Sand heists and property rights in the Caribbean (Summer School)

until the fall.

“That's why summer is a perfect time to make sure your new diet is calibrated.”

I mean, our team has, on a first we unpacked the three biggest stories every morning,

so you can stay informed and get on with your day in fewer than 15 minutes. Follow or subscribe up first today wherever you get podcasts. This is Planet Money from NPR. You know, if you're going to hit seven continents in eight weeks, eventually, eventually, you are going to hit a flight delay.

So, folks, on the flight deck, we have about about 13-15 aircraft ahead of us for take off. Thanks for your patience. Appreciate it, thank you. I guess we're going to have to start the show from the plane. Welcome back, everyone, to Planet Money Summer School World Tour, if we can ever get this

thing off the ground. The only international economics degree where the textbook is written in sand, beautiful, white, beach sand, because this week, we are headed to Jamaica, and a couple of other islands nearby. We have been saving this episode because we want our semester abroad to at least sound

like we're working hard. Now, at this point in the series, we can relax, lie in the sun, and let the economics wash over us because, and I am contractually obligated to say this, you can learn a lot about how economies function by looking at the tiniest nations. Small changes there can have huge effects, both good and bad, and we can take those lessons

and a few shells back with us to the mainland. Today's lessons will feature two fascinating stories from the islands, a case study about a group of people who challenge the very foundation of economics, property rights, and a mystery caper about the foundation of beaches sand. Our tour guide in Professor today is waiting for us in Kingston, Jamaica.

His name is Damian King, and he is the executive director of the, I actually don't know, but you say Caribbean or Caribbean, so in the Caribbean, we say Caribbean, outside of the Caribbean, people say Caribbean, all right, we're going to do this like they do in the islands.

“Damian is the executive director of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute, I think take”

in Jamaica. That's correct. nailed it.

Alright, so Jamaica has 3 million people, and I know the other island nations around

you have far fewer people, and economists often talk about the challenges of being a small country. Open economy. That is the place we have to import a huge share of what you use. How does that affect life in the islands?

What I talked to my economists colleagues around the region, we talk about vulnerability, you know, hurricanes come along, earthquakes come along, and economic shocks come along, all price fluctuations affect us much more than it affects the United States, global interest rate changes affect us greatly, because we're all highly indebted economies. So this idea that your economic fortunes depend upon forces outside of your control is an

ever-present consideration, because it affects the long-term decisions that you make. So if I have a plot of land in Jamaica, I might be afraid to do something ambitious like build a factory or an office building, I might just build, you know, a hotel. Well, even worse than that, you may build a hotel, but are you going to build the cute boutique hotel that has over the water bar for which you can charge a much higher room

rate, because the first hurricane that comes along is going to wipe out the over water bar, whereas if you build a concrete behemoth, then it is more resilient to the storms. So the idea really is that it affects all of your investment decisions. So you have these small nations, very similar economies based on tourism, they share similar

“threats, so why not band together, will there ever be a United States of the Caribbean?”

Well, the answer is no, but you know, it was tried in the late 1950s when former British

colonies were becoming independent, the English-speaking islands in the Caribbean formed a federation, the West Indian Federation. It didn't last two years before islands started pulling out of it. And this is unfortunate because it has created economies that are probably below the threshold of economic viability.

So it was tried, it didn't work, and it is never going to happen again.

The main problem was political, policy promises that our electorally successful are not necessarily the ones that are best for the actual economy.

I hear you, I hear you, David, in our first case study today, we actually deal with this

challenge of balancing economics and politics. Coming up after the break will visit a magical place that breaks the primary rule of capitalism. When you run an island without private property, it seems like everything is being called a recession indicator these days. Yeah, like the box of hamburger helper in my pantry.

Or the new Apple Neo book? Or the resurgence of press on nails, or lipstick, or no lipstick, I've lost track. There is only one way to know if these are actual economic warning signs, though, listen to the indicator from planet money on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, hey there, I'm Brittany Luce, and I don't know, maybe this is a little out of pockets

“to say, but I think you should listen to my podcast.”

