I don't think the Mennonites & Amish live in anything reasonably described as a 'city'.
City formation, anytime and anywhere, is pretty fascinating, and there are other 'found a new better city' projects and ideas apart from the 'charter city' stuff, but the meaningful distinction between the two seems to be that charter cities explicitly seek to be exempted from at least _some_ of the laws and regulations that they would otherwise be subject to.
It's about the same as a rent for a one bedroom one bathroom in the capital/most expensive city. So it's roughly the equivalent of charging the average rent for a one bedroom in New York but instead getting a studio.
Roughly 2.5-3 hour flight at most, less than 2 from Miami. At our current office building in the jurisdiction, I get 100mbps up and down, so this will be similar; these will be right near our current headquarters.
yeah it takes about 20mins driving, sometimes longer if there's traffic. The Roatan municipality is currently improving the main road of the island, which means traffic is horrible in some places while they work, but hopefully they'll be done soon!
It was both, total travel time. And in effect rather than as the crow flies. According to what I'm seeing, there are no direct flights. Traveling there seems like it'd cost about ~$1,000 and take at best one transfer and longer than that.
There are direct flights to Roatan from Houston, Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, and a few other cities, so depending on where you're coming from, should only be one layover.
I checked Miami and I could only find two direct flights a month. Both cost about $1,000. That's not all that easy to get to from the closest/most culturally tied city in the US.
Do you think we’ll ever get charter cities in the continental United States? The federal government owns over 1/4 of all US land including basically all of Nevada. I feel like if we really want to be a laboratory of democracy we should have charter cities here.
Nevada seems to be offering something vaguely charter-city like, though I don't know the details - see https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/post/an-analysis-of-nevadas-proposed-innovation-zones-law . I don't know how this works with federalism though - Nevada can exempt you from state laws but not federal laws, and it would be very hard (unconstitutional?) for the federal government to do anything that also exempted you from state laws.
Additionally, I read in a physical newspaper and can't find a link, but Storey county commissioners were opposed to the innovation zone because they were concerned about water rights. In a desert, this is a very important concern to have.
On another note, one commissioner wrote an article about how she opposed the city because she couldn't understand blockchain technology. I suppose that is also a valid concern. You don't want a technologically superior force to harm a bunch of people using a method you don't understand, but enough about AI risk.
Other rural counties in Nevada are also unwilling to offer charter zones. At local meetings, residents of rural Nevada don't like the idea, and can say so to local politicians fairly easily. See here for examples:
We could still see an innovation zone actually being made in Nevada, but very slowly. At first, it seemed like BlockChain LLC would get set up fast and break ground this year, but the feasibility study will push it back to at least next year. Hopefully, they don't just give up, but that seems like at least part of the plan from opposed commissioners. It is very cheap for them to ask for more studies and delay construction.
Hmm. Nevada. "some kind of religious group holding a regular meeting there, and then the meeting becoming more and more permanent until it’s a town". Black Rock Charter City, anyone? El Ciudad Del Hombre Ardiente, if we want to backdate the mythology a couple of centuries?
OK, the Federalism issue makes that problematic, but still fun to think about.
There is a possible case for creating a charter city on a Native American Reservation or other First Nation land in Canada or the USA. This would avoid issues around federalism and state/local laws in western nations. How about in one of those large multi-decade refugee camps in France?
What about establishing a very large embassy in another nation which is city sized and using that as the basis for a charter city? What about the real charter cities of military bases? The US has a long history of creating cities from scratch all over the world....maybe a full on occupation style city state would make sense - with all the contractors around...it sort of already exists.
That would likely have its own issues and conflicts between the purpose of those reservations and who can live there, though one could see them and charter city's within the same ideascape if you squint your eyes to make the world fuzzy.
Perhaps the external investment around getting casinos up and running or other tourism businesses, etc. can be seen in a quasi-charter city way. Or maybe charter city's can be seen through the lens of reservations. One is quite biased only looking at Singapore or Hong Kong or whatever as examples.
History is chock full of 'self-rule' arrangements for various polities, including many island nations and ethnic reserves/areas. Certainly lessons can be learned from places like Corsica or American Samoa or Puerto Rico or the Azores or Falkland Islands, etc. and various first nation and aboriginal and native xyz people arrangements around the world have been doing this for centuries if not millennia.
Still...if we are looking at religious or corporate charter city-states, then why not ethnic and cultural ones as well? To a degree, one need not wait or start anything as these communities have existed for well over 100 years already.
I'm not really implying that corporate fake libertarians who want to start fascist slave cities or ponzi scheme land price speculation grabs, etc. can really learn anything from indigenous communities that they'd be willing to hear as there are already large scale protests and mass death each time colonial/corporate powers want to put a new set of oil wells in the middle of rainforests.
But maybe as observers of the process we can draw some interesting parallels of what gets included and excluded from our analysis. Fictional sea-steading and plans for cities that don't exist might be seen in their full context of ethnic ghettoes and island self-rule situations which are more similar than not to the idea of a city established for a specific purpose, though that purpose generally hasn't been making money.
You could do it by finding some unincorporated land in a relatively small government state. Incorporate your own local government etc, maybe petition the state government. If you need even more independence you could always try to convince a Native American tribe or something in the territories. Native American tribes are often pretty willing to get on board with economic improvements so long as there's some money and improvements in their life there. There's even been some YIMBYs who've convinced them to serve as building code laboratories.
I guess what I'm thinking would have to be on reservation land. The US has territories e.g. Puerto Rico, USVI, etc. with their own local laws and mirror tax codes. Instead of being offshore I feel like we could extend that concept by creating city-states on federal lands within the US.
I suspect they'd never go for it, but the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Reservation, right next to Scottsdale/Tempe might be ideal if you wanted someplace not remote. You have miles of farmland just 3 miles from downtown Tempe and Scottsdale and 10 minutes from the Phoenix airport.
What do you mean by a charter city? Plenty of US states allow them in the sense that a city can be founded with a charter or adopt one after it's reached a certain size, and they get to decide what their governance structure will be based on the charter, rather than general state law. If you don't adopt a charter, then you get the general law. Los Angeles and San Francisco are both charter cities in this sense.
But this just means you get to choose your city leadership and org structure according to whatever the charter says. This can potentially include having a private local government that isn't elected. But it doesn't exempt your city or its residents from higher-level laws. You can't have a city charter that says people in your city don't need a state license to drive and don't have to pay US federal taxes.
You seemingly should be able to get that level of autonomy with some tribal territories, but the US doesn't exactly have a great history of honoring its treaties in this area.
I liked this one solely because it was interesting to learn about Nigerian megachurches. But in general I dislike the charter city posts. I think Scott is too ideologically drawn to the idea to admit the downsides, which in my opinion vastly outweigh the upsides. There are parts of the proposals that I like, namely medical licensing reciprocity, but in general they just sound like glorified tax havens with a lot of pretty pictures.
Doesn't he admit a lot of downsides? I don't even get the sense that he's all that drawn to the idea anyhow, just curious to see if some (if any) of these would work.
Yeah, he does. Lazy wording on my part. It's more that the significance of the downsides are such that it doesn't seem worth continuing writing about much and yet he's decided to make it a regular feature of the blog. Maybe it would be better to say that he doesn't seem to take the downsides seriously enough.
I thought the Próspera post itself was pretty bad, in that he seemed insufficiently critical of what was essentially a sales pitch to him. He admitted some flaws in the comments but was still far too charitable in my opinion.
Yeah. Scott is willing to take people's word on a lot of things where I feel like scepticism is warranted. Having worked in developing countries in the past you should assume any opportunity for rent seeking and corruption will be taken, because that's the fundamental incentives of the system. And having the people involved sign a charter saying they all promise not to do the bad things that are in their obvious interest to do isn't a sufficient constraint
I also like the charter city posts and hope they continue.
Is Scott too credulous? He does say "I do not necessarily endorse any project mentioned here as reasonable, ethical, relevant, or sane" at the beginning of every post. Seems like an adequate disclaimer to me.
