Paul Romer: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Under what conditions? I might rename it. I don’t know that, in communicating the idea, that charter city is the best name, but I think the idea is still a compelling alternative. And unfortunately — maybe this is now my shtick — it’s like a $100 billion a year on testing. It’s an unpleasant, bad idea that nobody likes, but it’s just better than the alternatives. The same thing is true, I think, on migration flows, as on dealing with the pandemic, which is that the alternatives are so terrible, the best option may be something that’s kind of bad, it’s kind of expensive — we just do it anyway. I’m not sure we should call it charter city, but the thing I think we could do is create new cities that would solve the current impasse, where you’ve got 750 million people who say they want to leave the countries where they currently live, and the existing countries that say, “We don’t want to take that many people.” So I’m saying, “Okay, what’s the middle ground here? What’s the deal we could do? Let’s create some new places that are still places that people want to go to, but where nobody in existing countries feels threatened by the creation of those new places. And let’s try and offer that as a solution to what seems like this impasse.” How do you frame what happened in Honduras, conceptually?…

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