Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian

Author:Quinn Slobodian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

10

Silicon Valley Colonialism

Honduras

In 2009, a Stanford economics professor named Paul Romer gave a talk on reviving colonialism. He asked the following: Why had some countries grown rich while some remained poor? It was not just about having the right location or the right natural resources, he said. It was about something more intangible: the right set of rules. Rules meant the laws that set tax rates, regulated labor, and protected property. They also meant the overall style of government. At a deeper level, rules were cultural norms, values, and beliefs. They were the way we were made to behave, but also the way we behaved without thinking. The history of capitalism was a history of struggle among rules. The nations with the best rules won.

Hong Kong—a scrap of coastline organized under different rules than the adjacent mainland since the nineteenth century—was Romer’s prime example. When China imported the Hong Kong model to the Pearl River Delta in the late 1970s, he said, a “process of copying” helped China begin catching up to the West. Romer waved away objections that Hong Kong was undemocratic. Until the handover, the colony’s governor was appointed by the UK parliament, which was elected by British voters. Hong Kong was a democracy—“it just happened to be not a democracy that involved the local residents.” As for the Opium Wars—the violence that had made the whole thing possible—Romer insisted they were incidental. In his telling, Hong Kong got to where it was because of the “historical accident” of being colonized by the British.1

How could such historical accidents be made to happen again? The shortcut to Hong Kong that Romer offered was called the charter city. The formula: persuade poor nations to surrender patches of uninhabited territory to be managed by richer ones. Pollinate the empty land with rules known to make capitalism work and watch it grow. This would be colonialism by consent, occupation by invitation. Using the jargon of Silicon Valley, he called them “start-up political jurisdictions.”2 Charter cities could happen anywhere. Displaying a nighttime map of Africa unlit by artificial light, he pointed out the “enormous amount of land on earth that’s very underutilized.”3 Leaders only had to face the fact that sovereignty under conditions of globalization was already moot. Why not go all the way and give over your country to external management? You had nothing to lose and Hong Kong to gain.

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