Hernando de Soto

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Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2015: Events of 2014,” www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/wr2015_web.pdf. 14. Interview with Hernando de Soto, November 27, 2015. 15. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Heinemann, 1983), 64. 16. Interview with Hernando de Soto, November 27, 2015. 17. Hernando de Soto, “The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism,” The Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2014; www.wsj.com/articles/the-capitalist-cure-for-terrorism-1412973796, accessed November 27, 2015. 18. Interview with Hernando de Soto, November 27, 2015. 19. Interview with Carlos Moreira, September 3, 2015. 20.

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Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content. Version_1 To Ana Lopes and Amy Welsman for enabling this book, and for understanding that “it’s all about the blockchain.” “A masterpiece. Gracefully dissects the potential of blockchain technology to take on today’s most pressing global challenges.” —Hernando De Soto, Economist and President, Institute for Liberty and Democracy, Peru “The blockchain is to trust as the Internet is to information. Like the original Internet, blockchain has potential to transform everything. Read this book and you will understand.” —Joichi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab “In this extraordinary journey to the frontiers of finance, the Tapscotts shed new light on the blockchain phenomenon and make a compelling case for why we all need to better understand its power and potential.”

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Clippinger, CEO, ID3, Research Scientist, MIT Media Lab Bram Cohen, Creator, BitTorrent Amy Cortese, Journalist, Founder, Locavest J-F Courville, Chief Operating Officer, RBC Wealth Management Patrick Deegan, CTO, Personal BlackBox Primavera De Filippi, Permanent Researcher, CNRS and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School Hernando de Soto, President, Institute for Liberty and Democracy Peronet Despeignes, Special Ops, Augur Jacob Dienelt, Blockchain Architect and CFO, itBit and Factom Joel Dietz, Swarm Corp Helen Disney, (formerly) Bitcoin Foundation Adam Draper, CEO and Founder, Boost VC Timothy Cook Draper, Venture Capitalist; Founder, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Andrew Dudley, Founder and CEO, Earth Observation Joshua Fairfield, Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University Grant Fondo, Partner, Securities Litigation and White Collar Defense Group, Privacy and Data Security Practice, Goodwin Procter LLP Brian Forde, Former Senior Adviser, The White House; Director, Digital Currency, MIT Media Lab Mike Gault, CEO, Guardtime George Gilder, Founder and Partner, Gilder Technology Fund Geoff Gordon, CEO, Vogogo Vinay Gupta, Release Coordinator, Ethereum James Hazard, Founder, Common Accord Imogen Heap, Grammy-Winning Musician and Songwriter Mike Hearn, Former Google Engineer, Vinumeris/Lighthouse Austin Hill, Cofounder and Chief Instigator, Blockstream Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia Joichi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab Eric Jennings, Cofounder and CEO, Filament Izabella Kaminska, Financial Reporter, Financial Times Paul Kemp-Robertson, Cofounder and Editorial Director, Contagious Communications Andrew Keys, Consensus Systems Joyce Kim, Executive Director, Stellar Development Foundation Peter Kirby, CEO and Cofounder, Factom Joey Krug, Core Developer, Augur Haluk Kulin, CEO, Personal BlackBox Chris Larsen, CEO, Ripple Labs Benjamin Lawsky, Former Superintendent of Financial Services for the State of New York; CEO, The Lawsky Group Charlie Lee, Creator, CTO; Former Engineering Manager, Litecoin Matthew Leibowitz, Partner, Plaza Ventures Vinny Lingham, CEO, Gyft Juan Llanos, EVP of Strategic Partnerships and Chief Transparency Officer, Bitreserve.org Joseph Lubin, CEO, Consensus Systems Adam Ludwin, Founder, Chain.com Christian Lundkvist, Balanc3 David McKay, President and Chief Executive Officer, RBC Janna McManus, Global PR Director, BitFury Mickey McManus, Maya Institute Jesse McWaters, Financial Innovation Specialist, World Economic Forum Blythe Masters, CEO, Digital Asset Holdings Alistair Mitchell, Managing Partner, Generation Ventures Carlos Moreira, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, WISeKey Tom Mornini, Founder and Customer Advocate, Subledger Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director, Drug Policy Alliance Adam Nanjee, Head of Fintech Cluster, MaRS Daniel Neis, CEO and Cofounder, KOINA Kelly Olson, New Business Initiative, Intel Steve Omohundro, President, Self-Aware Systems Jim Orlando, Managing Director, OMERS Ventures Lawrence Orsini, Cofounder and Principal, LO3 Energy Paul Pacifico, CEO, Featured Artists Coalition Jose Pagliery, Staff Reporter, CNNMoney Stephen Pair, Cofounder and CEO, BitPay Inc.

