They would still be constrained to degrees by their marginal costs (the price floor) v what the market will bear. Who knows what the actual costs will be the day they have a giant rock in orbit, although I expect they will fall rapidly with advancing privatization. I am sure they will take very conservative actions, but imagine the potential liabilities–might be a lot more than the value of the rock.
Exactly... the political and economic institutions of Russia have not progressed and have likely regressed in the last 10 years. Who led Russia in 2002? Putin. Who is leading Russia in 2011/12? Still Putin and United Russia. The Litvinenko killing and Khodorkovsky imprisonment are chilling indictments of this regression. Also the run up of energy and commodity prices has only increased the allure and hold of the Dutch disease in Russia.
The proposal mentions that the NYC campus will largely serve graduate students and graduate school programming. Stanford already has a satellite campus in Monterrey, CA for marine biology and oceanography students where students split time between the main and satellite campuses. I expect that the NYC campus will follow the same model (i.e. spend a couple quarters at each campus to fulfill complete course load).
Actually my experience growing up in NYC (and this may be an outlier, but I see it elsewhere) is that immigrants are more likely to be entrepreneurial because traditional employment is off limits due to language, cultural, and educational barriers–and sometimes outright discrimination. That's why there are New York archetypes of Korean green grocers, Chinese dry cleaners, Greek diner owners, etc (albeit these are rapidly shifting). The large number of Jewish-owned businesses in NY speaks to the historical discrimination against Jews (and not just some stereotypical belief about business acumen). Not exactly social networking and cloud computing, but entrepreneurship nonetheless.
At the same time, Hong Kong served as a model for China to emulate when it gradually liberalized its economy, beginning with the SEZs in coastal southern China in the 1980s. I think charter cities could be a novel way of easing people who have lived in generally corrupt and economically distorted environments into better institutions. Westerners take for granted that the trust embedded in the social contract and the civic and economic habits that emerge from this trust are not a given in many places (i.e. trust that the government/criminal entities/rent extractors will not capriciously bend things to their advantage).
I wouldn't be so hopeful. One of my professors who works in Antarctica and drills lots of ice cores was bemoaning the Russian mismanagement of the Vostok drilling project.
This kind of testing is already done in certain contexts. I am thinking specifically of air quality and automobile efficiency standards which are "tested" in California before being rolled out to the nation. However, this is only allowed because California has special exemptions from federal law in these contexts. It is important to note that scale and scope are critical-what may be efficient/optimal in one locale may not be so in others, or at larger scales. E.g. fuel standards and national energy profile are arguably under legitimate federal authority... other issues not so much. Also important to point out that the "optimal" and "efficient" are not mutually inclusive or absolutely defined-preferences, for better or worse, are king.
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