It's called "It's been a Minute," and I love it, and I think you will, too. Over the past couple of months, over 100,000 new listeners started tuning in. Find out why. Listen to the "It's been a Minute" podcast from NPR today. All right, class, stay together, stay together.

We do not want to miss the ferry to the island of Barbuda. Now, don't get confused, do not get on the boat to Burmuda, or Barbados. We are going to a tiny island with a couple of thousand residents called Barbuda, Professor Damien King, watch the tour group keep in mind as we visit this island. The great thing about looking at small economies is it has a way of exposing what our really

fundamental economic issues in a way for everybody to see because of the small scale. So, this episode really is about the importance of property rights.

Of course, property rights, but the question raised in this first case study is, does property

have to be private? Can we come up with other ways of owning property collectively that better serve the people who live on it?

“The story originally aired in 2020 and was hosted by Scott Gerion and Sarah Gonzalez.”

There are two ways to get to Barbuda, and a seven-seater, unreliable plane, or a rocky ferry. Oh, where are we? Really rocky. Three weeks once a day from Antiga, Antiga and Barbuda are two islands that make up one country,

and the trip takes about two hours. Antiga is mountainous and touristy with about 98,000 residents. That's where the government is. Barbuda is flat, like flat, like it looks flat, like a painting. Wow.

I've never seen an island that flop before.

You could drive across Barbuda in about 30 minutes. It's rural, just about 1,000 homes, 1500 residents, probably more animals here than people. Goats and sheep. It's the kind of island where wild donkeys just walk into your home. The houses are all pastel, turquoise with gray, mint green with peach, peach with orange,

and where no one wants lobster anymore. We have lots of food breakfast, we have it for lunch, we have it for dinner. We love the three times a day, so a piece of chicken in between is not bad. The land of sun and sea, beautiful Barbuda. This is Natalia John.

Natalia was born in Barbuda, her mom and grandma were two. She actually lives in her grandma's house. She has her own plot of land too, but she hasn't built anything on it yet. No, not as yet, but I have my son and my stone on it. Nobody can go take it.

What does that mean? You're sand in your stone. Just to show that something is going to happen on that land soon. You put some sand and some stone down just to show that something is going to happen on that land soon, so don't take it.

Because in Barbuda land isn't something you buy in cell.

“It's something you just have, for free, nobody free, no money, so that's how I grow up.”

Not even taxes, not even taxes. Free free, no paperwork, no lease, no rental agreement, no title. Just a whole 62 square mile tropical island shared, communally and informally. This is why we came to Barbuda. Barbuda and say they don't just own the plot of land they put a fence on, they own

and share the whole island, collectively. All three sources, all the land, they use it in common. That's what it's called. Barbuda has the greatest land deal on earth. This is Albert Patty Simon, they call me the grill.

The grill?

For those who are not familiar with the term, it simply means a verbal historian.

“We wanted to talk to Patty because he knows how Barbuda got this special land arrangement.”

Once upon a time, no one lived on Barbuda. Even when the Caribbean was all indigenous populations, they would just come to Barbuda to hunt in fish and then go back to the other islands they lived on.

Vida was never inhabited.

And then during the 1600s colonization times, the single-sh guy, Christopher Cajrinton comes along and says, "I have a plan for that island." Oh yeah, Cajrinton was a slave master. He leases the whole island from the King of England and his payment was a fat sheep. One fat sheep, he had his slaves over there and it was like a supply.

The whole island was made up of 500 enslaved people at its peak and one white manager and his family. Sometimes maybe you know more than a handful of other white workers too. So schools and churches and all the other things that Antiga had, they didn't really get built in Barbuda because there were no white people.

And for almost two centuries, a bunch of different Cajrinton's run Barbuda this way.

“Ivory is abolished in 1834 but that doesn't actually change anything for several more decades.”

Eventually the Cajrinton's leave, their lease expires and when they leave, there are no white people left, just formerly enslaved people. So they stayed. And as they're there, living, no one ever came up and said, "Wait, but you need a property title."

Technically the King of England had claimed the land and considered the people of Barbuda tenants but there's no evidence that anyone like paid rent or anything like that. So for more than a hundred years, people on this island were pretty much left alone

to use the land however they wanted and they never took on a formal property rights system.