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America by Tony Horwitz

airport security, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, trade route, urban renewal

Translations of Biedma, Rangel, Elvas, and Garcilaso, as well as other documents relating to De Soto’s life and expedition, are collected in The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543. This indispensable two-volume work includes essays by many of the leading experts on De Soto and Spanish conquest. For a cautionary deconstruction of the sources on De Soto, see The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast, edited by Patricia Galloway. The best biography of the conquistador is David Ewing Duncan’s Hernando De Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas. Duncan bridges popular and academic history, writing a biography that is carefully researched, balanced, and also a lively and accessible read.

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“Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and the Writing of Settlement in Colonial America.” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2006. Duncan, David Ewing. Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Elliot, J. H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. ———. Imperial Spain 1469–1716. London: Penguin Books, 1963. Estabrook, Arthur H., and Ivan E. McDougle. Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe. Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Co., 1926. Ewen, Charles R., and John H. Hann. Hernando de Soto among the Apalachee. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Fernández-Armésto, Felipe.

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The Indian woman told her new captors that “she had run away from men like them,” and gave the names of Coronado’s captains as proof. Castañeda learned all this upon his return to Mexico, where he met members of the Spanish party that had recaptured the woman. The men were survivors of another major expedition, this one led by Hernando de Soto, who had set off from Florida at almost the same time Coronado left Mexico. Several years later, the paths of the conquistadors’ armies—one wandering east, the other straggling west—had almost intersected in the middle of the continent. Of the tattooed woman who witnessed the two greatest expeditions of conquest in North America, and became captive to both, nothing more is known.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

In its first iteration, the new World Bank philosophy, which was influenced by the ideas of the English architect John Turner, stressed a "sites-and-services" (provision of basic "wet" infrastructure and civil engineering) approach to help rationalize and upgrade self-help housing. By the late 1980s, however, the World Bank was championing privatization of housing supply across the board and soon became the most powerful institutional megaphone for the schemas of Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist who advocates micro-entrepreneurial solutions to urban poverty. The Friends of the Poor The intellectual marriage in the 1970s between World Bank President Robert McNamara and architect John Turner was supremely odd. The former, of course, had been chief planner of the war in Vietnam, while the latter had once been a leading contributor to the English anarchist paper Freedom.

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They divert and sublimate political rage, and make sure it does not build to a head."31 Syrupy official assurances about "enablement" and "good governance" sidestep core issues of global inequality and debt, and ultimately they are just language games that cloak the absence of any macro-strategy for alleviating urban poverty. Perhaps this guilty awareness of the gap between promise and need explains some of the fervor with which international lending institutions and NGOs have embraced the ideas of Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian businessman who has become the global guru of neo-liberal populism. A John Turner for the 1990s, de Soto asserts that Third World cities are not so much starved of investment and jobs as suffering an artificial 29 Ibid., pp. 8-15, 33-35. 30 Ibid., pp. 90-91. 31 Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Boston 2004, p. 82.

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"It is not simply a means of extending full property titles to the poor, but increasingly a means of incorporating them into the tax base." The benefits of being able to use homes as legal collateral are counterbalanced by a new visibility to tax collectors and municipal utilities. Regularization also undermines solidarity within the colonias by individualizing the struggle 32 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York 2000, pp. 301-31. 33 Geoffrey Payne, unpublished 1989 report, quoted in Alan Gilbert and Ann Varley, landlord and Tenant: Housing the Poor in Urban Mexico, London 1991, p. 4. for housing and by giving tided homeowners interests that differ from those of other slum residents.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

CHAPTER SEVEN After a long multi-decade fight with the city: Jorge Salomón, “El barrio Charrúa, una pequeña Bolivia en el sur de Buenos Aires,” El País, February 12, 2016, http://www.elpaisonline.com/index.php/2013-01-15-14-16-26/sociedad/item/204708-el-barrio-charrua-una-pequena-bolivia-en-el-sur-de-buenos-aires. Hernando de Soto estimates that: Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (Basic Books, 2000). 7.7 percent of the population is “unbanked,”: Lori London, “The Top 10 Unbanked and Underbanked Cities,” goEBT, March 29, 2017, https://www.goebt.com/the-top-10-unbanked-and-underbanked-cities/.