You can put a disclaimer like that, but the mere fact that he finds them to be one of the only topics worthy of a full post every other week still tells me he's too credulous. It's a fringe topic and I wish that fact were reflected in their frequency. I just think he's drawn to it more than is warranted because for some odd reason he seems to be drifting back towards libertarianism and his head seems to be stuck in that space a lot lately.
It's odd to me at least since one of the first posts of his I read, and one of the reasons I began reading the blog regularly, was the Anti-Libertarian FAQ. Were he less stuck on libertarianism, I think his head would be in a lot of the other worthwhile places it often is, just more. I think it wouldn't still be thinking about model cities much, for example. Had he just written the one post on Prospera then left it at that, I wouldn't have had any objection to it.
From the Non-Libertarian FAQ: "To many people, libertarianism is a reaction against an over-regulated society, and an attempt to spread the word that some seemingly intractable problems can be solved by a hands-off approach. Many libertarians have made excellent arguments for why certain libertarian policies are the best options, and I agree with many of them. I think this kind of libertarianism is a valuable strain of political thought that deserves more attention, and I have no quarrel whatsoever with it and find myself leaning more and more in that direction myself."
To me, his interest in model cities (and prediction markets and many other things) seems to be a natural extension of this sort of sentiment.
Also from the Non-Libertarian FAQ: "However, there’s a certain more aggressive, very American strain of libertarianism with which I do have a quarrel. This is the strain which, rather than analyzing specific policies and often deciding a more laissez-faire approach is best, starts with the tenet that government can do no right and private industry can do no wrong and uses this faith in place of more careful analysis. This faction is not averse to discussing politics, but tends to trot out the same few arguments about why less regulation has to be better."
If I thought Scott was drifting in *that* direction, I'd probably share some of your concerns. But IMHO there's no evidence of that happening.
That's fair. Maybe I'm just slow to realize that he's more libertarian leaning (and always has been) than I would like. I think his "greatest hits" just happened to be more in line with my thinking than what the bulk of the blog actually ended up turning out to be. He seems to have a tendency to dismiss leftist viewpoints and frequently cites libertarians - actual libertarians, mind you. Part of the reason I liked his content more at first could have been because it discussed culture war things, which is an area where I tend to agree more with centrist libertarian types. But over time I've come to see the culture war stuff as more distracting and possibly detrimental to more consequential political goals - better tax policy, housing, criminal justice reform, healthcare, ending the drug war, etc. - and I'm a bit tired disinterested now. Idk. All I can say is I wish this place were less libertarian-y than it appears to be. Doing my best to change that.
Maybe it's worth mentioning that up until around 2013, I pretty much was one of those stupid, dogmatic, deontological libertarians. I abandoned that in favor of consequentialism, but as time went on I would notice myself making bad consequentialist arguments for libertarian positions that I was still hung up on. I couldn't quite shake the bug. I had trapped libertarian priors, even once I'd decided to operate as a utilitarian, and sometimes I wonder if Scott could be a bit stuck like that as well since it reminds me of myself. But if he was never actually ideologically libertarian, that's probably not correct.
How much of what we are accustomed to would seem sane to someone in 1921? Is there a path to a sane future that depends only on steps that look sane to people who aren’t paying attention?
Restorative Justice is endorsed by the UK Crown Prosecution Service. Describing it as "hippie-ish" seems like you're trying to ridicule the very idea. I get that you're actually linking it to the person behind the project, but it's not a fringe idea.
"Hippie-ish" does sound a bit pejorative simply because hippies are so often unfairly maligned, but I don't necessarily think that was his intent. I certainly wish we got more articles here about criminal justice reform than pie-in-the-sky libertarian fantasies.
The elevator pitch for restorative justice (at least in the way I've come across it before) does sound pretty hippie-ish to me: "Instead of throwing people in jail, let's just all talk to each other about our feelings."
I get that it's a lot more subtle than that and I actually think it would be a great idea to talk to people more instead of (or in addition to) throwing them in jail, but it definitely has some strong hippie vibes.
That sounded wrong enough to me that I googled it. Looks to me like a really bad elevator pitch. The first two definitions I came across both described it as getting the victim and criminal together to discuss the harms done and *agree on how the criminal can repair the harm*.
By leaving out the part where the criminal makes some agreed upon restitution to repair the harm done, which is the source of the "restorative" adjective in the name, you can certainly reduce the practice to talking about feelings. But that so misses the point that it seems more like a pitch for why "restorative justice" is stupid than an actual attempt to describe the idea.
As it is, the idea itself doesn't seem so very utopian, though I'm not convinced it's actually workable in the real world.
I'm not sure what you've linked exactly counts as an endorsement, and it's so full of jargon and fluff what they're actually on about is rather unclear.
Restorative Justice can mean doing mediation and falling back on the justice system if that doesn't work out, or an Amish-like system where if people falsely claim to repent and to change their behavior, there is no recourse.
The extreme 'no one is a criminal' side does deserve ridicule, IMO (or rather, concern about the victims of such a system).
In human history, this has been done. Seems to me to have been the precursor of civil law in northern Europe at least. Look up some Icelandic sagas. Every family has axes and people to wield them, wars are expensive, so we meet once a year at the thing to talk things through. If it doesn't work out, there are still the axes. It was difficult as long as nobody wrote or read shit and they had to rely on experienced people with good memory of past cases. After written law was established, the need for thing meetings seems to have gone.
> there may be opportunities in Somaliland as well
So after years of enduring the taunt that libertarians should move to Somalia, they're actually considering it. And in fact they're doing that one better and considering moving to an unrecognized breakaway region of Somalia.
In all seriousness, I think a post on how cities are founded would be cool. The classic distinction in the US is between Massachusetts Bay and Chesapeake Bay, and how the motivations of early settlers guided entire regional cultures.
There's two aspects to "how cities are founded", depending on what you mean by "city". The usual definition is that a "city" is a local municipal government established under local state or equivalent law, and there's an official definition of how to do this in most places that it happens. But I think the more useful definition is that a "city" is a collection of people living in close proximity to one another and interacting on the basis of that close proximity, even while maintaining very different life paths (so a university or a military base might not count as a "city"). And it's far less clear how you get a whole bunch of different people to move to a new place and start living there, particularly if no one already finds that place to be a good place to live.
I think the 19th and early 20th century was a particularly weird time for this, because that's a time when technological and economic changes drastically changed the balance of reasons to live in a rural area vs an urban area. Because urban living suddenly gained a lot of advantages relative to rural living, lots of places that weren't worth forming cities at before then became relevant places to found cities. (In North America, it also helped that previous inhabitants were killed by war or disease or genocide.) I suspect the current period of relatively few occasions for really new cities to arise is probably more similar to most of human history than the situation of the 19th and early 20th centuries when most American cities were founded.
I think you have to factor in changing technology and the changing value of natural resources. The only reason Chicago became a big city was that this is where the big rail junctions were built, before the railroad became the key transportation tech it was not an important town (one reason the University of Illinois's main campus is not in Chicago). LA became big in part because coal gave way to oil as the more valuable natural resource and LA had a lot of oil easy to pull out of the ground.
What happens if, say, work-from-home because the norm because of technology change? Arguably the Bay Area drastically slows its growth, or even reverses, and places like Bend, Whitefish, and Bozeman become big, and maybe tiny little places in weird corners of Idaho that have 2 farmhouses and a stop sign today become tomorrow's Pittsburgh.
Yeah, I suppose that's a third definition of "how cities are founded" - under what conditions does some existing small settlement become big?
There's an interesting story about how Chicago displaced St. Louis as the central transit hub of the United States, because the river junction lost importance to the lake port that could also get rail bridges over the Mississippi. But this doesn't explain why St. Louis was the river junction that grew rather than Cairo, IL.
But for instance, why did Austin rise up to become one of the 30 largest metro areas in the country, while very similar Madison never did? Why did Phoenix and Las Vegas, and to a lesser extent Tucson and Albuquerque, become the big southwest cities rather than Yuma and Needles and Socorro?
