffering, in order to reach rock bottom.
Noting that additional authors still don’t carry over when the post is a cross-post, unfortunately.