A crisis affords unique opportunities for reform, but a crisis of governance present an unusual dilemma: How can people trust that crisis-prone agencies will reform themselves? The recent cases of police reform in New Orleans and anti-corruption efforts in Greece illustrate the challenge of internal reform. Dysfunctional police departments and corruption plagued governments will always find it difficult to credibly commit to change. In both cases, political leaders can draw on their external allies to avoid the hazards of internal reform.
The mayor and community groups in New Orleans adopted this strategy when they recruited the federal Justice Department to help overhaul their police department. The overhaul will begin with a comprehensive review that leads to a legally binding agreement for reform — reform that will be overseen by the Justice Department rather than the police force itself or locally elected leaders.
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We would like to believe that democracy will lead to steady improvement in the rules that a society follows. In principle, it seems self-evident that if a rule is bad, citizens or their representatives vote for a better one. In practice, it is not always this simple.
Sometimes it takes a two-stage decision process to get rid of a bad rule. People must first vote to change a higher-level rule that structures voting on other rules. Then, following the new voting rules, they can vote to change the bad rule.
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According to Transparency International’s corruption index, corruption is “sticky.” Over time corrupt countries tend to remain corrupt, while clean countries remain clean. This makes it tempting to lean on cultural interpretations to explain the persistence or absence corruption.
Hong Kong provides a compelling counterexample, showing that a change in rules can defeat a culture of corruption. Though it once had high levels of corruption, comparable to those in mainland China in the 1970s, the British government was able to effectively banish corruption. In 1977, 38% of the population thought that corruption was widespread, by 1982 only 8% did.
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This article in the New York Times summarizes new research on the effects that early human populations had on on the oceans. Sample quote:
“Hunter-gatherers with fairly simple technology were actively degrading some marine ecosystems” tens of thousands of years ago.
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For each of us, other people truly are (to borrow a phrase from Julian Simon) the ultimate resource. Rules matter because they determine whether we reach our collective potential. Bad rules divide us and diminish us. Good rules free us to collaborate and grow.
Many important rules are embedded in values, norms, customs, beliefs, conventions, and shared understandings. This makes some observers pessimistic about changing a system of bad rules. “Culture,” they say, “is what really matters, and culture can’t change.”
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If you give someone a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach someone to fish, you destroy another aquatic ecosystem.
Most of the work on the economics of ideas has focused exclusively on a subset of ideas, technologies. Economists have been slower to acknowledge the complementary set of ideas, rules …
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As you’d expect from the name, a charter city is a city governed by a charter. Sounds simple, but it’s a surprisingly powerful way to let people choose to move someplace that is well governed.
A fanciful example helps illustrate how a charter city might develop. An existing treaty between the United States and Cuba currently gives the United States administrative control over a piece of sovereign Cuban territory straddling Guantanamo Bay that is twice the size of Manhattan.
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