And how long does it take these days for a small town to become a big city? Shenzhen did it pretty quickly by being in a country that was rapidly urbanizing, but how long does it take in the United States? I suspect Austin is the top 30 urban area that was most recently outside of the top 100 in the United States, and it was probably quite a few decades ago that it was. Can other cities do that under current or future conditions?
UT Austin with big oil money and good sports team, attracts students who want to stay in pleasant city (possibly helps that the harsher summers are when school is out), eventually convinces Dell to headquarters here to employ the human resources UT Austin is generating. Feedback cycle ensues. Toss in some famous festivals to convince people to move or students to stay.
Something of a just so story, sure. But things to attract people and things to make them stick are all positive feedback loops that are only really counterbalanced by the negative feedback of crowding and cost of living. Madison may also be too close to Milwaukee and have some of its opportunities drawn off there. Dallas and Houston are further away from Austin and San Antonio isn't really the same.
When I think of Madison I think of biting cold and hardware/software development that's a decade out of date. Likely not an accurate picture but their stickyness just isn't as clear.
There's something to this, but it feels a bit like a just-so story.
On additional question is why this happens starting in the 1970s. In 1900 the population of Madison was 19,164 and that of Austin was 22,258. In 1970 Madison was 171,809 and Austin was 253,539, so Madison has multiplied its population by a factor of 9 while Austin has gotten a factor of 11 or so. But in the 1970s, Madison actually declined, and no decade since then has reached 13% total population growth. Austin growth also slows since then, but most decades have been in the 30-40% growth rate and the last two have slowed down to 20%, while previous decades in both cities were in the 50-60% growth rates.
Columbus, Indianapolis, and Nashville are interesting comparison cases, because they are also state capitals (though I don't think Indianapolis has the university presence of the others), and it's notable that the three of them seem to have perked up quite a bit in growth and excitement over the past decade or two, particularly compared to Cleveland, Cincinnati, Memphis, and perhaps even Chicago. But I think only Nashville out of this group is in the same class as Austin, even though all have grown faster than Madison.
Sounds like we're on the same page about the just-so story.
So when you posted these numbers, the first thing I thought about was "what about metro area"? and that makes things even stranger.
The Madison metro sat at 230k in 1900 while Austin was 47k. By 1970 Madison makes it to 547k while Austin is 387k. By 2010 Madison is at 827k vs Austin's 1716k. If the metro areas are accurate, then Madison posts a pretty regular growth of 8-12% per decade except for the roaring 50s-70s going up to as high as 20%. Whereas Austin accelerates in the 30s and posts around 40%/decade since.
Columbus and Indianapolis growth looks closer to Madison. Nashville data that I have only goes back to 1950, but posts in the mid-20s.
So zoomed out to the metro and looked at from that frame, the growth rate in all of these communities doesn't seem to be relatively stable over the long run and not due to anything recent. Very interesting.
The likeliest Latin American country to follow Honduras is just El Salvador, right? They have a culture which is very similar to Honduras's and their government is currently very interested in these sorts of futuristic quirky institution-building efforts (as they've made global headlines for adopting bitcoin as an official currency, AIUI just on paper), so it would make a great deal of sense for the Salvadoran government to see the Honduran government getting some attention/success with their ZEDE effort and try to copy them.
Business culture varies. My experience is some cultures have a lot of very public meetings so no one pays attention to any one. In others you keep them private until you have something to announce. But what is common is that businesses are only interested in being well known among their customers. About a third of the economy is not consumer facing. These people don't necessarily hide but they won't spend a single cent to tell you, random person, that they exist. Why would they? You'll never buy anything from them.
I suspect this is the same for charter cities. The ones that will have high public profiles will be the ones that have a reason. Perhaps they need crowdfunding. Maybe they want open recruiting for citizens. Etc. The ones who don't, won't.
As for those mega-churches, the other thing to keep in mind is the networks these people get access to. The GDP per capita is about $2k in Nigeria. Evangelical Churches in the US can send expertise and significant (for Nigeria) money through mission trips that have a huge impact. Plus the converts remain networked with the other churches which creates long term relationships.
It creates a relatively information rich quasi-market mechanism. Pastors compete for donated expert time, for donations both abroad and at home, and for followers. Often judged through personal relationships between people who actually visit in person, make personal friends, and intermarry.
I wonder if Israel might be a good country for this kind of thing because the kibbutz precedent, obviously not a place for libertarian cities, but there may still be there a variety of intentional communities?
In my experience, the kibbutz precedent is mostly talked about as a failed example, in Israel. Most successful kibbutzes are in fact very much not kibbutzes in many ways. The standard paradigm failed dismally.
However, little communities dedicated to, e.g., sustainable living and heavy materiel reuse do exist, though by no means prosperously.
I am pretty sure there are a fair few prosperous kibbutzim left, and many with waiting lists of people that want to move into. They have changed a lot though.
As I said - very much not kibbutzim in many ways. I mean, if half of their wealth is from renting to non-members, and more than half of the members work outside, giving part of their earnings to the kibbutz - would their founders recognize them as a kibbutz at all?
Why not, there are even city kibbutz communities. Why does it matter if members work outside? Why does it matter if the families get their incomes from shares of the kibbutz factories? They are still great places to raise children, still have communal nurse, childcare, doctor, youth groups, schools, swimming pool etc.
I really liked reading about the mega-churches. Interesting stuff. As a Latter-day Saint I've got some cultural background with planned cities, so it's fun to read about these ideas.
Joseph Smith, when he wasn't running for president or having lots of wives, dabbled in city planning:
Salt Lake is kind of interesting, but a place like Nauvoo is more interesting, and none of them ever reached "Zion" levels of planning. (Just one temple instead of 24, for instance.) The closest thing we've got to a "megachurch" would be the Conference Center in Salt Lake, which seats a little over 20,000, and is more for events, which is smaller No idea where we'd squeeze 1 million people in. That's amazing.
Fun fact, as a missionary for the LDS church was assigned to Ocean Grove, NJ, which is a famous Methodist planned community, and again, nothing like the scale of Redemption Camp. When I was there they still closed the roads and the beach on Sundays.
I am pretty sure all of these will be somewhere on the fizzle--crash--burn continuum, but it's interesting to hear about them.
Honestly, cute marriage city sounds the most interesting.
Less "We're gonna innovate the future innovatively while respecting everyone's rights but in a capitalist way and also make infinite money ", more "Yo lets try all this rad shit that hasn't been tried yet!"
Alright, first time I'm hearing about dominant assurance contracts, and I don't think the math works out (under assumptions appropriate for large scale). Someone point out where I've gone wrong?
Project either succeeds or fails, and I either contribute or abstain. My personal benefit of the public good is 'g', my contribution is 'c', and the net I'd get refunded if it fails is 'r'.
If I'd personally have only a small chance of affecting the outcome (assumption!), then 'contribute' is just a bet that (c*p(succeed)) < (r*p(fail)). Concretely: if there's a 80% chance that a bridge is built, then I'll only expect to come out ahead if the potential refund is at least 4x the cost of contribution. And it's simple enough to go from here to the idea that it doesn't work out on the guarantor side either -- to balance that risk of paying out 4x the cost of the project, all the contributions would need to go to the guarantor.
Basically, what I'm saying is: *someone* participating in an assurance contract has negative EV, and adding the 'dominant' flavor doesn't fix that -- you'll still end up with free riders. I think adding in the p(success) term is what kills it.
I think your analysis is correct as far as it goes; if you think the DAC has an 80% chance of succeeding, and it's totally independent of your input, then your optimal strategy is to contribute iff 20% r > 80% c. If you contribute, then you have an 80% chance of winning g-c and a 20% chance of winning r; if you don't contribute, then you have an 80% chance of winning g and a 20% chance of winning nothing. So you're basically betting that the project will fail. (Against the guarantor/entrepreneur.) This is a long-odds bet, so you're only on the winning side of it if the payoff is pretty high, just as you say.
However, just as in horse racing or stock trading, when people take the obviously winning side of the bet, the odds start to shift. In this case, if r is less than 4c, and everyone can see that, there would never have been so many people rushing to fund the project that its chances of success would reach 80%. If r is only 3c then people would stop pledging contributions once the chances of success reach 75%. So far, it's just a fair betting system. No expected profits.