And people didn't really fight over land either like who gets what because there was plenty of it, 62 square miles, most of it undeveloped and not that many people. In 1981 Antiga and Barbuda gained their independence and become one country with one prime minister. Around that time they set up a Barbuda council, kind of like a city council.

When Barbudaans want to build something, they check with them. And at some point the council does start leasing land to developers. There are a few beach front hotels and resorts on the island. Princess Diana used to vacation here but Barbudaans never sold the land. They just rented it out to whoever they wanted.

And then in 2007 Barbudaans get this special informal land system, formalized into law. Parliament passes the Barbuda land act which says, "Yes Barbudaans, you now officially owned the land in common." And it stays this way until 2017 when a hurricane hits, Hurricane Irma. It's September 6th, 2am, dark out.

The wind started to pick up. This is Natalia again. So the water started to come in late. Rush in New. Not so much rain but water from the sea.

Sea water. Yes. It was a lot of water. And remember Barbuda, flat as a penny. A lot of wind.

And then you just say the wind was started to burst the door to the ash, you know. All over the island just shelves of buildings were left. No doors, no roofs, open to the sky. Barbudans were totally exposed. And then they heard another hurricane was coming in three days.

Hurricane Jose.

“And the prime minister, who remember lives in Antiga, he doesn't really come to Barbuda and”

Teagan's rarely do. He does this kind of dramatic thing. He gets private helicopter, takes himself and a cameraman to Barbuda lands, jumps on the bed of a pickup truck and makes a big announcement. The entire country has been decimated.

I have never seen anything like this before.

He orders a mandatory evacuation of the island. Barbudans were sent to shelters, someone with family in Antiga, but actually the second hurricane never hit. It ended up turning out to sea. So everyone is like, okay, we're going to go back now.

The prime minister calls all Barbudans to a meeting at some university in Antiga, like every Barbuda can come to this meeting a little weird. The prime minister, the guy who flew in on a helicopter, he's still the prime minister today, Gaston Brown. He tells Barbudans, you know that lot you've already been living on for free all these

years. New plan. We're going to sell it to you for one dollar, Eastern Caribbean, about 37 cents US. And now, now you'll have a title and titles open up all these opportunities. You can take a title to a bank.

If the individual is going to take responsibility and would want to get a mortgage or a short-term loan to rebuild out to repair his or her home, he would require ownership.

Meaning that they could go to the bank with their title in their hands and say, use my property

value as collateral to give me a loan for one dollar. Which sounds a little strange to many Barbudans. They're like, hold on, your rebuilding plan is to sell us the land we already own for

“one dollar each and he's like, yeah, because this whole communal land thing, I think it's”

just a big misunderstanding, a myth. In the 1700s, 1800s, Barbudans carrying that type of myth, one could empathize with them as individuals who were illiterate. Today, when the 21st century, it is unconscionable, inconceivable that any educated person could believe in that myth today, it is a form of ignorance that has to be broken.

You say that Barbudans have been thinking that they own the land and that it is a myth that they own the land, but there is a law that Parliament, the Antigen and Barbuda government passed that says Barbudans own the land. It was a law that violated the constitution of the country and a law that had sought to give credence to a long standing myth.

Barbudans are challenging this whole thing in court. It'll likely go to their version of the Supreme Court, but for now, under the Prime Minister's new plan, communal land is out, property titles are in. He says now Barbudans can have actual, legally binding titles, to whatever plot of land they had been living on.

Just that plot, though, the rest of the island, which is about 90% of the island, that be open to foreign investment and development. The Prime Minister wants Barbuda to become a big vacation spot, and at least in Barbuda, his plan is not super popular. Barbudans are not stupid.

This is John Masnington, he lives in Barbuda. And let me tell you why. As a Barbuda, I own 62 square miles. Remember, the Prime Minister is only offering Barbuda's ownership over the little piece of Barbuda where their homes are built.

And John does not live on some prime beachfront property. No one in Barbuda does.

“They're like, why would we build a house on a beach beaches or dangerous?”

They all live on one strip in the middle of the island. So it's not like hotel developers are going to be super interested in their plots of land. So John says it feels like the Prime Minister is stealing the island. 62 square miles is not just the physical land. It is the resources which are sustained by that 62 square miles.

