Charter Cities: why they're exciting & how they might work — EA Forum

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Hello! What follows is a work-in-progress script about the idea of Charter Cities, which the EA-adjacent youtube channel RationalAnimations plans to animate soon. I want to make sure I'm presenting the idea of charter cities properly and in a compelling, understandable way, so I thought it would be helpful to post it here and get feedback from this forum! When you think about ways to help people in developing countries, you probably think of international aid -- providing medical supplies, or coordinating disaster relief, or even just giving cash, like we discussed in our recent video about global poverty. These things are great, and this kind of charitable aid saves lives every day. But there’s something a little curious here, because these interventions AREN’T what helped the world’s most prosperous countries succeed in the first place. Up until the 1700s, essentially the entire population of the planet lived in poverty. [1] That started to change during the industrial revolution

MvK🔸 3y 19 4 1 I think this does a great job of introducing the concept of a charter city to audiences with little prior exposure to these ideas. That said: I know this is for a YouTube video and I might just be too immersed in academic/research culture and hedging, but this feels a little too much like an advertisement to me. As a report by RethinkPriorities points out, there's a number of reasons to think Charter Cities are not the most effective way to alleviate poverty: Lack of tractability, mostly caused by difficulties of coordination between many stakeholders Indirect effects might be

Charter Cities: why they're exciting & how they might work — EA Forum

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