Over at 80,000 Hours they have an interview with Mark Lutter about charter cities. I think they are a cool idea, but my estimation of the utility of Lutter’s organization was dealt a bitter blow with this line:
Because while we are the NGO that’s presenting directly to the Zambian government, a lot of the heavy lifting, they’re telling us who to talk to. I’m not gonna figure out Zambian politics. That’s really complicated, but they understand it.
They want to build cities, for the purpose of better governance, but plan A is to throw up their hands at local politics. I strongly feel like this is doing it wrong, in exactly the same way the US military failed to co-opt tribal leadership in Afghanistan (because they assumed the Pashtuns were basically Arabs) and the Roman failures to manage diplomacy on the frontier (because they couldn’t tell the difference between a village chief and a king).
Later in the interview he mentions Brasilia specifically as an example of cities being built, which many will recognize as one of the core cases of failure in Seeing Like a State. I now fear the whole experiment will basically just be scientific forestry but for businesses.
Over at 80,000 Hours they have an interview with Mark Lutter about charter cities. I think they are a cool idea, but my estimation of the utility of Lutter’s organization was dealt a bitter blow with this line:
They want to build cities, for the purpose of better governance, but plan A is to throw up their hands at local politics. I strongly feel like this is doing it wrong, in exactly the same way the US military failed to co-opt tribal leadership in Afghanistan (because they assumed the Pashtuns were basically Arabs) and the Roman failures to manage diplomacy on the frontier (because they couldn’t tell the difference between a village chief and a king).
Later in the interview he mentions Brasilia specifically as an example of cities being built, which many will recognize as one of the core cases of failure in Seeing Like a State. I now fear the whole experiment will basically just be scientific forestry but for businesses.