The farming resources, the animal resources, the real estate value which increases over time, the food security, the clean air, right? If every single Barbuda accepted that offer, in one stroke of the pen, we would have converted our ownership of 62 square miles to one little, it's a bit piece of that. And Natalia, she says she actually would like to see Barbuda developed more, but she

thinks people on the island should have a say over what projects get approved.

The way it's always been.

We just wanted to be just like what it is. Just pink and peach and mint greenhouses and mango trees and pomegranate trees and water melon and flowers I can see why you would want that just awesome. That was Scott Grian and Sarah Gonzalez from the year 2020. Here in 2026 there is still a legal fight over the land in Barbuda.

One court rule that the residents there have limited property rights, not communal ownership, and a new law allows for the development of resorts on the island. But the high court is still considering an environmental challenge by Barbuda residents over a new private development. Let's get our professor back in here, Damian King, hey Damian, hi Robert.

“Why is the debate on Barbuda about land so important to the economics world?”

I can see how excited you are to talk about this.

If you were to ask me what is the single most important institution that underpins the

tremendous growth in prosperity through the history of mankind, my answer would be the invention of the idea of property rights. Once property rights are invented and I think this was probably 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. And for the first time people have been incentive to save a part of their current product to invest in the property, and then you get the miracle of compounding.

then you reinvest in it again, and that underlies the exponential growth of property.

That'll make sense, but growth means wealth, and there's a question in the story of who gets the wealth eventually, who benefits the most. The prime minister argues that if residents have title to the land, then banks will lend the money to improve the land, but some of these residents have no income, they have no assets. It's not guaranteed that banks will want to let them borrow money.

So it seems like land ownership alone can't guarantee prosperity. Now, it's not a sufficient condition, other factors have to be in place other than private

“property rights, so you need to have a secure environment so that whatever you earn from your”

economic activity, you have a reason to believe it is safe.

That is not going to come and be stolen. In particular, you need to know that it's not going to be stolen by the government itself. So as much as property rights are an important institution, there are other institutions that need to be in place for an economy to invest and grow. I guess it's also a question about whether the people themselves can form those institutions.

There have been successful rural land cooperatives around the world in places like Spain, Portugal, Mexico where land is shared and common among the farmers. And our students have figured out how to avoid the tragedy of the comments where people abuse

“the collective land. Why isn't that system enough on Barbuda?”

There are institutions and practices which Barbuda engaged in which eliminates one aspect of the

tragedy of the commons, which is the main aspect which is just overexploitation of a common resource, but it doesn't solve the problem of their big, no incentive to invest in the common property, to put up a costly investment that will have a high return because it is common property, then there is no way for the investor to keep the returns to themselves. Listen to the story reminded me of an interesting economic concept called path dependence,

which is that sometimes the accidents of history can last not just for generations, but for centuries. And in the case of this particular story, the way the island was ignored for so long, the history of slavery on the island and the people who brought them there, those historical facts have lived all the way up to this very moment. I feel like you see this accident of history issue pop up a lot in the Caribbean.

You know, that's actually a great point. It's a great example of path dependence because there is no other island on which they have a history of individual private property that are considering changing to communal land ownership. So it does make the point that where you start out, kind of determines down the road, what your interest is, and what you want to maintain. Damian, I've been reporting on economics a long time. So I do understand the private property arguments,

I understand what the Prime Minister is saying, but I can't help but root for the Barbunins to pull this off. Like, it is a tiny island. What is the harm in letting Barbunins run it like they

“want to run it? The people don't know what's good for them. Sounds like you should run for political”

office in Antigua. I don't think the people don't know what's good for them is a good political slogan. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, but I won't. Up next, a mystery, a crime thriller complete with a hard-nosed detective, a chase scene, and a planet-money host seeking the truth that no one wants to hear. The game is a foot after the break. This message comes from the Date Line Original Podcast,

