The Wiki Man

15 August 2009

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

It isn’t every day you hear the suggestion that British imperialism has ‘done more to alleviate poverty than all the world’s aid programmes in the last century’, and to hear such praise from the lips of an American is rarer still. All the more so when the American in question is an eminent economist called Paul Romer and is speaking at the TED Global event in Oxford (see www.TED.com), where earlier in the week Gordon Brown had received a standing ovation.

Yet I am immensely proud to say I was there in person to witness Romer’s speech — in fact I even tracked him down the following day to say how compelling I had found his argument (though, at an event attended by Cameron Diaz and Meg Ryan, the fact that I spent my coffee break stalking a Stanford University economist suggests my Asperger’s has got out of check again).

The good professor wasn’t there simply to praise British imperialism, I should add, and his kind words for our efforts mostly extended to Hong Kong and Singapore, in particular the former’s beneficial effect on China. Romer has the conviction — what TED calls an ‘Idea Worth Spreading’ — that the best way to improve the lot of the developing world would be to create many more Hong Kongs: city-states which operate on different economic models and under different rules to the large countries they border. So his mischievous suggestion for enriching Cuba, for instance, is for the United States to hand over Guantanamo Bay not to the Cubans but to Canada, so creating a kind of micro-Canada where Cubans might enjoy free markets, internet access and Mr Horton’s doughnuts (and where Canadians would finally get to watch decent baseball).

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