Paul Romer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Syrian refugee cities — aren’t they a kind of charter city? But they don’t have credibility, so they don’t attract foreign investment. Wages are very low; people are stuck there; they don’t build futures. If 10 million people need to leave, say, Bangladesh or wherever, how do we set up a well-functioning, credible charter city with the right commercial and legal culture? I’m going to do something which is probably bad form, which is talk about an idea before I’ve even written it down, but so be it. I find it’s a way to refine ideas. I think we should talk about a trilemma for migration, which is three things, and we can only have two out of the three. You think of the liberal democracies — what would we like as a response for large numbers of people who need to go someplace? If it was some political jurisdictions, one of the things we want is local democratic accountability for the officials in the government. The second would be equal treatment under the law. And the third is, in this jurisdiction, the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, potentially numbers that are bigger than the existing population. Picture one of these places when there’s a million people there, but you’d like it to be able to accept another 9 million. All three of those things are things that most people would support, and you can’t have all three. So, the two we pick in most existing jurisdictions — we just don’t allow large-scale migration, and you can see some logic to that. If you’re one of a million people, and you like the equilibrium, and you’re contemplating bringing in another nine million, and you’re committed to equal treatment under the law, the system’s going to basically be the one that all the new arrivals are going to vote for, not the ones that you like. And the new arrivals might be coming for the thing that you like, but still, collectively, they might vote for or put in place something that isn’t the one they’re seeking out. There’s a reason why democratic systems can’t absorb huge numbers of migrants. You could violate equal treatment and say, “Okay, we’re going to let large numbers of people come in, but they’re not going to become citizens, have a different legal status. ” Because of the norms that evolve in these conditions of inequality, I think that is going to prove to be a very damaging approach for both the migrants who arrive and the people in the existing society. I don’t think violating equal treatment is a very useful option. And the Hong Kong–like solution we should consider is to say, “We’re committed to large-scale migration for a period of time. We’re going to give everybody equal treatment under the law, but we’ll make the transition to local democratic accountability when we’ve basically reached our maximum population and the migration process is over.” This is, I think, the way to describe Hong Kong under the British. The governor there was still accountable to a democracy; it wasn’t like an autocrat. They changed periodically. Some were better than others. But it was an offshore democracy in England. People in Hong Kong were really quite happy with that system under British rule. The pressure for democracy only came when it became apparent that the British would leave, and there was a concern about, who is going to guarantee our system? ppy with that system under British rule. The pressure for democracy only came when it became apparent that the British would leave, and there was a concern about, who is going to guarantee our system? We could consider Hong Kong–like arrangements, where an existing system of government helps create the frame for a new jurisdiction. Then large numbers of people can move in. Once you get full, it basically makes the transition to local democratic control. It’s a very unfamiliar approach, and it has features that are unattractive. But the thing to realize is, we just don’t have an answer at all if we’re facing this kind of very large-scale crisis of migration. We don’t have an answer either to the chronic problem of people who really want to leave places — and hundreds of millions want to leave places they’re currently in — nor do we have an answer to the immediate crisis. What would we do within the space of a year when tens of millions of people needed to get out of an environment that was going to descend into violence?…

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