Paul Romer, the inventor of the charter city, is the closest this century has to a real-life character from a Joseph Conrad novel. Since quitting his job as a Stanford economist and tech CEO, Romer has dedicated himself to realizing a vision: the creation of vast neocolonial cities within the territory of developing countries, paid for, built, and governed by wealthy liberal democracies.

Romer, who describes his office as the local Peet’s café down the road, fills his calendar with meetings with corrupt local leaders and trips to survey remote coastal hinterlands where he fantasizes about the creation of cities of millions. You can imagine arriving at a tavern in some distant tropical port only to find him, wearing khakis and a Panama hat, with a cellphone, a map, and a giant red marker pen, talking about “win-win solutions” to global poverty.

Romer’s charter cities are pitched as a solution to the “bad governance” — often referring to pesky things like taxes — preventing countries like Uganda from becoming, say, Switzerland. These future metropolises will boast free movement of labor in and out of their borders. Trading their citizenship for jobs, residents would not be allowed to vote in any traditional sense other than with their feet.