Tabarrok's first analysis examines the perfect-information case. My vague memory is that, here, each bettor knows that they personally have *no chance at all* of affecting the outcome, so they bet entirely based on the c/r ratio, until the last bettor, who knows that if they pledge their contribution, the project will switch from failure to success. *Their* payoff matrix looks much simpler: fail = 0, succeed = g-c. So as long as g > c they will contribute, and the bridge will be built. No further bettors will pledge because they know they'd be on the losing side of the bet.
(Hmm, that can't have been his argument, because then any single person for whom g > c would result in the project getting funded? Spider Georg gets everyone to crowdfund him a spider farm by betting against it, then pays the final dollar. Maybe the mechanism relies on the guarantor setting reasonable odds?)
He also made some argument about the imperfect-information case, but I don't remember it at all.
Provision of public goods isn't necessarily negative-EV for anyone; the cost of fixing the potholes on your street is often much lower than the damage they do to your vehicles, so a mandatory tax assessment on vehicle value that pays for the pothole repair plus a little extra for assessment and enforcement can easily be positive-EV for everyone, including the road repair crew and the tax assessor. Even if passenger cars are exempted from the assessment, counting only SUVs, it might still be positive EV for everyone. The trick is to do this with a purely voluntary, private mechanism.
I'm curious whether anyone has deployed DACs in practice. It seems like the kind of thing that a group of grad students could set up to fund a departmental photocopier, or neighbors could set up to fund pothole repair or a water tower, if it's compatible with human motivations rather than just spherical selfish Bayesians in a vacuum. Kickstarter and Patreon come close: if the project fails to meet its funding goal, you pay nothing. But the missing piece that makes DACs Dom is that the guarantor *pays you* for pledging; she's buying a put option from you. And KS doesn't pay you for pledging if the funding fails, so there's no incentive for disinterested parties to bet on the odds.
Okay, so Tabarrok's perfect-information analysis doesn't have the bettors betting one at a time; he's instead just computing the Nash equilibrium for the subgame where all the bettors ("agents") are placing their bets. In the simplest case where the value V (your g) is the same for everyone, the equilibrium is for precisely enough agents to contribute ("accept") for the contract to pass when V - S (your g-c) is positive. This is a Nash equilibrium because if any of the K agents who accepted were to instead decline the contract, that agent would cause the contract to fail, but get nothing (since they didn't accept it, they don't get F) instead of V - S; and the other agents who didn't accept are free riders, earning V rather than V - S. When V - S is negative, the Nash equilibrium is instead for less agent to accept, so all the K - 1 agents who pledged win the payoff F (your r) and the contract fails. None of this is nondeterministic at all.
His perfect-information analysis for the entrepreneur is a little more complicated because it has to take into account the cost C of actually delivering the goods. His conclusion is that in the monopoly case the entrepreneur maximizes profits by setting K = N (everyone must contribute) and S = V - epsilon, so V - S is barely positive. So then if VN > C (which is to say, the benefits exceed the costs) the entrepreneur can offer a profitable contract, everyone pledges, the contract succeeds, and everyone is happy, except that the entrepreneur captures all the value created; Tabarrok says that in a competitive perfect-information market different entrepreneurs will offer different S, and competition will push S down to C/N, equitably sharing the cost of providing the public good across all the agents who benefit from it.
(In Tabarrok's formulation, as in yours, the failure payment F or r is only paid out in case of failure. I think it's maybe more illuminating to think of F or r as the price of a put option, with the exercise price being S+F (your c+r), which illuminates the connections with actually existing options trading for things like metals, PPEs, and land.)
The other two-thirds of the paper is devoted to analyzing the imperfect information case, the case you started with, and I still don't understand it.
In my childhood there was some partnership between my school (in Russia) and American church-like organisation. This organisation, which, if I remember correctly, used to be called "New Generation", created summer and spring/autumn camps where children from my school (and probably some others schools as well) could spend holidays. It was framed as educational opportunity as there were native english speakers from America who had english lessons with the kids, but quite obviously it was a missionary attempt to spread protestantism amoung Russian children.
It was genuinely great experience. These camps had a feeling of community and niceness. We played games, socialized, had lots of cultural exchange, practised english and had theological discussions which I really enjoyed. I asked lots of tricky questions, found and resolved contradictions in the Bible and was sharing my own takes and religious experiences. I was a really strong believer in God at the time and I was genuinely curious about other people experiences and explanations. This actually gave me a very healthy perspective on religion, became a starting point in my philosophical journey and later allowed to graciously become a very mindfull atheist.
Of course now I'm less happy about the converts that were made in these camps but I still count them as positive utility. Would be great if we had something like that but spreading real instead of imagionary values. Children camps with similar sense of nice community for raising the sanity waterline.
If a charter city is successful, don't we just call it a 'city'? There's probably a negative selection bias at play when studying the history of charter cities.
> When you’re in a corrupt and dangerous developing country, religious communities are a way for people who are serious about improving themselves and their surroundings to self-segregate and internalize the benefits of their actions.
Sometimes they get into liberation theology (aka Christian socialism), try to reform the society that surrounds them and get tortured and killed by CIA-sponsored death squads!
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"This seems like kind of a weird grab bag of stuff. But it turns out there’s a completely reasonable explanation: the project is run by a husband and wife team. He’s a libertarian cryptocurrency entrepreneur. She’s a hippie alternative medicine practitioner. Their relationship sounds incredibly cute, but maybe not so cute that it needs to be its own city."
My husband grew up near the Chataqua Institution, and one of his favorite anecdotes is that apparently the real Maria Von Trapp spent time there and when she was asked what she liked most she (allegedly) said “The gates... it keeps the unwanteds out.” (So a very non Julie Andrews answer haha).
Marijuana delivery is now legal in California. But the procedure for ordering cannabis online is the same as buying it in-person at a dispensary. ... When you order cannabis online in California, you have to be home to accept the delivery of your products. buy THC Lean
Do California dispensaries accept out of state cards?
While California did not accept out-of-state MMJ cards, the point is moot since they legalized recreational cannabis . dispensaries that ship to va
Can anyone buy from California dispensary or
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Who can buy legal weed? You have to be 21 or older to buy recreational cannabis products (we'll get to them in a bit) and present a valid ID—a driver's license or a passport will do just fine—upon entering a marijuana dispensary. People with a medical marijuana card issued by a doctor must be 18.
Do you still need a medical card in California 2020?
I don't think the Mennonites & Amish live in anything reasonably described as a 'city'.
City formation, anytime and anywhere, is pretty fascinating, and there are other 'found a new better city' projects and ideas apart from the 'charter city' stuff, but the meaningful distinction between the two seems to be that charter cities explicitly seek to be exempted from at least _some_ of the laws and regulations that they would otherwise be subject to.
Hey Scott! Just wanted to keep you abreast of Próspera's progress too (probably not worth mentioning in a post or anything, but I'll drop stuff like this on these model city posts for you as they come up), but we recently signed a deal for several residential towers which is being financed and built by a prominent Honduran developer group. See here: https://prospera.hn/news/press-releases/apolo-group-and-pr%C3%B3spera-team-up-to-address-local-housing-shortage-with-trendy-affordable-residences
What do you expect rent to be?
As low as $500/month for the smallest studio units, although this is subject to potentially change; that's our target though
I don't know anything about local housing but that seems more on par with American rent than Honduran? Would current locals be able to afford that
It's about the same as a rent for a one bedroom one bathroom in the capital/most expensive city. So it's roughly the equivalent of charging the average rent for a one bedroom in New York but instead getting a studio.
Yes, we've done market studies and $500/month is slightly below average in the Roatan housing market. Island living is expensive!
Internet speed? Travel time from plane?
Roughly 2.5-3 hour flight at most, less than 2 from Miami. At our current office building in the jurisdiction, I get 100mbps up and down, so this will be similar; these will be right near our current headquarters.
