Posted by Caitlin Endyke
An interesting experiment: sometimes, would it be easier to
solve a society’s problems simply by starting from scratch?
In a recent This American Life episode (go to Act III, transcript here), regular Planet Money
contributors Chana Joffe-Walt and Jacob Goldstein traveled to Honduras to speak
to some local officials, and one internationally-known economist, about their
attempts at doing just that. It’s an
interesting theory- take a country with a wealth of problems but not fiscal
resources, where people are resistant to wide-sweeping reforms that would be necessary
to get the country back on track, and create within that country a small space
where the old rules don’t exist. A space
where you toss out all the corruption and all the things that don’t work in the
rest of the nation and create a real-life utopia, using laws and
infrastructures modeled after successful developed nations. In
theory, what happens is people in the country surrounding the carved-out utopia
see that these reforms work, and make for a better quality of life, and then
they advocate for the country as a whole to adopt similar systems. Then, a few years down the line, you’re able
to essentially re-create an entire nation in a better image.
In practice, it doesn’t quite go that smoothly. This radio piece lays out how the Honduran
government initially ran with this idea, but then got mired in a series of
pitfalls ranging from a lack of outside financial investments to the clashing
of key-player personalities. Not to
mention scars of history and the implications of imposing western systems on a
formerly-colonized nation. Still, it’s interesting to think about. If you could create a utopia within a nation,
one where you could throw out all the laws and rules and systems that didn’t
work and replace them with ones you thought would, what would that place look
like? If we were creating a Commons
utopia, what laws would we keep? What
new infrastructures would we make sure we put in place? Does this very idea- of
starting from scratch- fit into a commons framework?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below!
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