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

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Imagine a nation where, for the residents, land is for the claiming. You walk down the street, pick out a nice looking plot of land, and just plop down a marker. No rent, no taxes, no deed – just free land. That’s the communal system of property rights that governed a small Caribbean island for over a century.This week on our Summer School World Tour we make port on the small economies of island nations, a great place to explore how different experiments play out. Every small change – the good and the bad – has big consequences.First, the fascinating test case on the island of Barbuda, where the people there have found a way to run things without the usual, formal land rights.Then, we consider the vulnerabilities of small nations as we dig into a mysterious sand heist in Jamaica. A stolen beach – yes, you read that right – and something called “sand forensics” reveal the importance of this seemingly infinite resource and the challenges of protecting public spaces when there’s money to be made.Along the way we found ourselves asking: Does property have to be private? What happens when it’s not? How can you protect scarce resources when they’re part of the vast, public spaces everyone shares?Featured Episodes:The Island No One Owns (2020)Peak Sand (2018)Featured Terms:Tragedy of the commonsProperty rightsPath dependenceOwnership in commonSupport:NPR+ (sponsor-free listening & bonus episodes) And please click “follow” in your podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. Read: Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life (Audiobook here) Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletterOur weekly Indicator link round-up newsletterFollow: InstagramTikTokYouTubeFacebookThis episode of Planet Money Summer School is hosted by Robert Smith. It was produced by Sophia Paliza-Carre and edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark. It was fact-checked by Leyla Doss and engineered by Annlie Huang.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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, between about 13 and 15 aircraft ahead of us for takeoff. 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 challenged the very foundation of economics, property rights, and a mystery caper about the foundation of beaches, sand. Our tour guide and professor today is waiting for us in Kingston, Jamaica. His name is Damien King, and he is the executive director of the – I actually don't know. Do 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. Damien is the executive director of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute, a think-take in Jamaica. That's correct. Nailed it. Right. So Jamaica has three 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, open economy. That is a place where you have to import a huge share of what you use. How does that affect life in the islands? When I talk to my economist colleagues around the region, we talk about vulnerability.

You know, hurricanes come along, earthquakes come along, and economic shocks come along. Oil 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 overwater 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 ban 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 Ireland 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. What was the main problem? The main problem was political. Policy promises that are 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, we'll visit a magical place that breaks the primary rule of capitalism. Can you run an island without private property? Hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. 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 Bermuda or Barbados. We are going to a tiny island with a couple thousand residents called Barbuda. Professor Damian King, what should 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 are

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 Gurian and Sarah Gonzalez. There are two ways to get to Barbuda on a seven-seater, unreliable plane, or a rocky ferry. Oh, my God.

Really rocky. The ferry leaves once a day from Antigua. Antigua and Barbuda are two islands that make up one country, and the trip takes about two hours. Antigua is mountainous and touristy with about 98,000 residents. That's where the government is. Barbuda is flat. Like flat flat, flat like a penny. Wow.

I've never seen an island that flat before. You could drive across Barbuda in about 30 minutes. It's rural, just about 1,000 homes, 1,500 residents. Goats. Probably more animals here than people. Goats and sheep. It's the kind of island where wild don't. monkeys just walk into your home.

The houses are all like pastel, turquoise with gray, mint green with peach, peach with orange, and where no one wants lobster anymore. We have lobster for breakfast, we have it for lunch, we have it for dinner. We eat lobster 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 Jan. Natalia was born in Barbuda. Her mom and her grandma were, too.

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 sand and my stone on it, so nobody can go and take it. What does that mean your sand and 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's going to happen on that land soon. So don't take it.

Because in Barbuda, land isn't something you buy and sell. It's something you just have. For free, no money. No money. So that's how I grew 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. to Barbuda. Barbutta say they don't just own the plot of land they put a fence on. They own and share the whole island collectively. All its resources, 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 Paddy Simon. They call me the griot. The griot? Oh, you don't know that. 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 and fish and then go back to the other islands they lived on. Barbuda was never inhabited. And then during the 1600s colonization times, this English guy, Christopher Codrington, comes along and says, I have a plan for that island. Oh, yeah. Cajington 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 in his family, sometimes maybe no more than a handful of other white workers, too. So schools and churches and all the other things that Antigua had, they didn't really get built in Barbuda because there were no white people. And for almost two centuries, a bunch of different Codrington's run Barbuda this way. Slavery is abolished in 1834, but that doesn't actually change anything for several more decades. Eventually, the Codrington's leave, their lease expires. And when they leave, there are no white people left, just formerly enslaved people. So they stay.

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

And then in 2007, Barbudans get this special informal land system formalized into law. Parliament passes the Barbuda Land Act, which says, yes, Barbudans, you now officially own the land in common. And it stays this way until 2017 when a hurricane hits. Hurricane Irma. It's September 6th, 2 a.m. dark out. The wind started to pick up. This is Natalia again. So the water started to come in like rushing in.

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. Woo! And then you just said the window started to burst the door, so, pash, you know? All over the island, just shells 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 Antigua, he doesn't really come to Barbuda, Antigans rarely do. He does this kind of dramatic thing. He gets a 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. He orders a mandatory evacuation of the island. Barbudans were sent to shelters. Some went with family in Antigua. But actually, the second hurricane never hit. It ended up turning out the 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 Antigua. Like every Barbudin 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 $1, Eastern Caribbean, about 37 cents U.S.

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 or to repair his or her home, he would require ownership. So it was a sensible thing to do to help them to unlock capital so that they could rebuild.

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 $1 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, we're in 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 Antiguan and Barbudan government passed that says Barbudans own the lands. It was a law that violated the constitution of the country and a law that had sought to give credence to a longstanding 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. But just that plot, though, the rest of the island, which is about 90% of the island, that'd 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 Mussington.

