charter cities
Article
charter cities is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 02, 2021 and January 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “report questioning the cost-effectiveness of charter cities”; “Charter Cities: This is maybe closest to the original spirit of neoreaction”; “Charter cities embed this basic idea in a liberal framework”. It most often appears alongside Charter Cities Institute, Rethink Priorities, Russia.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: August 02, 2021
- Last seen: January 04, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Charter Cities Institute (2 shared issues)
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- Rethink Priorities (2 shared issues)
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- Russia (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 1700s (1 shared issues)
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- 1950s (1 shared issues)
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- 4chan (1 shared issues)
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- accelerationism (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
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- Age of Trump (1 shared issues)
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- AgroAlpha (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Tabarrok (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I recently got a chance to attend a Charter Cities Institute event and talk to some people working on potential charter cities around the world. They had all sorts of philosophies and plans and goals, with the one constant being that none of them wanted to give me identifiable details or (God forbid) have me write anything about them.
Mark Lutter of CCI is kind of bummed about this. He has to meet with government officials and advocate for charter cities, and he would love to be able to say something like “Amazon is planning a charter city in Brazil”, and since everyone recognizes Amazon is an important dignified corporation and Brazil is an important dignified country, they’ll agree that this all seems like the sort of thing important dignified people do and they’re on board with it. Instead, all the important dignified people involved demand secrecy, and your choices are the husband-and-wife team interested in “ecstatic birthing” or those Black Hammer guys from the last links roundup. It’s individually rational, but bad for the charter city movement in general.
Inline links: the last links roundup
_ Mark Lutter expands on his disagreements with Rethink Priorities’ report questioning the cost-effectiveness of charter cities. Also useful as a good rundown for what might be in the pipeline: he says he is especially interested in getting charter city legislation for Nigeria, that one additional Latin American country (exact identity currently secret) may follow Honduras in proposing a ZEDE-type law, and that there may be opportunities in Somaliland as well.
Inline links: expands on his disagreements
Charter Cities: This is maybe closest to the original spirit of neoreaction. Reactionaries noticed that many developing countries, when given a democratic choice, picked warlords who promised revenge on their ethnic enemies, or socialists eager to expropriate the property of anyone trying to start a useful industry. Meanwhile, benevolent dictators like Lee Kuan Yew and Park Chung-hee led their countries to peace and prosperity.
Charter cities embed this basic idea in a liberal framework. They allow basically democratic countries that notice they’re failing to develop to give a small portion of their land to a non-genocidal and non-socialist company tasked with developing it according to international best practices, and everyone can choice whether to live in the small portion or the rest of the country. The larger country takes responsibility for making sure the company respects human rights, and we get there from here because a lot of countries have shown interest in doing this (and if it’s proven to work, hopefully more countries will later).
Whether or not you support charter cities, they’re an upgrade in ethicalness and practicality from the original neoreactionary plan, and a better standardbearer for this idea.
RIP …so this doesn’t support the “invest in whatever companies give the best rate of return” narrative either. What’s left is strategy 3: Do something like donating to charity, but the donation should go to charities that promote capitalism somehow, or be an investment in companies doing charitable things (impact investing) I find this promising, but I don’t know what a good charity along these lines would be. There are some charities that send economists (or other professionals) to developing countries and advise them on how to do more capitalism. This kind of development aid has been roundly criticized and did especially badly in Russia. I’ve supported some of these that seem especially careful in the past, and would be willing to support them more if someone found a very good one with a strong track record. (also, I’m concerned that even though rich countries got rich because of capitalism, it’s no longer that easy for poor countries to get rich with the same type of capitalism - existing rich countries will outcompete them - and we’re not entirely sure how to help poor countries get rich now, although probably good institutions are always better than bad institutions) I am partial to Charter Cities Institute, which helps advise developing countries on creating charter cities that have better governance and less corruption than the rest of the region. But EA evaluator group Rethink Priorities has a report on why they don’t think this is quite as valuable as traditional charity (they’re not sure special economic zones consistently make areas develop faster, and they think this finding should be applied to charter cities too). Here’s CCI’s counterargument (they think SEZs aren’t a good reference class for the charter cities they want). I think both sides make good points but I’m currently more convinced by Rethink Priorities’ (although I do still donate to CCI sometimes). Finally, you could invest in developing-world projects and companies that seem unusually likely to make an overall economic difference there. I’m nervous about this because of China’s Belt and Road initiative, which did this at huge scale for infrastructure, but doesn’t seem to have done much good (and might have done some bad). Also, I’m not smart money, which means I’m exposed to adverse selection - if there’s a company that can’t raise enough money to build a dam in Kenya and needs your charity dollar to make the budget work, why hasn’t Wall Street come through for them? One plausible answer is “because it’s a bad company with a bad plan”. Admittedly another plausible answer is “because it has a 5% RoI, the next Instacart has a 6% RoI, and so Wall Street would prefer the next Instacart but you as a charitable individual should prefer the Kenyan dam.” I would potentially be willing to believe this if some smart charity evaluator would tell me which projects were good. But $1 million only gets you a fraction of a dam, and does get tens of thousands of clean water dispensers, so I would also want someone to present the specific case for why the dam would be better (not just the heuristic “capitalism is always better than charity”). I’m willing to believe that some capitalist charities - whether these are development aid think tanks, or investment in developing-world projects - could potentially be better than usual charities. The reason I’m not donating to these is that nobody’s done the hard work of identifying these and calculating their expected value, and I don’t feel qualified to do that work myself. I have a high prior that any nonprofit that hasn’t been rigorously shown to be good is probably bad, and the potential advantage of capitalism over normal charity usually isn’t enough to overcome my decreased certainty in its efficacy2. UPDATE: I respond to your comments and counterarguments here. 1Instacart is worth $10 billion and has 10 million customers, so naively you might say that it cost $1000 in investment per customer. But successful companies are worth more than the amount of investment it took to create them. I don’t know how much has ever been invested in Instacart total, but this also seems like the wrong question. You, today, can’t invest in “the next Instacart” - everyone wants to invest in the next successful company, but nobody can be sure which one it will be. All you can do is invest in a basket of promising-looking startups: most will fail but some will succeed. Because of this, I thought the best way to represent “the amount of investment money it originally took back when Instacart was founded in 2012 to create Instacart today” as the current value of $10 billion discounted by the rate of return a good VC gets on their investments, which I think is about 7.5%. That suggests it took about $5 billion of investment in 2012 to create the amount of value represented by Instacart today, ie 10 million customers getting a good deal on grocery delivery. That means $500 in investment per customer. Because most charities can’t take $5 billion in new funding, I chose to represent this as per million dollars, so 2,000 customers per $1 million. I understand this is a very shaky estimate and I’m hoping that all the comparisons I’m going to make are so order-of-magnitude different that nobody really cares about the specifics. There’s one thing that confuses me here, which is that Instacart has 10 million customers and makes $2.5 billion in revenue per year, suggesting each customer spends $250. But you can get a yearly subscription to Instacart for $100, after which the service is free. So either customers are overwhelmingly being stupid, not buying the subscription, and paying much more than it should cost - or I’m missing something here and the numbers are wrong. Again, I’m hoping all of this is done across so many orders of magnitude that it doesn’t matter. 2Doesn’t this principle also mean I shouldn’t do ACX Grants, where I donate to fledgling projects with no evidence of efficacy? Maybe, and every year I debate whether I should really do this. I think the arguments for a distinction are: ACX Grants go to charities where my donation potentially has a very high upside, so I’m not as concerned about the high prior on failure.