I am going on sabbatical leave until late September. Normal service will be resumed then.

What have the Romans ever done for us? is the rhetorical question posed by the rabble-rouser Reg in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, to which the reply comes from his audience: aqueducts, roads, education, wine, peace etc.

Colonial occupiers do not get a good press, rightly in many ways, but they often bring infrastructure and other benefits such as the rule of law to colonised countries.

Paul Romer, a Stanford economist, wants to bring back some of the benefits of colonisation without the nasty aspects. He believes developing countries should partner with developed ones to create special economic zones – or “charter cities” – as a means of boosting local economic development.

Prof Romer made the argument at TED Global this morning that developing countries should create their own equivalents of Hong Kong, the city state run for a time by the British and then assumed into China.

Hong Kong, with its free market system, independent courts and efficient administration became a model for economic development across China, he argued.

“Britain inadvertently through its actions in Hong Kong did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programmes we have seen throughout the world,” he said.

Prof Romer’s first suggestion for a zone which could be developed on behalf of, or in partnership with, a poor country? Guantanamo Bay, which he suggests Cuba could charter Canada to develop on its behalf, assuming it would not want the United States to do so.

I am in Oxford at the TED Global conference, a melange of all sorts of talented people people making short and provocative presentations over four days. The surprise attraction at the opening session this afternoon was Gordon Brown, the British prime minister.

Although I agreed with some of what he said, I thought Mr Brown suffered from making a politician’s speech to an event where you get points for being entertaining and off the wall (he was later followed by a man who makes micro-sculptures of houses on the heads of pins).

In my view, the most thought-provoking presentation was Alain de Botton‘s, which was a critique of the drive towards meritocracy in modern society on the grounds that it is a) impossible to achieve and b) implies that many people deserve to be at the bottom of the pile.

As Mr de Botton pointed out, we have come to expect that any of us can succeed if we work hard and have talent, whereas there in fact is a lot of chance and arbitrariness involved.

He noted that the poor in medieval times were known as “unfortunates”, a recognition that they were simply stuck with their social status, whereas we now talk about “losers” as if they deserve it.

He drew a comparison with the moral framework of literature, in which a hero’s tragic fate does not require an audience to look down upon him: “It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser. He is not a loser, although he has lost.”

It reminded me of some of the deconstruction of individual success in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, in which he points out the importance of collective influence and random factors such as birth date.

Photo: TED/Duncan Davidson