If I parse right they meant how far is the housing from the airport.
Google says it's a 24 minute drive from the airport to the Próspera site on Roatán: https://goo.gl/maps/KiDAiEQjN3gcB3QS8
yeah it takes about 20mins driving, sometimes longer if there's traffic. The Roatan municipality is currently improving the main road of the island, which means traffic is horrible in some places while they work, but hopefully they'll be done soon!
It was both, total travel time. And in effect rather than as the crow flies. According to what I'm seeing, there are no direct flights. Traveling there seems like it'd cost about ~$1,000 and take at best one transfer and longer than that.
There are direct flights to Roatan from Houston, Miami, Dallas, Atlanta, and a few other cities, so depending on where you're coming from, should only be one layover.
I checked Miami and I could only find two direct flights a month. Both cost about $1,000. That's not all that easy to get to from the closest/most culturally tied city in the US.
Do you think we’ll ever get charter cities in the continental United States? The federal government owns over 1/4 of all US land including basically all of Nevada. I feel like if we really want to be a laboratory of democracy we should have charter cities here.
Nevada seems to be offering something vaguely charter-city like, though I don't know the details - see https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/post/an-analysis-of-nevadas-proposed-innovation-zones-law . I don't know how this works with federalism though - Nevada can exempt you from state laws but not federal laws, and it would be very hard (unconstitutional?) for the federal government to do anything that also exempted you from state laws.
FYI the most recent innovation zone was pushed back. It was supposed to be approved but something changed and now it's back to being studied. Here's a link to that: https://thisisreno.com/2021/04/nevada-governor-wants-lawmakers-to-study-innovation-zones/
Additionally, I read in a physical newspaper and can't find a link, but Storey county commissioners were opposed to the innovation zone because they were concerned about water rights. In a desert, this is a very important concern to have.
On another note, one commissioner wrote an article about how she opposed the city because she couldn't understand blockchain technology. I suppose that is also a valid concern. You don't want a technologically superior force to harm a bunch of people using a method you don't understand, but enough about AI risk.
Other rural counties in Nevada are also unwilling to offer charter zones. At local meetings, residents of rural Nevada don't like the idea, and can say so to local politicians fairly easily. See here for examples:
https://elkodaily.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/elko-commissioners-reject-idea-of-creating-innovation-zone-governments/article_2edcb216-3920-5a26-97bb-134c4d58ffa1.html
We could still see an innovation zone actually being made in Nevada, but very slowly. At first, it seemed like BlockChain LLC would get set up fast and break ground this year, but the feasibility study will push it back to at least next year. Hopefully, they don't just give up, but that seems like at least part of the plan from opposed commissioners. It is very cheap for them to ask for more studies and delay construction.
Hmm. Nevada. "some kind of religious group holding a regular meeting there, and then the meeting becoming more and more permanent until it’s a town". Black Rock Charter City, anyone? El Ciudad Del Hombre Ardiente, if we want to backdate the mythology a couple of centuries?
OK, the Federalism issue makes that problematic, but still fun to think about.
There is a possible case for creating a charter city on a Native American Reservation or other First Nation land in Canada or the USA. This would avoid issues around federalism and state/local laws in western nations. How about in one of those large multi-decade refugee camps in France?
What about establishing a very large embassy in another nation which is city sized and using that as the basis for a charter city? What about the real charter cities of military bases? The US has a long history of creating cities from scratch all over the world....maybe a full on occupation style city state would make sense - with all the contractors around...it sort of already exists.
That would likely have its own issues and conflicts between the purpose of those reservations and who can live there, though one could see them and charter city's within the same ideascape if you squint your eyes to make the world fuzzy.
Perhaps the external investment around getting casinos up and running or other tourism businesses, etc. can be seen in a quasi-charter city way. Or maybe charter city's can be seen through the lens of reservations. One is quite biased only looking at Singapore or Hong Kong or whatever as examples.
History is chock full of 'self-rule' arrangements for various polities, including many island nations and ethnic reserves/areas. Certainly lessons can be learned from places like Corsica or American Samoa or Puerto Rico or the Azores or Falkland Islands, etc. and various first nation and aboriginal and native xyz people arrangements around the world have been doing this for centuries if not millennia.
Still...if we are looking at religious or corporate charter city-states, then why not ethnic and cultural ones as well? To a degree, one need not wait or start anything as these communities have existed for well over 100 years already.
I'm not really implying that corporate fake libertarians who want to start fascist slave cities or ponzi scheme land price speculation grabs, etc. can really learn anything from indigenous communities that they'd be willing to hear as there are already large scale protests and mass death each time colonial/corporate powers want to put a new set of oil wells in the middle of rainforests.
But maybe as observers of the process we can draw some interesting parallels of what gets included and excluded from our analysis. Fictional sea-steading and plans for cities that don't exist might be seen in their full context of ethnic ghettoes and island self-rule situations which are more similar than not to the idea of a city established for a specific purpose, though that purpose generally hasn't been making money.
You could do it by finding some unincorporated land in a relatively small government state. Incorporate your own local government etc, maybe petition the state government. If you need even more independence you could always try to convince a Native American tribe or something in the territories. Native American tribes are often pretty willing to get on board with economic improvements so long as there's some money and improvements in their life there. There's even been some YIMBYs who've convinced them to serve as building code laboratories.
I guess what I'm thinking would have to be on reservation land. The US has territories e.g. Puerto Rico, USVI, etc. with their own local laws and mirror tax codes. Instead of being offshore I feel like we could extend that concept by creating city-states on federal lands within the US.
I suspect they'd never go for it, but the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Reservation, right next to Scottsdale/Tempe might be ideal if you wanted someplace not remote. You have miles of farmland just 3 miles from downtown Tempe and Scottsdale and 10 minutes from the Phoenix airport.
What do you mean by a charter city? Plenty of US states allow them in the sense that a city can be founded with a charter or adopt one after it's reached a certain size, and they get to decide what their governance structure will be based on the charter, rather than general state law. If you don't adopt a charter, then you get the general law. Los Angeles and San Francisco are both charter cities in this sense.
But this just means you get to choose your city leadership and org structure according to whatever the charter says. This can potentially include having a private local government that isn't elected. But it doesn't exempt your city or its residents from higher-level laws. You can't have a city charter that says people in your city don't need a state license to drive and don't have to pay US federal taxes.
You seemingly should be able to get that level of autonomy with some tribal territories, but the US doesn't exactly have a great history of honoring its treaties in this area.
I just want to note that I really enjoy these charter city posts, and hope they continue.
I liked this one solely because it was interesting to learn about Nigerian megachurches. But in general I dislike the charter city posts. I think Scott is too ideologically drawn to the idea to admit the downsides, which in my opinion vastly outweigh the upsides. There are parts of the proposals that I like, namely medical licensing reciprocity, but in general they just sound like glorified tax havens with a lot of pretty pictures.
Doesn't he admit a lot of downsides? I don't even get the sense that he's all that drawn to the idea anyhow, just curious to see if some (if any) of these would work.
Yeah, he does. Lazy wording on my part. It's more that the significance of the downsides are such that it doesn't seem worth continuing writing about much and yet he's decided to make it a regular feature of the blog. Maybe it would be better to say that he doesn't seem to take the downsides seriously enough.
I thought the Próspera post itself was pretty bad, in that he seemed insufficiently critical of what was essentially a sales pitch to him. He admitted some flaws in the comments but was still far too charitable in my opinion.
He still seems way to credulous to me, even when he does occasionally admit some of the downsides.
Yeah. Scott is willing to take people's word on a lot of things where I feel like scepticism is warranted. Having worked in developing countries in the past you should assume any opportunity for rent seeking and corruption will be taken, because that's the fundamental incentives of the system. And having the people involved sign a charter saying they all promise not to do the bad things that are in their obvious interest to do isn't a sufficient constraint
Me to.
Too.
I also like the charter city posts and hope they continue.
Is Scott too credulous? He does say "I do not necessarily endorse any project mentioned here as reasonable, ethical, relevant, or sane" at the beginning of every post. Seems like an adequate disclaimer to me.