He lives in Barbuda. And let me tell you why. As a Barbudan, I own 62 square miles. Remember, the Prime Minister is only offering Barbudon's ownership over the little piece of Barbuda where their homes are built. And John, 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 are 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 itsy-bitsy 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. like what it is. Just pink and peach and mint greenhouses and mango trees and pomegranate trees and watermelon and flowers. Yes.

Okay. I can see why you would want that. Just us. That was Scott Gurian and Sarah Gonzalez from the year 2020. Here in 2026, there is still a legal fight over the land in Barbuda. One court ruled 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, Damien King. Hey, Damien. 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, Then for the first time, people have an incentive to save a part of their current product, to invest in the property, and then you get the miracle of compounding. You invest a little in the capacity of your productive resource. Then you produce more. Then you reinvest in it again. And that underlies the exponential growth of property. That all makes 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. No, it's not a sufficient condition. Other factors have to be in place. 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 in common among the farmers. And Barbudans have figured out how to avoid the tragedy of the commons 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 over-exploitation of a common resource. But it doesn't solve the problem of there being no incentive to invest in the common property, to put up a costly investment that will have a high return because it's its common property, then there is no way for the investor

to keep the returns to themselves. Listening 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,

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 landownership. So it does make the point that where you start out kind of determines down the road what your interests are and what you want to maintain. Damien, 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 Barbudans to pull this off. Like it is a tiny island. What is the harm in letting Barbudans 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 afoot after the break. Hello, class. it is Jamaica time, which does not mean we're doing a story on the economics of rum and reggae. That would be too obvious. This is an elite educational institution. We are 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, Damien 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. This story first aired in 2018,

and it was hosted by Karen Duffin and once again with the difficult beach assignment, Sarah Gonzalez. There's this rustic little beach town in northern Jamaica, one reggae bar on the beach with a tin roof. When the tropical rain comes out of nowhere, everyone runs into this bar. A self-described Rasta man is in there singing reggae, calling everyone girls. friend. Girlfriend. From the very first time, I bless my eyes on you, girl. It's not the kind of beach town that tourists flock to.

This is a local beach. Okay, it's called Silver Sands. And it's because it's white glistling sand against blue waters. Sandra James loves this water. Oh, live on the beach, a water girl. The waves just calms you. 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 where 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 crew. Ribbian Sea. And then he sees it. There were holes that were probably 10 feet 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 some warehouse. It was way too much sand. So Michael thinks there has to be a huge just 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 people, 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.

Hello, can you hear us over there? Yes, absolutely. Hello, Sarah. This is Pascal. I'm Pascal Peduzzi. 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, people told us that some people came overnight, the guy. and trucks, and they stole the sand.

They sold the beach away of a night. 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, at a very minimum, $250 billion 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, rarer than one thinks. And we think it's just infinite, and it's not. And where sand is running out, things are getting violent. And in fact, people have been killed in Mexico, in India, and probably in many other areas, just for sand extraction. And Pascal says the biggest sand importer in the world these days is Singapore. They have imported hundreds of... of millions of tons of sand.

Singapore is, in terms of landmass, they don't have a whole whole lot. Where do they put their sand? Oh, they do see the reclamation. So they expand their territory by placing sand into the sea. Singapore dumps all of the sand that it buys onto the edges of the country to make Singapore bigger. You can see this from satellite images. Singapore used to get all of its 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 sedimentologists 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. Gosh, she's a queen of Jamaica. But is she really?

It's a long story. Long story. Jamaica is part of the Commonwealth, the old British colonies, and nobody messes with the monarch's 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, 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 quite a conspiracy, and some of the people that would be involved in this would be quite influential. So in the end, the hotels just settled with the beach owners without admitting guilt. 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 have preferred to have lost the case than to not have gotten a verdict. 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. pools and bars and rum everywhere, catamaranes and tiki huts on stilts 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, that sand is long gone. That was Sarah Gonzalez and Karen Duffin from 2018. After the break, we'll talk about a possible solution.

to the problem of sand theft, but the tourists aren't going to like it. We are back with our Jamaican economist, Damien King. Thanks for showing us around and for being a professor today. Happy to be here and 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 uses for it than the amount that exists, just that the amount is 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 a 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 rum 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. I see. 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 10 to 20 percent of your GDP is the tourism sector, then the tourism interests are going to say, well, I'm not going to build a hotel. And they can and do hold governments 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 are really not making that calculus. So Damien, 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 steal here in the United States? I'm kind of sorry that you added economically because I was going to say, you know, that with a hundredth of your population and one thousandth of your GDP, we produce world-beating sprinters. Like in the Olympics, like Usain Bolt. Yes, Usain Bolt and Shelley and Fraser Price.

All right, but economically, what kind of country like the U.S. learn from the Caribbean as a whole? When you look at the different curious, 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 than 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 open economy, and one of those dangers is vulnerability. What is that? Vulnerability refers to the fact that developments outside of the control of the residents of that country greatly affect their economic fortunes. And that can be hurricanes or the price of oil. A small economy is like a cork bobbing in the vast ocean.

Professor, can 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, a think tank in Jamaica, and a former professor of economics, I should say, and our professor today. Thank you so much, Damien, for doing this. We appreciate it.

It's been a joy to become a part of the Planet Money 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've ever lived 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 planetmoney at npr.org and put summer school in the subject. Summer school is produced by Sophia Polisa Carr and edited by Alex Goldmark. It is fact-checked by Leila Das. This show is engineered by Anli Huang. I'm Robert Smith and, you know, when 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.