Date Line, Missing in America. Each episode explores an unsolved disappearance where one new tip could make all the difference. Search Date Line, Missing in America, to follow now. Have you ever been so upset that you can't even think straight? When we're distressed and in high anxiety, we tend to breathe from our chest, which is actually more hyperventilating and is the opposite of relaxing. So we want to breathe from our belly area. This week on Life Kit Podcast,

tips for those painful, stressful moments, listen to Life Kit on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Zendaya and Tom Holland are back in Spider-Man brand new day, and the movie has a more grounded tone than we've seen from the franchise. But does it strike the right balance of fun and darkness? We'll talk about it on NPR's pop culture happy hour. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, class. It is Jamaica Time. Which does not mean we're doing a

institution. We're going to talk about the allocation of scarce resources. And yes, okay, the

“resource is a beautiful white sand beach overlooking azure waters. And I am not out on the rum part.”

But first, our professor, Damian King, is here. What should our students keep in mind as they

listen to this mysterious case study about sand? They should think about any resource that is large or vast like the rivers, the seas, the oceans, the air that is difficult to police. How do you police the unpoliceable? I like it. And one other thing to keep in mind as you listen to this story, sand is very valuable. Not just for tourist beaches, but as construction material to make concrete to make glass, modern life needs sand. The story first aired in 2018 and it was hosted by

Karen Duffin. And once again with the difficult beach assignment, Saracanzales.

“There's this rustic little beach town in northern Jamaica. One reggae bar on the beach with the”

chin roof. When the tropical rain comes out of nowhere, everyone runs into this bar. A self-described rustiman is in their singing reggae calling everyone girlfriend. It's not the kind of beach town that tourists flock to. This is a local beach. Okay, it's called silver sand. And it's because it's white, glittering sand against blue waters. Sandra James loves this water. Oh, they want the beach, no water girl. The waves just comes. But Sandra feels protective, very specifically

of that white glistening sand because everyone seems to want it. It happens a lot in this area, sand, theft, sand, theft, a lot in this area. You can hear the trucks at night, moving with sand.

“In Jamaica, sand is valuable. So valuable that a few years ago, just down the road, an entire beach”

was stolen. There's a lawyer in Kingston, Michael Hilton, real quiet talker, born and raised in Jamaica. Michael was running what is essentially the Justice Department in Jamaica. And then he decided to go into private practice. And in 2008, he gets a call. A beach has been stolen, taken in the dead of the night hauled out in dump trucks. So there were witnesses who saw trucks in the night, moving sand. But who could not say where the sand was being taken? And Michael Hilton, his job was to find

this missing sand. The challenge would be to prove who the sand went, who took it and who benefited from it. So Michael heads to the scene of the crime, drives down a rocky, overgrown dirt road, and peeking out through the beautiful mango trees is that aqua blue Caribbean sea. And then he sees it. There were holes that were probably deep. Oh, there were holes. Well, there were trenches. Deep trenches. Like, if someone went down one of these, you probably would

not be able to see them. Digging trenches like this would require some kind of excavator type of equipment. The amount that was stolen was not something that you could just hide in somewhere house. It was way too much sand. So Michael thinks there has to be a huge pile of sand somewhere on this island. It must have been spread out somewhere and where would sand be spread out? And who has the money

to buy a million dollars worth of sand? Beachfront resorts. They become Michael's primary suspects.

Michael sends one of the owners of the stolen beach, a sand scientist and a justice of the piece on a mission, up on a helicopter. And this scrappy eagle-eyed sand squad, they noticed something at two particular hotels. These hotels looked like they were built on beaches that had brown sand. And it kind of looked like white sand had been sprinkled over the brown sand. The pilot lands the helicopter on the border of one of these private resorts. The sand scientist runs out,

collects some sand samples and then runs back onto the helicopter. And while they were flying around in helicopters, a guy from the United Nations was wandering around the beaches.

I'm Pascal Petuzzi. I'm from Switzerland. Pascal is with the environmental arm of the United

“Nations. He happened to be in Jamaica at the time doing research for the UN, talking to the locals.”

In one village, we people told us that some people came overnight, the guns and trucks. And they stole the sand, they sold a beach away overnight. And he discovers that this sand theft in Jamaica is just one tiny part of a huge and growing sand shortage. And a ton of money

is at stake. Oh, the sand business is big. It's a very minimum 250 billion dollar per year.