You can put a disclaimer like that, but the mere fact that he finds them to be one of the only topics worthy of a full post every other week still tells me he's too credulous. It's a fringe topic and I wish that fact were reflected in their frequency. I just think he's drawn to it more than is warranted because for some odd reason he seems to be drifting back towards libertarianism and his head seems to be stuck in that space a lot lately.
I'm not sure why it would be odd for Scott to drift towards libertarianism. Where do you think his head would be if it were less "stuck"?
It's odd to me at least since one of the first posts of his I read, and one of the reasons I began reading the blog regularly, was the Anti-Libertarian FAQ. Were he less stuck on libertarianism, I think his head would be in a lot of the other worthwhile places it often is, just more. I think it wouldn't still be thinking about model cities much, for example. Had he just written the one post on Prospera then left it at that, I wouldn't have had any objection to it.
That post was one of the first posts I read, too.
From the Non-Libertarian FAQ: "To many people, libertarianism is a reaction against an over-regulated society, and an attempt to spread the word that some seemingly intractable problems can be solved by a hands-off approach. Many libertarians have made excellent arguments for why certain libertarian policies are the best options, and I agree with many of them. I think this kind of libertarianism is a valuable strain of political thought that deserves more attention, and I have no quarrel whatsoever with it and find myself leaning more and more in that direction myself."
To me, his interest in model cities (and prediction markets and many other things) seems to be a natural extension of this sort of sentiment.
Also from the Non-Libertarian FAQ: "However, there’s a certain more aggressive, very American strain of libertarianism with which I do have a quarrel. This is the strain which, rather than analyzing specific policies and often deciding a more laissez-faire approach is best, starts with the tenet that government can do no right and private industry can do no wrong and uses this faith in place of more careful analysis. This faction is not averse to discussing politics, but tends to trot out the same few arguments about why less regulation has to be better."
If I thought Scott was drifting in *that* direction, I'd probably share some of your concerns. But IMHO there's no evidence of that happening.
That's fair. Maybe I'm just slow to realize that he's more libertarian leaning (and always has been) than I would like. I think his "greatest hits" just happened to be more in line with my thinking than what the bulk of the blog actually ended up turning out to be. He seems to have a tendency to dismiss leftist viewpoints and frequently cites libertarians - actual libertarians, mind you. Part of the reason I liked his content more at first could have been because it discussed culture war things, which is an area where I tend to agree more with centrist libertarian types. But over time I've come to see the culture war stuff as more distracting and possibly detrimental to more consequential political goals - better tax policy, housing, criminal justice reform, healthcare, ending the drug war, etc. - and I'm a bit tired disinterested now. Idk. All I can say is I wish this place were less libertarian-y than it appears to be. Doing my best to change that.
Maybe it's worth mentioning that up until around 2013, I pretty much was one of those stupid, dogmatic, deontological libertarians. I abandoned that in favor of consequentialism, but as time went on I would notice myself making bad consequentialist arguments for libertarian positions that I was still hung up on. I couldn't quite shake the bug. I had trapped libertarian priors, even once I'd decided to operate as a utilitarian, and sometimes I wonder if Scott could be a bit stuck like that as well since it reminds me of myself. But if he was never actually ideologically libertarian, that's probably not correct.
How much of what we are accustomed to would seem sane to someone in 1921? Is there a path to a sane future that depends only on steps that look sane to people who aren’t paying attention?
Restorative Justice is endorsed by the UK Crown Prosecution Service. Describing it as "hippie-ish" seems like you're trying to ridicule the very idea. I get that you're actually linking it to the person behind the project, but it's not a fringe idea.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/restorative-justice
"Hippie-ish" does sound a bit pejorative simply because hippies are so often unfairly maligned, but I don't necessarily think that was his intent. I certainly wish we got more articles here about criminal justice reform than pie-in-the-sky libertarian fantasies.
The elevator pitch for restorative justice (at least in the way I've come across it before) does sound pretty hippie-ish to me: "Instead of throwing people in jail, let's just all talk to each other about our feelings."
I get that it's a lot more subtle than that and I actually think it would be a great idea to talk to people more instead of (or in addition to) throwing them in jail, but it definitely has some strong hippie vibes.
That sounded wrong enough to me that I googled it. Looks to me like a really bad elevator pitch. The first two definitions I came across both described it as getting the victim and criminal together to discuss the harms done and *agree on how the criminal can repair the harm*.
By leaving out the part where the criminal makes some agreed upon restitution to repair the harm done, which is the source of the "restorative" adjective in the name, you can certainly reduce the practice to talking about feelings. But that so misses the point that it seems more like a pitch for why "restorative justice" is stupid than an actual attempt to describe the idea.
As it is, the idea itself doesn't seem so very utopian, though I'm not convinced it's actually workable in the real world.
I'm not sure what you've linked exactly counts as an endorsement, and it's so full of jargon and fluff what they're actually on about is rather unclear.
Restorative Justice can mean doing mediation and falling back on the justice system if that doesn't work out, or an Amish-like system where if people falsely claim to repent and to change their behavior, there is no recourse.
The extreme 'no one is a criminal' side does deserve ridicule, IMO (or rather, concern about the victims of such a system).
In human history, this has been done. Seems to me to have been the precursor of civil law in northern Europe at least. Look up some Icelandic sagas. Every family has axes and people to wield them, wars are expensive, so we meet once a year at the thing to talk things through. If it doesn't work out, there are still the axes. It was difficult as long as nobody wrote or read shit and they had to rely on experienced people with good memory of past cases. After written law was established, the need for thing meetings seems to have gone.
> there may be opportunities in Somaliland as well
So after years of enduring the taunt that libertarians should move to Somalia, they're actually considering it. And in fact they're doing that one better and considering moving to an unrecognized breakaway region of Somalia.
In all seriousness, I think a post on how cities are founded would be cool. The classic distinction in the US is between Massachusetts Bay and Chesapeake Bay, and how the motivations of early settlers guided entire regional cultures.
I don't think it's really "one better" -- my understanding is that breakaway region has more and better governance than Somalia proper.
There's two aspects to "how cities are founded", depending on what you mean by "city". The usual definition is that a "city" is a local municipal government established under local state or equivalent law, and there's an official definition of how to do this in most places that it happens. But I think the more useful definition is that a "city" is a collection of people living in close proximity to one another and interacting on the basis of that close proximity, even while maintaining very different life paths (so a university or a military base might not count as a "city"). And it's far less clear how you get a whole bunch of different people to move to a new place and start living there, particularly if no one already finds that place to be a good place to live.
I think the 19th and early 20th century was a particularly weird time for this, because that's a time when technological and economic changes drastically changed the balance of reasons to live in a rural area vs an urban area. Because urban living suddenly gained a lot of advantages relative to rural living, lots of places that weren't worth forming cities at before then became relevant places to found cities. (In North America, it also helped that previous inhabitants were killed by war or disease or genocide.) I suspect the current period of relatively few occasions for really new cities to arise is probably more similar to most of human history than the situation of the 19th and early 20th centuries when most American cities were founded.
I think you have to factor in changing technology and the changing value of natural resources. The only reason Chicago became a big city was that this is where the big rail junctions were built, before the railroad became the key transportation tech it was not an important town (one reason the University of Illinois's main campus is not in Chicago). LA became big in part because coal gave way to oil as the more valuable natural resource and LA had a lot of oil easy to pull out of the ground.
What happens if, say, work-from-home because the norm because of technology change? Arguably the Bay Area drastically slows its growth, or even reverses, and places like Bend, Whitefish, and Bozeman become big, and maybe tiny little places in weird corners of Idaho that have 2 farmhouses and a stop sign today become tomorrow's Pittsburgh.
Yeah, I suppose that's a third definition of "how cities are founded" - under what conditions does some existing small settlement become big?
There's an interesting story about how Chicago displaced St. Louis as the central transit hub of the United States, because the river junction lost importance to the lake port that could also get rail bridges over the Mississippi. But this doesn't explain why St. Louis was the river junction that grew rather than Cairo, IL.
