Let A Thousand Nations Bloom

At a mock event in Philadelphia, a few British and American lawyers argued the question:

The event, presented by the Temple American Inn of Court in conjunction with Gray’s Inn, London, pitted British barristers against American lawyers to determine whether or not the American colonists had legal grounds to declare secession…

To the British, however, secession isn’t the legal or proper tool by which to settle internal disputes. “What if Texas decided today it wanted to secede from the Union? Lincoln made the case against secession and he was right,” they argue in their brief.

We agree with the British in these pages that it was secession. But, if you read our July 4th secession week blogging, we disagree that the grievances listed in the Declaration were too trivial to justify secession.

Tyler Cowen recently issued his widely-read e-book “The Great Stagnation” as a hardback. Economist Peter Boettke calls it “the most subversive libertarian argument of our age.” Why? Because it outlines the limits and, indeed, the hard realities of government’s expansion over the 20^th century. Without Cowen’s ‘low-hanging fruit’ of technological progress, we face a world of declining growth rates, burgeoning debts and unemployment.

Fans of the Thousand Nations approach to innovating governance might have been disappointed in Cowen’s static, almost fatalistic, resolve to accept an indefinite future of economic stagnation.

Cowen claims that advances in modern technology have failed to generate the massive revenues, job creation, and structural change that the railroad or the lightbulb brought to America in earlier eras. We must recognize, Cowen claims, that Facebook is no Ford Motors.

Economist David Henderson charges Cowen with ignoring cutting back government spending and deregulation as tools which, at least potentially, could jump start areas of innovation. However Cowen’s indictment of the decaying West remains: indeed, our malaise can be viewed as the inevitable, destructive churn of democratic political incentives.

But we need not think of ourselves as doomed; by limiting himself to a vision of technology as gears and smokestacks, Cowen misses one of the biggest, lowest-hanging fruit of all: rules.

Paul Romer, illustrious proponent of ‘Charter Cities’ as a solution to global poverty, argues – quite rightly – that rule systems are analogous to technology. Networks of political and economic institutions can be innovated and rendered obsolete just like motherboards or vacuum tubes.

In a sense, Cowen’s argument is that, over the last century, we have seen a steadily growing gap between America’s institutional backdrop and America’s rapid technological evolution in key sectors. The winds of creative destruction have shocked the worlds of communication, banking, publishing, music, even dating; but our political rule set remains, in a fundamental way, unchanged. The options for innovation around this rule set are limited, since many of Cowen’s game-changing industries like automobiles or the telegraph have already been invented.

Radical innovation in ‘rule technology’ is the logical solution to the institutional stagnation burdening the world economy. Past change in governance systems has typically been slow and required the costly (and sometimes bloody) toolkit of revolution or exodus to the frontier. But the Thousand Nations vision – a global industry in rules, arbitration, and entrepreneurial communities – need not be either.

Experiments in new forms of living and governing ourselves bring with them boundless possibilities for new gains in education, culture, and science: all areas that Cowen believes are crucial to rescue us from the slow-growth mire.

Instead of fretting over decline in the 20^th century, we should look forward to seizing the ultimate low-hanging fruit of the 21^st: innovating our rules to build a better world.

In Sumerian beliefs, Eden was not a garden, it was a city, but unlike the biblical version from which humanity had been forever banished, this Eden had been created specifically to give people a reason for existing. And so long as the citizens ensured that relations between their city and its gods were in harmony, they would live in prosperity and happiness.

from anthropologist John Reader’s excellent book Cities.

Last month’s issue of Scientific American (September 2011) is devoted to cities.

The articles are a moving testament to cities as liberating spheres for entrepreneurship, health, happiness, wealth, and cultural and technological innovation.

Those interested in Free Cities will find especially interesting the articles by Edward Glaeser (author of Triumph of the City)  on education and innovation, and Robert Neuwirth (author of Shadow Cities and the important soon-to-be-released work Stealth of Nations) on the ‘informal economy’ of developing-world cities.

Cities offer a bright future for mankind, especially the world’s poorest. Entrepreneurial Free Cities and Charter Cities are an indispensable tool for bringing the environmental, cultural, and economic blessings of urbanization around the world.

Where static, conservative thinkers of the past feared the sweeping dynamism and bustle of growing urban centers, today’s world demands cities: in the words of Scientific American’s editors:

the city has come to look less like a source of problems than as an opportunity to fix them.

One man’s focus group is another man’s ballot box:

“For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Notice he didn’t say, “impose it upon them.” Or, try this:

“This is what customers pay us for–to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.”

This time in Reason:

Maybe if there were a way to have more competition among governments, things would be better. Competition forces people to become more efficient and to get rid of stupid rules. What if we let people take over some unused land in America to create areas with fewer rules, simpler legal systems, smaller government?

Some alluring renderings of a design by the BMT Yachts group:

From their press release:

BMT Nigel Gee, a subsidiary of the BMT Group, has announced its latest design, developed in partnership with Yacht Island Design.  Project Utopia, an avant‐garde vision of a future concept breaks the traditional naval architectural mould which the market has come to expect and offers a truly unique outlook free from any conventional design constraints.

James Roy, Yacht Design Director at BMT Nigel Gee explains: “Visions of the future are often constrained by familiarity with the present or reflection on the past.  Much is made in today’s design community of starting with a blank sheet of paper yet many, if not all yacht concepts revert back to the traditional form – the perception that a yacht should be a form of transport becomes an immediate constraint. Utopia is not an object to travel in, it is a place to be, an island established for anyone who has the vision to create such a place.”

Measuring 100m in length and breadth, and spanning over 11 decks with the equivalent volume of a present‐day cruise liner, there is enough space to create an entire micronation.

HT Al Fin.