Today, The Caleb Foundation celebrated the grand opening of The Olde Woolen Mill in North Berwick, ME. We’ve been working on this project for quite awhile and are thrilled to see residents moving in.
The Portland station, WCSH Channel 6 covered the event here.
Almost every time I see Field of Dreams on, I stop and watch it for awhile. It was a magical movie growing up. I didn’t play baseball and I didn’t live on a farm, but there was something so familiar about the whole movie. Who would have thought that the most famous line from the movie would end up describing a revolutionary idea to end poverty in developing nations?
If you build it, they will come…
Who can forget JEJ’s speech when Kevin Costner’s about to sign away the farm?
While Paul Romer doesn’t have nearly as impressive of a voice as JEJ, he does manage to deliver a moving (and controversial) clarion call with a similar suggestion: If you build it, they will come. Only Romer’s not talking about a baseball field in the middle of the cornfields, he’s talking about brand new, empty cities, built on uninhabited lands in poor nations, governed by other nations that invite people to come get jobs there.
Romer outlines his idea for lifting millions out of poverty:
Building Charter Cities that
1. are governed by good rules (captured in the charter) multiple nations,
2. offer choices for people (consist of completely voluntary residents and built on uninhabited land) and
3. offer choices for leaders (in the form of joint partnerships between different nations to govern the charter city).
Check out his TED talk for a better description.
and
There’s an intelligent Q & A with Romer via the Freakonomics Blog if you’re interested.
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