Most sand is actually just bought and sold legally. But humans are extracting sand faster than the earth can create sand, because it takes forever to make. So Pascal takes all of his research and he publishes a report. Calls it sand, rare, then one thinks. And we think it's just infinite. And it's not. And where sand is running out? Things aren't getting violent. And in fact, people have been killed in Mexico and India and probably many other areas,

just for sand destruction. And Pascal says the biggest sand importer in the world these days is Singapore. They have imported hundreds of millions of tons of sand.

“Singapore is in terms of land mass. They don't have a whole whole lot. Where do they put their sand?”

Oh, they do see the reclamation. So they take, they expand the territory by placing sand

in the sea. Singapore dumps all of the sand that it buys onto the edges of the country to make Singapore bigger. So you can see this from satellite images. Singapore used to get all of it sand from Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. But then Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia started shrinking. They were literally selling their countries to Singapore. The UN says around 24 Indonesian islands disappeared. They no longer exist because all of their sand went to Singapore. Now Pascal,

he did eventually leave Jamaica. But Michael, he would be on the trail of the missing sand for years. Michael needs to prove that the white sand grains they saw from the helicopter and snuck

off with came from his beach. He hires sedimentologist and marine geologists to run forensics

on these tiny white sand grains. And Jamaican police are also on the sand forensic beat. They're knocking on these hotel doors. Like, excuse me, we have a warrant to collect some sand samples.

“There was a whole criminal case. Who would have brought the criminal case?”

The crown, yes. The crown. As in, Queen Elizabeth. Because she's a Queen of Jamaica. But did she really leave? It's long story. Long story. Jamaica is part of the Commonwealth. The old British colonies and nobody messes with the monarch sand. Because you don't steal beaches from parts of anybody's country. That's Mark Shields. He was the head of the National Police Force in Jamaica during this sand

heist. Mark is thinking, how many people were involved in this scheme? And how high did this crime go up? There were allegations that police were escorting these dump trucks helping them make a clean getaway. Quite clearly, the police would not under normal circumstances be escorting sand from one location to another. Years into this case, the crown says that their main witness starts getting death threats, real and specific intimidation they said.

The witness no longer wants to testify and the crown is forced to drop the charges. It was clearly a quite a conspiracy. And some of the people that were involved in this would be quite influential. So in the end, the hotels just settled with the beach owners without admitting go. Jamaica's great sand heist so big the evidence could be seen from a helicopter whoever did it got away with it. My disappointment in this case is how it ended.

There's a part of me that would almost prefer to have lost the case than to not have gotten over it. So it's not my favorite case. And since that theft and the UN report, the problem has just gotten worse. In India alone, the UN is aware of thousands of illegal sand mining sites. When I was in Jamaica, I went to one of the resorts that was accused of buying that stolen sand. Fools and bars and rum everywhere, catamarans and tiki huts on stills in the middle of

the water. And of course, a big expansive white sand beach. And everyone I spoke to for this story told me the same thing. Wherever this hotel got that white sand from all those years ago,

we'll talk about a possible solution to the problem of sand theft, but the tourists aren't going

to life it. This message comes from the Date Line Original Podcast, Date Line, missing in America. Each episode explores an unsolved disappearance where one new tip could make all the difference. Search Date Line, missing in America to follow now. This week on Sharwave, the Universal Vaccine. One vaccine that can protect against multiple diseases for years. It's not just theoretical, it's possible. The question is, how do you translate

“this safety into humans? Why the future of vaccines could be a one-stop shop on Sharwave?”

Listen on the Emperor app or wherever you get your podcasts.

We are back with our Jamaican economist, Damian King. Thanks for showing us around.

And for being a professor today. Happy to be here. I'm happy to be discussing lessons that the Caribbean can teach the rest of the world. One of the reasons I love this story is, in my mind, sand is infinite. We say something is as numerous as the grains of sand, but of course it's not infinite. The right sand and the right place is actually a scarce resource. And once you're dealing with scarce resources, then you are dealing with economics.

In economics, scarce doesn't mean that there is not a lot of it. It just means that there

“are more used for it than there are more that exist, that just that there aren't as finite.”

