Your Next Government

It starts out showing how common special economic zones actually are. But the author considers bonded warehouses as special economic zones which isn't very helpful. But he then picks out some of the more interesting ones. Fordalandia was one I didn't really know about. I knew Ford built a rubber farm in Brazil but I didn't know he had managed to get full control of everything that happened inside of his property. To him it was primarily just a rubber farm though so when it failed he returned it to Brazil.

After this he makes a case for the importance of consent in governance. It's kind of an unusual use of the word though. What he's talking about is more commonly called legitimacy. But in the end I see why he prefers the word consent. It makes it easier to talk about the different kinds of it.

He then talks about the importance of citizens having a sense of ownership over their city. The way cities are currently run nobody considers the city to be theirs. Or in other words there isn't a single individual that gets shamed when the city falls short of expectations. Mayors get shamed to some degree when things go wrong but they usually spread the blame and they certainly don't feel any desire to remake the city according to their vision. The author proposes the company ownership model as a solution to this where citizens would buy shares in the city.

Which leads on to his idea of double democracy which has two types of voters for two types of problems. Issues related to resource allocation are make by shareholders according to the number of shares they own. While social issues are decided by one person one vote as it typical in most democracies today.

There are some other interesting ideas in the book that I've skipped. Overall it's a very interesting book and the author comes across as very likeable.