In thinking about an African free zone designed to fund educational projects, it occurred to me that if a university was funded substantially through revenues tied to free zone growth, then the professors would have an incentive to support the economic growth of the free zone. In Singapore, civil servants receive annual bonuses based on rates of GDP growth the previous year, thus creating a public choice mechanism designed to support those policies that increase economic growth.

Yes, ideology does matter, but if one started with libertarian-oriented university that was funded by government, one would predict that the ideology of the professors would drift towards statism, whereas if the same university was funded by free zone growth, I would predict that the professors would more likely find reasons to believe that growth-enhancing policies were good.

While all of this could take place anywhere, I am working on free zone projects in Africa, and Africa is also in urgent need of far better universities than they have at present. Imagine a whole continent in which dozens of free zone funded universities were established, an entire academic eco-system that was pro-market.

Non-western universities are just beginning to obtain their own distinctive intellectual voice. There are regions of the world, such as Russia, where there are stronger pockets of resistance to global warming alarmism than elsewhere. I predict that if the world begins to put real pressure on China to reduce emissions, we will see more and more academic work coming out of China that argues against global warming alarmism.

Bit by bit we will see the breakdown of the curious disciplinary monopolies based on the notions of existing elite universities in Europe and the U.S. May some of these breakdowns be in the direction of new academic cadres of libertarian thought.

http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2007/06/25/nomadic-community-dynamic-nation-hurting-state