Charter Cities: why they're exciting & how they might work

Thanks!  Apparently I am in a mood to write very long comments today, so if you like, you can see some thoughts about addressing potential objections / difficulties [EA(p) · GW(p)] in a response I made to a comment on the EA Forum version of this post.

Probably the charter city with the most publicity is Prospera, so you could do stuff like:

• read a bunch of hostile news articles complaining about how Prospera is neocolonialism and might be secretly hoping to confiscate people's land
• read stuff put out by the Prospera organization about how they are actually fanatics about the importance of property rights and would never confiscate anyone's land, and how in general they are trying to be responsible and nice and create lots of positive externalities for neighboring communities (jobs, construction, etc)
• read analysis by interested people (including numerous rationalists) who have visited Prospera, etc, which tends to be pretty sympathetic to Prospera and thinks they are upstanding people trying to do cool stuff

But idk if it's worth going on that journey since it's something that a lot of other people have done before (such as myself -- I came away thinking that Prospera is doing great stuff and their critics are being extremely uncharitable / ill-intentioned.  the one possible ding against Prospera IMO is that in addition to their main site on Roatan which is the cool libertarian city-state in the making, they are also using the ZEDE law to create an import/export center on the mainland, called La Ceiba, which seems less like an amazing innovative experiment in state-of-the-art governance and more like just an ordinary Special Economic Zone where lower taxes encourage freer trade.  Personally I think freer trade is probably good for Honduras, but if you like protectionism then you might not like the idea of special economic zones whose main benefit is a somewhat lower tax rate).

Anyways, if you are interested, it would probably produce a lot more social value to investigate some other, lesser-known charter cities and report back with your thoughts.  There are two other projects in Honduras under the "ZEDE" charter city law -- "Ciudad Morzan", which seems like an effort to basically create a gated community -- a neighborhood in crime-ridden Honduras where workers can opt into a higher standard of policing in exchange for presumably higher local taxes to fund the police, and maybe some restrictions on activity like nightly curfews (idk if Ciudad Morzan has these... just brainstorming).  Seems like a nice option for working-class Hondurans to have, IMO, but maybe if I looked into it more closely I'd come away with a worse impression.  And then there is "Orqueda", which seems straightforwardly like a large business exploiting the ZEDE law simply in order to pay lower taxes or otherwise getting out of Honduran regulations, without really experimenting with any cool new governance institutions or trying to create an awesome new city where lots of people might like to live.

But there are lots and lots of new-city projects throughout the world -- as I mention in the draft, new cities aren't that unusual in quickly-urbanizing developing countries.  Some projects, like Saudi Arabia's "NEOM", seem like poorly-concieved vanity megaprojects that will probably come bundled with human rights abuses (and which have indeed been condemned by rationalists like Scott Alexander / Astral Codex Ten).  Others are just blander and lower-profile since they aren't shooting for the same kind of broad regulatory independence that places like Prospera or Itana are hoping for.  See this "Startup Cities Map" (the green dots, not the blue or purple ones) for a directory of interesting projects: https://www.startupcitiesmap.com/map

Personally I would be kind of interested in finding out what the heck is the deal with Telosa -- this is a new-city project funded by a billionare in the United States, seemingly around an economic philosophy that combines Georgism (which I love!!) with some vague but pretty strong lefty / egalitarian / social-justice vibes (which I kinda don't really understand in terms of how this is supposed to influence the design and government of the city, but whatever).  Is there some special angle here beyond the surface presentation?  Who is the guy funding it and how did he become such a huge Georgist that he wanted to use his life's fortune to build a new city on these principles?  Why not just use the money to lobby for more lefty & Georgist policy changes like a normal person, instead of building a new city in the desert?  etc.

Thanks for catching that about Singaporeans!

Re: democracy, yeah, we debated how exactly to phrase this.  People were definitely aware of the democracies of ancient Greece and Rome, and democracy was sometimes used on a local level in some countries, and there were sometimes situations where the nobles of a country had some sway / constraints over the king (like with the Magna Carta).  But the idea of really running an entire large country on American-style democracy seems like it was a pretty big step and must've seemed a bit crazy at the time... IMO, it would seem as least as crazy as of like if a large country today (like, say, Chile after it voted to rewrite its constitution, or a new and more-united version of the European Union, or a future post-Putin Russia trying to reform itself) did something like:

• Deciding to try out direct democracy, where instead of a Senate or Parliament, legislation would be voted on directly by the people via a secure smartphone app.
• Deciding to try out prediction-market-based governance, where economic policy was automatically adjusted in order to maximize some national GDP-like metric according to the principles of "futarchy".
• Deciding that they would select their political leaders using the same method as medieval Venice used to select their Doge. ("Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge.")  And maybe to base a bunch of other parts of their political system off of random selection ("sortition") -- not just jury members in trials but also members of parliament, or using sortition to poll a random 1% of the population about important issues instead of having everyone vote on issues, etc.