{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"80,000 Hours Podcast","title":"#55 – Lutter & Winter on founding charter cities with outstanding governance to end poverty","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":9074,"description":"Governance matters. Policy change quickly took China from famine to fortune; Singapore from swamps to skyscrapers; and Hong Kong from fishing village to financial centre. Unfortunately, many governments are hard to reform and — to put it mildly — it's not easy to found a new country.\r\n\r\nThis has prompted poverty-fighters and political dreamers to look for creative ways to get new and better 'pseudo-countries' off the ground. The poor could then voluntary migrate to in search of security and prosperity. And innovators would be free to experiment with new political and legal systems without having to impose their ideas on existing jurisdictions. \r\n\r\nThe 'seasteading movement' imagined founding new self-governing cities on the sea, but obvious challenges have kept that one on the drawing board. Nobel Prize winner and World Bank President Paul Romer suggested 'charter cities', where a host country would volunteer for another country with better legal institutions to effectively govern some of its territory. But that idea too ran aground for political, practical and personal reasons.\r\n\r\nNow Mark Lutter and Tamara Winter, of The Center for Innovative Governance Research (CIGR), are reviving the idea of 'charter cities', with some modifications. Gone is the idea of transferring sovereignty. Instead these cities would look more like the 'special economic zones' that worked miracles for Taiwan and China among others. But rather than keep the rest of the country's rules with a few pieces removed, they hope to start from scratch, opting in to the laws they want to keep, in order to leap forward to \"best practices in commercial law.\"\r\n\r\nLinks to learn more, summary and full transcript.\r\n\r\nRob on The Good Life: Andrew Leigh in Conversation — on 'making the most of your 80,000 hours'.\r\n\r\nThe project has quickly gotten attention, with Mark and Tamara receiving funding from Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures (discussed in episode 45) and winning a Pioneer tournament.\r\n\r\nStarting...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/VO1STE7hN95RRg9QdLo4soV2VhhbR9PF5ZZlRhDYcwE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzQxNDAyLzE2ODM1/NDQ1NDAtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}