The big concept here is it is inherently difficult to protect numerous or vast public access spaces,

rivers, oceans, air, coastlines. It's difficult even in countries that have great public bureaucratic capacity and have lots of money. It's even worse in a small island in which the government's capacity is weak and poor, simply because they don't have enough people and they don't have enough money. There's an economic term we've gone over before for this kind of situation. And that is in negative externality, which is something bad that happens, that is not accounted

for in the cost of a good. So when I go to a beautiful resort in Jamaica, I pay a lot for the rom and the food and the towels, but I am not paying for the environmental damage that could have

“happened in the public beach next door. Very much so. And I'm going to remind you of this,”

the next time you're on that beach and I happen to walk by. You know very well, there are guards to keep rogue economists from walking onto the beach. But why not raise the taxes on the tourists and on the resorts to fund a police force to protect the natural resources? That would work. You know, when a 10 to 20% of your GDP is the tourism sector, then the tourism interests are going to say, "Well, that's not going to build a hotel." And they can and do whole government

to ransom. And the point is that this is not sort of blaming the investors in hotels. The government itself is not going to be willing to make that step because the governments tend to be desperate to get investment. And so they're really not making that calculus. So Damian, we are asking all of our professors this season to give us a lesson we can take back with us to the United States. So is there anything that Jamaica does economically

that we should still hear in the United States? I'm kind of sorry that you added economically because I was going to say, you know, that with hundreds of your population and one thousand of your GDP, we produce world-beating sprinters, like in the Olympics, like you say in Bolt. Yes, you say in Bolt and Shelley and Fraser Price. All right, but economically, what kind of country like the US learn from the Caribbean is a whole? Where do you look at the different

Caribbean islands? They have pursued different international trade policies over the years. And all of the countries that had high import tariffs are the ones that have done worse in the Caribbean over the last half a century. So that might be a lesson for the United States in the effect of import tariffs even though they are going to have a smaller effect and take a longer time to be manifest. So you're saying the lesson to take from the Caribbean is the value of free trade.

Yes, our students will have to pass a test on the concepts we have discussed today. So we'd like to review them here at the end of the show. We talked about the perils of being a small

that developments outside of the control of the residents of that country greatly affect their

economic fortunes and there can be hurricanes or the price of oil. A small economy is like a cork bobbing in the vast ocean. Professor Ken, you in one sentence, just one, remind us of the importance of property rights. Property rights incentivizes individual investment which increases wealth. Excellent. And we talked a bit about how Barbuda ended up without private property and that was path dependence. Path dependence is the idea that where a system ends up is dependent on your starting point.

Damien King is the executive director of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute,

“I think Tank and Jamaica, and a former professor of economics, I should say, and our professors today.”

Thank you so much Damien for doing this. We appreciate it. It's been a joy to become a part of the planet Monet Academy. We'll send you a fake diploma, please. If you want more stories about how a government can influence the economy of a small island nation, may I recommend page 51 of the new planet money book where they talk about Taiwan, whole different experience, great new lessons that's planet money, a guide to the economic forces

that shape your life. And hey, if you never live in a country with some sort of smart,

“economic idea that the rest of the world should know about, please. Tell us,”

and you might be featured in our graduation episode. Get in touch now email us at planet [email protected] and put summer school in the subject. Summer school is produced by Sophia police a car and edited by Alex Goldmark. It is fact checked by Leila Dawes. The show is engineered by Emily Huang. I'm Robert Smith and you know what I'm not hosting summer school and stuck on the tarmac in an airplane. I'm also the host of the new podcast business history,

a show about the history of business. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Ladies and gentlemen of planet money summer school world tour. I'm sure the jet lag at this point is really setting in so make sure and get your naps in because we are not done. Next up on World Tour, we'll be heading south to Argentina. To learn about what happens when inflation goes off the rails. Next up on planet money summer school world tour, next Wednesday.

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Not once. Listen to Weeky Bus Safe. A new true crime series on the embedded podcast from NPR. Since the 1970s abortion on screen has been portrayed as either a medical necessity or a dangerous decision. On its been a minute, we discuss how the many depictions of abortion have shifted with the politics of the times. Watch the full it's been a minute episode on YouTube or listen to the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.