Romer
Article
Romer is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 14, 2021 and January 11, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Romer discussed charter cities and invited him to Honduras for negotiations”; “The Romer-esque version of a ‘Charter City’ was to some extent a straw man”. It most often appears alongside Charter Cities Institute, China, Dubai.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: April 14, 2021
- Last seen: January 11, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- Charter Cities Institute (2 shared issues)
-
- China (2 shared issues)
-
- Dubai (2 shared issues)
-
- Ireland (2 shared issues)
-
- Mexico (2 shared issues)
-
- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
-
- Africa (1 shared issues)
-
- Alaska (1 shared issues)
-
- Amalgamated Kenyan Wells (1 shared issues)
-
- America (1 shared issues)
-
- Amisulpride (1 shared issues)
-
- anarcho-capitalist (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.
In 2009, Nobel-winning economist Paul Romer proposed a new type of governance structure. Underdeveloped countries looking for an economic boost could donate territory to some entity considered non-corrupt and skilled at governance - for example, a successful country like Switzerland. The recipient entity would govern the territory as effectively as it could, bringing improved human rights and economic growth.
Lobo's party controlled Congress and got a charter city law passed. After this the story gets kind of murky. Paul Romer's version was that they appointed him head of a Transparency Committee to make sure that whatever happened was in the best interests of Honduras, then started negotiating with a company called MKG Group without telling him. Upset at the opacity, and also at the negotiations themselves (he preferred having a foreign country administer the zones, not a private corporation), he resigned in protest. Honduras' version is that Romer was never appointed head of anything and there was no Transparency Committee.
Inline links: gets kind of murky
Honduras - with 70% of its population in poverty, the 5th highest murder rate in the world, and a political system widely recognized as corrupt and dysfunctional - was running low on options. They approached Romer and expressed interest in his idea. Together, Romer and Honduran officials developed the ZEDE (Spanish acronym for "Zone for Employment and Economic Development"), a generic model for creating special economic zones ("charter cities") within Honduras.
Insofar as one of the core conclusions of the "Intervention Report" was "economic development and reform zones," the actual work done by Charter Cities Institute and others in this domain do, in fact, work on a variety of zone-based reforms. The Romer-esque version of a "Charter City" was to some extent a straw man for what should have been a deeper dive into the global movement of zones with distinctive law and governance.
Hello? Much of CCI's work is towards what are de facto reform zones rather than grandiose Romer-esque Charter Cities - and that is the way they should be working.