But for instance, why did Austin rise up to become one of the 30 largest metro areas in the country, while very similar Madison never did? Why did Phoenix and Las Vegas, and to a lesser extent Tucson and Albuquerque, become the big southwest cities rather than Yuma and Needles and Socorro?
And how long does it take these days for a small town to become a big city? Shenzhen did it pretty quickly by being in a country that was rapidly urbanizing, but how long does it take in the United States? I suspect Austin is the top 30 urban area that was most recently outside of the top 100 in the United States, and it was probably quite a few decades ago that it was. Can other cities do that under current or future conditions?
UT Austin with big oil money and good sports team, attracts students who want to stay in pleasant city (possibly helps that the harsher summers are when school is out), eventually convinces Dell to headquarters here to employ the human resources UT Austin is generating. Feedback cycle ensues. Toss in some famous festivals to convince people to move or students to stay.
Something of a just so story, sure. But things to attract people and things to make them stick are all positive feedback loops that are only really counterbalanced by the negative feedback of crowding and cost of living. Madison may also be too close to Milwaukee and have some of its opportunities drawn off there. Dallas and Houston are further away from Austin and San Antonio isn't really the same.
When I think of Madison I think of biting cold and hardware/software development that's a decade out of date. Likely not an accurate picture but their stickyness just isn't as clear.
There's something to this, but it feels a bit like a just-so story.
On additional question is why this happens starting in the 1970s. In 1900 the population of Madison was 19,164 and that of Austin was 22,258. In 1970 Madison was 171,809 and Austin was 253,539, so Madison has multiplied its population by a factor of 9 while Austin has gotten a factor of 11 or so. But in the 1970s, Madison actually declined, and no decade since then has reached 13% total population growth. Austin growth also slows since then, but most decades have been in the 30-40% growth rate and the last two have slowed down to 20%, while previous decades in both cities were in the 50-60% growth rates.
Columbus, Indianapolis, and Nashville are interesting comparison cases, because they are also state capitals (though I don't think Indianapolis has the university presence of the others), and it's notable that the three of them seem to have perked up quite a bit in growth and excitement over the past decade or two, particularly compared to Cleveland, Cincinnati, Memphis, and perhaps even Chicago. But I think only Nashville out of this group is in the same class as Austin, even though all have grown faster than Madison.
Sounds like we're on the same page about the just-so story.
So when you posted these numbers, the first thing I thought about was "what about metro area"? and that makes things even stranger.
The Madison metro sat at 230k in 1900 while Austin was 47k. By 1970 Madison makes it to 547k while Austin is 387k. By 2010 Madison is at 827k vs Austin's 1716k. If the metro areas are accurate, then Madison posts a pretty regular growth of 8-12% per decade except for the roaring 50s-70s going up to as high as 20%. Whereas Austin accelerates in the 30s and posts around 40%/decade since.
Columbus and Indianapolis growth looks closer to Madison. Nashville data that I have only goes back to 1950, but posts in the mid-20s.
So zoomed out to the metro and looked at from that frame, the growth rate in all of these communities doesn't seem to be relatively stable over the long run and not due to anything recent. Very interesting.
Somaliland and Somalia are not the same thing https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/05/30/530703639/somaliland-wants-to-make-one-thing-clear-it-is-not-somalia
> "It’s individually rational, but bad for the charter city movement in general."
If only they had a dominant assurance contract!
The likeliest Latin American country to follow Honduras is just El Salvador, right? They have a culture which is very similar to Honduras's and their government is currently very interested in these sorts of futuristic quirky institution-building efforts (as they've made global headlines for adopting bitcoin as an official currency, AIUI just on paper), so it would make a great deal of sense for the Salvadoran government to see the Honduran government getting some attention/success with their ZEDE effort and try to copy them.
The Nigerian megachurch stuff is fascinating.
Business culture varies. My experience is some cultures have a lot of very public meetings so no one pays attention to any one. In others you keep them private until you have something to announce. But what is common is that businesses are only interested in being well known among their customers. About a third of the economy is not consumer facing. These people don't necessarily hide but they won't spend a single cent to tell you, random person, that they exist. Why would they? You'll never buy anything from them.
I suspect this is the same for charter cities. The ones that will have high public profiles will be the ones that have a reason. Perhaps they need crowdfunding. Maybe they want open recruiting for citizens. Etc. The ones who don't, won't.
As for those mega-churches, the other thing to keep in mind is the networks these people get access to. The GDP per capita is about $2k in Nigeria. Evangelical Churches in the US can send expertise and significant (for Nigeria) money through mission trips that have a huge impact. Plus the converts remain networked with the other churches which creates long term relationships.
It creates a relatively information rich quasi-market mechanism. Pastors compete for donated expert time, for donations both abroad and at home, and for followers. Often judged through personal relationships between people who actually visit in person, make personal friends, and intermarry.
Another example of a religion building utopian centers / cities is the Mormons in Utah.
Preach. Worked out pretty well in Utah’s case.
I wonder if Israel might be a good country for this kind of thing because the kibbutz precedent, obviously not a place for libertarian cities, but there may still be there a variety of intentional communities?
In my experience, the kibbutz precedent is mostly talked about as a failed example, in Israel. Most successful kibbutzes are in fact very much not kibbutzes in many ways. The standard paradigm failed dismally.
However, little communities dedicated to, e.g., sustainable living and heavy materiel reuse do exist, though by no means prosperously.
I am pretty sure there are a fair few prosperous kibbutzim left, and many with waiting lists of people that want to move into. They have changed a lot though.
As I said - very much not kibbutzim in many ways. I mean, if half of their wealth is from renting to non-members, and more than half of the members work outside, giving part of their earnings to the kibbutz - would their founders recognize them as a kibbutz at all?
Why not, there are even city kibbutz communities. Why does it matter if members work outside? Why does it matter if the families get their incomes from shares of the kibbutz factories? They are still great places to raise children, still have communal nurse, childcare, doctor, youth groups, schools, swimming pool etc.
The successful kibbutzim work by operating summer programs and other non-farm activities. Pure communal farm settlements did not work
Many of them have factories, including high tech factories.
I really liked reading about the mega-churches. Interesting stuff. As a Latter-day Saint I've got some cultural background with planned cities, so it's fun to read about these ideas.
Joseph Smith, when he wasn't running for president or having lots of wives, dabbled in city planning:
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/plat-of-the-city-of-zion-circa-early-june-25-june-1833/1
Salt Lake is kind of interesting, but a place like Nauvoo is more interesting, and none of them ever reached "Zion" levels of planning. (Just one temple instead of 24, for instance.) The closest thing we've got to a "megachurch" would be the Conference Center in Salt Lake, which seats a little over 20,000, and is more for events, which is smaller No idea where we'd squeeze 1 million people in. That's amazing.
Fun fact, as a missionary for the LDS church was assigned to Ocean Grove, NJ, which is a famous Methodist planned community, and again, nothing like the scale of Redemption Camp. When I was there they still closed the roads and the beach on Sundays.
Most of the cuties in Utah were planned by the pioneers. I think they’ve done a swell job.
Sounds like the Bene Gesserit.
I ignored my browsers warnings on ZEDE Orquidea website and registered. The only thing they have are 4 normative documents:
https://docdro.id/9bVgSlA
https://docdro.id/pwf2KkV
https://docdro.id/hCAZpeI
https://files.fm/u/psuf29suf
Scott please cover Akon City at some point!
I am pretty sure all of these will be somewhere on the fizzle--crash--burn continuum, but it's interesting to hear about them.
Honestly, cute marriage city sounds the most interesting.
Less "We're gonna innovate the future innovatively while respecting everyone's rights but in a capitalist way and also make infinite money ", more "Yo lets try all this rad shit that hasn't been tried yet!"
Agreed. Hope they're equipped and willing to take the project seriously
Alright, first time I'm hearing about dominant assurance contracts, and I don't think the math works out (under assumptions appropriate for large scale). Someone point out where I've gone wrong?
