When I visited Jamaica in the Fall of 2009, here is how a knowledgeable observer described the political reality facing the government: Desperately needed policy steps—steps that any objective observer would recognize as being good for the country—would cost the government many votes in the next election. Extending an absentee ballot to the many Jamaicans who do not live on the island could assist the reform effort and reduce the political price that any government in Jamaica has to pay for implementing good policy.

The pressing need in Haiti is for food, water, and medical care, plus assistance in re-establishing basic services like policing, power, sanitation, and telecommunications. This kind of aid and assistance has to be the highest priority now, but many people are already looking ahead. How can Haitians get access to urban infrastructure, buildings, equipment, and the know-how that can support jobs in industries like garment assembly? Contrary to what some have suggested, a charter city in Haiti is simply not an option at this time.

We would like to believe that democracy will lead to steady improvement in the rules that a society follows. In principle, it seems self-evident that if a rule is bad, citizens or their representatives vote for a better one. In practice, it is not always this simple. Sometimes it takes a two-stage decision process to get rid of a bad rule. People must first vote to change a higher-level rule that structures voting on other rules.

According to Transparency International’s corruption index, corruption is “sticky.” Over time corrupt countries tend to remain corrupt, while clean countries remain clean. This makes it tempting to lean on cultural interpretations to explain the persistence or absence corruption. Hong Kong provides a compelling counterexample, showing that a change in rules can defeat a culture of corruption. Though it once had high levels of corruption, comparable to those in mainland China in the 1970s, the British government was able to effectively banish corruption.

Most economists think that they are building cranes that suspend important theoretical structures from a base that is firmly grounded in first principles. In fact, they almost always invoke a skyhook, some unexplained result without which the entire structure collapses. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics because she works from the ground up, building a crane that can support the full range of economic behavior. When I started studying economics in graduate school, the standard operating procedure was to introduce both technology and rules as skyhooks.