A Milton Friedman Disneyland

The Boston Globe reports on a smart, idealistic plan for relieving poverty in the third world--with a remarkably right-wing feel.

Paul Romer, an economist from Stanford, has decided to leave his tenured professorship to defend an idea he calls "charter cities." Basically, it means Western nations would buy (or maybe rent, to be more accurate) cities from third-world countries, put in our own form of government, and see if we can't spur economic growth that way.

"Unemployed workers and frustrated entrepreneurs from the host country would flock there for the opportunities; international firms would be drawn by the combination of First World stability and cheap labor. And from these nodes, money and expertise, laws and norms would spread throughout the rest of the country and, potentially, the developing world. Ultimately, their work done, the cities would revert to local control."

It's classic free market economics. Quality tends to propagate through the mechanism of competition. As you see potential customers flocking to a different city, chances are you will make an effort to improve your business, to give people a reason to stick around.

Of course you know what detractors will say. Those inclined to view everything in terms of power struggle will cry, "Colonialism! Imperialism!" Admittedly, there is a sort of "pragmatic paternalism" (from the article) about this whole plan. But I find it refreshing to hear a bit of free market idealism these days.

“I hope he’s right, I’m rooting for him,” says Elliott Sclar, a professor of urban planning and international affairs at Columbia University. “But history is littered with visions like this.” Romer’s charter cities, he argues, are “almost a kind of Milton Friedman Disneyland.”

And who says Milton Friedman's dreams can't come true? I think that if we really want to something about the enormous gap between rich and poor, it wouldn't hurt to try something logical.

Central to Romer’s proposal, no matter what the exact structure, is the belief that the developed world has lessons to teach poorer countries about how to deter violence, spur trade, incorporate new technologies, and train a workforce, and that we shouldn’t let political correctness blind us to that fact.

I'm sure this sounds really arrogant to someone who wants it to sound arrogant. But it's not; it's just a simple fact, as factual as me saying that I know way more math than all of my freshman calculus students. It doesn't make me a more valuable person, but it does mean they're better off coming to my class than not coming.

To me this plan contains a perfect concoction of pragmatic idealism, something I find lacking in today's political arena. I believe every person of every origin has the potential to display his own creativity in whatever form that may take, and contribute to a global, interconnected economy. And I think we can allow people to do that if we implement the right policies.

Aid programs today, [Romer] argues, think too small - they aim simply at keeping people in poor countries alive, or at making their farms more productive or their schools marginally less bad. They don’t dare to try to actually vault them into prosperity and growth, and they ignore many of the ambitions of the inhabitants, especially the young ones

“These kids don’t want to use a foot treadle generator to produce their own light to read books, they want to write apps for the iPhone,” says Romer. “And they’ll never be able to do that if they can’t go live in a major modern city.”

“Small isn’t beautiful,” he says. “Small is condescending.”

I agree. And I have to say, I'm inspired.

What's in an idea?

About a week ago I wrote a weird little post about "unity and continuity in creation." Just as I said, that post was meant to be continued, and I think here's where I get to what I'm really thinking about.

I was listening to a talk given by Tony Jones called, "Smackdown--Plato versus Aristotle." That's almost nerdier than something a mathematician would come up with. I like it.

The reason he was talking about Plato and Aristotle is that these ancient Greeks disagreed fundamentally on what knowledge and thought really are. Jones argued that in our Western culture, we have inherited most of our vocabulary about thought from Plato.

I've noticed that I usually either consciously or subconsciously think that whenever I'm talking or thinking about big issues, my mind is ascending into some "thought land," some Platonic heaven where the Truth can be ascertained directly, if only we train our minds to see.

I think this is reinforced by the way we are taught in our culture from an early age. We go into a classroom to talk about those abstract truths we're required to learn. Then we leave the classroom to do what we actually want to do with our lives.

This pattern reinforces a Platonic separation between the "higher" and "lower" forms of knowledge, a distinction I think is false. I've never read the book Shop Class as Soulcraft, but I hear that it tries to combat this distinction, and for good reason.

I talked about in my previous post how we're completely created beings. Now I want to say that from this, we know that our thoughts and ideas are also completely created, and thus part of the continuum of creation.

What I really mean is this. If you separate knowledge into "higher" and "lower," then you get some people trying to reach for a higher plane of existence through their learning, while others just leave all that "fancy book-learning" to the weirdos in the academy.

In relation to what I do, mathematics, this is what I hear constantly: "How is this useful? How is this relevant to me? What can you do with that?" People want something they can hold in their hands, at least metaphorically (but often literally) speaking.

But in the academy, often knowledge for knowledge's sake is still a virtue. So you can see in the separation between different groups (almost different classes) of people how this Platonic theory of knowledge is played out.

What concerns me is that you can see this not just in an academic setting, but in the church, as well. Protestantism has actually prided itself on stressing orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy. This comes from a theological debate over justification by faith versus works, but I really wonder if what we're really doing is being Platonists.

Think about it: it's like those who have faith have some higher knowledge. We've sought the knowledge truly worth having, as opposed to something common people can "hold in their hands," so to speak.

Isn't that what lines like, "You just have to believe!" are really all about? You just have to believe because this kind of knowledge only comes to you when your mind escapes creation and enters the "spiritual" world. (Thus, things like scientific evidence will not help you.)

Whether it's the church obsessed with orthodoxy or the academy obsessed with, well, itself, what we get is this radical separation between different kinds of knowledge, and so people are given a black or white decision. Either seek the higher knowledge, or seek the lower knowledge.

This rather divisive choice is presented to people precisely because of our theory of knowledge, which coincides with Plato's desire to escape the world with his mind and find some purer truth.

But what happens when we say that actually all thought is part of the continuum of creation? I confess I don't fully know the answer, because generally speaking, our society doesn't think this way yet. I do have some ideas, but right now I think I'll just mention one.

It may sound cliche, but I think one thing we could use more of is togetherness. When we acknowledge that our minds are created things, and that therefore our thoughts all remain right here on earth no matter how sophisticated they are, we realize what is really going on when we talk about ideas that matter to us.

What we're really doing is what I talked about before: we're housekeeping. We're bringing some sort of order to God's created world. And because we're all part of that creation, we're all in this together. Ideas aren't meant to lift people's minds up out of the world, but rather to make the world better to live in.

I hear people say something like, "It's not about ideas, but about relationships." They say that because they're reacting to the old way of thinking about ideas. What we should be saying is that ideas are about relationships--our relationship to every created thing.

This is probably already being said by someone else much smarter and more famous than I am, but, it's nice to be able to say it the way I want to say it.