Project either succeeds or fails, and I either contribute or abstain. My personal benefit of the public good is 'g', my contribution is 'c', and the net I'd get refunded if it fails is 'r'.
Construct a payoff matrix: (succeed/contribute) = -c+g, (succeed/abstain) = +g, (fail/contribute) = +r, (fail/abstain) = 0
If I'd personally have only a small chance of affecting the outcome (assumption!), then 'contribute' is just a bet that (c*p(succeed)) < (r*p(fail)). Concretely: if there's a 80% chance that a bridge is built, then I'll only expect to come out ahead if the potential refund is at least 4x the cost of contribution. And it's simple enough to go from here to the idea that it doesn't work out on the guarantor side either -- to balance that risk of paying out 4x the cost of the project, all the contributions would need to go to the guarantor.
Basically, what I'm saying is: *someone* participating in an assurance contract has negative EV, and adding the 'dominant' flavor doesn't fix that -- you'll still end up with free riders. I think adding in the p(success) term is what kills it.
I think your analysis is correct as far as it goes; if you think the DAC has an 80% chance of succeeding, and it's totally independent of your input, then your optimal strategy is to contribute iff 20% r > 80% c. If you contribute, then you have an 80% chance of winning g-c and a 20% chance of winning r; if you don't contribute, then you have an 80% chance of winning g and a 20% chance of winning nothing. So you're basically betting that the project will fail. (Against the guarantor/entrepreneur.) This is a long-odds bet, so you're only on the winning side of it if the payoff is pretty high, just as you say.
However, just as in horse racing or stock trading, when people take the obviously winning side of the bet, the odds start to shift. In this case, if r is less than 4c, and everyone can see that, there would never have been so many people rushing to fund the project that its chances of success would reach 80%. If r is only 3c then people would stop pledging contributions once the chances of success reach 75%. So far, it's just a fair betting system. No expected profits.
Tabarrok's first analysis examines the perfect-information case. My vague memory is that, here, each bettor knows that they personally have *no chance at all* of affecting the outcome, so they bet entirely based on the c/r ratio, until the last bettor, who knows that if they pledge their contribution, the project will switch from failure to success. *Their* payoff matrix looks much simpler: fail = 0, succeed = g-c. So as long as g > c they will contribute, and the bridge will be built. No further bettors will pledge because they know they'd be on the losing side of the bet.
(Hmm, that can't have been his argument, because then any single person for whom g > c would result in the project getting funded? Spider Georg gets everyone to crowdfund him a spider farm by betting against it, then pays the final dollar. Maybe the mechanism relies on the guarantor setting reasonable odds?)
He also made some argument about the imperfect-information case, but I don't remember it at all.
Provision of public goods isn't necessarily negative-EV for anyone; the cost of fixing the potholes on your street is often much lower than the damage they do to your vehicles, so a mandatory tax assessment on vehicle value that pays for the pothole repair plus a little extra for assessment and enforcement can easily be positive-EV for everyone, including the road repair crew and the tax assessor. Even if passenger cars are exempted from the assessment, counting only SUVs, it might still be positive EV for everyone. The trick is to do this with a purely voluntary, private mechanism.
Tabarrok's paper, from last millennium, is at https://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/PrivateProvision.pdf; I guess it's time for me to go back and read it.
I'm curious whether anyone has deployed DACs in practice. It seems like the kind of thing that a group of grad students could set up to fund a departmental photocopier, or neighbors could set up to fund pothole repair or a water tower, if it's compatible with human motivations rather than just spherical selfish Bayesians in a vacuum. Kickstarter and Patreon come close: if the project fails to meet its funding goal, you pay nothing. But the missing piece that makes DACs Dom is that the guarantor *pays you* for pledging; she's buying a put option from you. And KS doesn't pay you for pledging if the funding fails, so there's no incentive for disinterested parties to bet on the odds.
Okay, so Tabarrok's perfect-information analysis doesn't have the bettors betting one at a time; he's instead just computing the Nash equilibrium for the subgame where all the bettors ("agents") are placing their bets. In the simplest case where the value V (your g) is the same for everyone, the equilibrium is for precisely enough agents to contribute ("accept") for the contract to pass when V - S (your g-c) is positive. This is a Nash equilibrium because if any of the K agents who accepted were to instead decline the contract, that agent would cause the contract to fail, but get nothing (since they didn't accept it, they don't get F) instead of V - S; and the other agents who didn't accept are free riders, earning V rather than V - S. When V - S is negative, the Nash equilibrium is instead for less agent to accept, so all the K - 1 agents who pledged win the payoff F (your r) and the contract fails. None of this is nondeterministic at all.
His perfect-information analysis for the entrepreneur is a little more complicated because it has to take into account the cost C of actually delivering the goods. His conclusion is that in the monopoly case the entrepreneur maximizes profits by setting K = N (everyone must contribute) and S = V - epsilon, so V - S is barely positive. So then if VN > C (which is to say, the benefits exceed the costs) the entrepreneur can offer a profitable contract, everyone pledges, the contract succeeds, and everyone is happy, except that the entrepreneur captures all the value created; Tabarrok says that in a competitive perfect-information market different entrepreneurs will offer different S, and competition will push S down to C/N, equitably sharing the cost of providing the public good across all the agents who benefit from it.
(In Tabarrok's formulation, as in yours, the failure payment F or r is only paid out in case of failure. I think it's maybe more illuminating to think of F or r as the price of a put option, with the exercise price being S+F (your c+r), which illuminates the connections with actually existing options trading for things like metals, PPEs, and land.)
The other two-thirds of the paper is devoted to analyzing the imperfect information case, the case you started with, and I still don't understand it.
This megachurch stuff gave me nostalgia.
In my childhood there was some partnership between my school (in Russia) and American church-like organisation. This organisation, which, if I remember correctly, used to be called "New Generation", created summer and spring/autumn camps where children from my school (and probably some others schools as well) could spend holidays. It was framed as educational opportunity as there were native english speakers from America who had english lessons with the kids, but quite obviously it was a missionary attempt to spread protestantism amoung Russian children.
It was genuinely great experience. These camps had a feeling of community and niceness. We played games, socialized, had lots of cultural exchange, practised english and had theological discussions which I really enjoyed. I asked lots of tricky questions, found and resolved contradictions in the Bible and was sharing my own takes and religious experiences. I was a really strong believer in God at the time and I was genuinely curious about other people experiences and explanations. This actually gave me a very healthy perspective on religion, became a starting point in my philosophical journey and later allowed to graciously become a very mindfull atheist.
Of course now I'm less happy about the converts that were made in these camps but I still count them as positive utility. Would be great if we had something like that but spreading real instead of imagionary values. Children camps with similar sense of nice community for raising the sanity waterline.
Not exactly a charter city, but it may in some sense be similar enough to be mentioned :->
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamel,_Germany
Love this recurring series
If a charter city is successful, don't we just call it a 'city'? There's probably a negative selection bias at play when studying the history of charter cities.
Maybe choosing between Lagos and the neighboring communities won't be a choice much longer.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/01/africa/lagos-sinking-floods-climate-change-intl-cmd/index.html?lt=Lagos%20Nigeria
> When you’re in a corrupt and dangerous developing country, religious communities are a way for people who are serious about improving themselves and their surroundings to self-segregate and internalize the benefits of their actions.
Sometimes they get into liberation theology (aka Christian socialism), try to reform the society that surrounds them and get tortured and killed by CIA-sponsored death squads!
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"This seems like kind of a weird grab bag of stuff. But it turns out there’s a completely reasonable explanation: the project is run by a husband and wife team. He’s a libertarian cryptocurrency entrepreneur. She’s a hippie alternative medicine practitioner. Their relationship sounds incredibly cute, but maybe not so cute that it needs to be its own city."
I lol'ed
My husband grew up near the Chataqua Institution, and one of his favorite anecdotes is that apparently the real Maria Von Trapp spent time there and when she was asked what she liked most she (allegedly) said “The gates... it keeps the unwanteds out.” (So a very non Julie Andrews answer haha).
It's been 40 days: time to check back if there's been any land expropriation.
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