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Techonomy, March 7, 2016, http://techonomy.com/2016/03/blockchain-global-growth/. He is working on a pilot in the Republic of Georgia: Laura Shin, Forbes, April 21, 2016, “Republic of Georgia to Pilot Land Titling on Blockchain with Economist Hernando De Soto, BitFury,” https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/04/21/republic-of-georgia-to-pilot-land-titling-on-blockchain-with-economist-hernando-de-soto-bitfury/#3c381e6144da. blockchain startup Ubitquity is partnering with Priority Title & Escrow: “Ubitquity, the Blockchain-Secured Platform for Real Estate Transactions, Partners with US-Based ‘Rising Barn’ for Property Recording,” Ubitquity.io, October 17, 2016, https://www.ubitquity.io/blog/ubitquity_llc_partners_prioritytitle_blockchain_10_17_2016.html.

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Still, when a ledger is assumed to be an unquestioned truth, the issue of what information gets into it is a serious one. Nonetheless, if we take a macro view and assume that in the vast majority of cases blockchains will be used honestly, the wider benefits of a cryptographically secure asset registry are pretty enticing. Peruvian economist and anti-poverty campaigner Hernando de Soto estimates that the amount of “dead capital,” the pool of untitled property around the world, is worth about $20 trillion. If poor people could use that capital as collateral, he says, the multiplier effect from all that credit flowing through the global economy could create growth rates in excess of 10 percent in developing countries, which account for more than half of world GDP.

1491 by Charles C. Mann

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Gary Taubes, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, land tenure, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, phenotype, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, stem cell, technological determinism, trade route, zoonotic diseases

Four decades after Dobyns’s article appeared, his colleagues “are still struggling to get out of the crater that paper left in anthropology,” according to James Wilson, author of Their Earth Shall Weep, a history of North America’s indigenous peoples after conquest. The dispute shows no sign of abating. This is partly because of the inherent fascination with the subject. But it is also due to the growing realization of how much is at stake. Frequently Asked Questions NOT ENOUGH FOR YANKEE STADIUM On May 30, 1539, Hernando De Soto landed his private army near Tampa Bay in Florida. De Soto was a novel figure: half warrior, half venture capitalist. He grew very rich very young in Spanish America by becoming a market leader in the nascent slave trade. The profits helped to fund the conquest of the Inka, which made De Soto wealthier still.

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“The net result was to keep that kind of animal at arm’s length,” Woods told me. “The total number of bison, say, seems to have gone down quite a bit, but they wanted to have them available for hunting in the prairie a couple days’ journey away.” When disease swept Indians from the land, this entire ecological ancien régime collapsed. Hernando De Soto’s expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years in the early sixteenth century and saw hordes of people but apparently didn’t see a single bison. (No account describes them, and it seems unlikely that chroniclers would have failed to mention sighting such an extraordinary beast.) More than a century later the French explorer La Salle canoed down the Mississippi.

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Boszhardt, R. F. 2002. “Contracting Stemmed: What’s the Point?” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 27:35–67. Botkin, D. B. 1990. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press, rev. ed. Bourne, E. G., ed. 1922. Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto. New York: Allerton (1544). Bourque, B., and R. H. Whitehead. 1994. “Trade and Alliances in the Contact Period,” in Baker et al. 1994, 131–47. Bower, B. 2001. “Peru Holds Oldest New World City.” Science News 159:260. Boyd, B. 1991. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

It was also apparent to Turner that the combined wealth of the poor – if all their assets were capitalised – was far greater than any government’s, and that all the poor needed was assistance in deploying their resources in the ways that suited them best, not in the manner that suited the government. This is a premise that the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has reasserted more recently, in calling for slum dwellers to be given land titles. In The Mystery of Capital de Soto writes: ‘Without formal property, no matter how many assets they accumulate or how hard they work, most people will not be able to prosper in a capitalist society.’ But this is not what Turner was arguing.

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.’* Harvey’s opinion is that the poor, out of need, are easily persuaded to sell their homes at too cheap a price. * David Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, in Rebel Cities, Verso, 2012. Jailson’s solution would be not to give the favelados in the Zona Sul the right of ownership, and instead to levy a social rent system. This is a standard and, in my opinion, reasonable foil to Hernando de Soto’s argument that the only thing the favelados lack is access to the capital embedded in their homes.* For it is that very right, and the speculation that accompanies it, that ultimately forces the poor out of the centre of the city. ‘The state has to recognise that housing should have a use value and not an exchange value,’ says Jailson, sounding like a Brazilian David Harvey.

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In Caracas, Medellín and Rio, it’s as though they have become the default method for negotiating the hilly barrios, comunas and favelas. The origins of the Caracas Metrocable lie in 2001, at a conference on human settlements at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Brillembourg and Klumpner were in a public debate with Hernando de Soto, questioning his thesis that the slum dwellers should be given legal titles to their houses. Firstly, they argued, it would be more productive to give them cooperative titles over the land rather than private titles that would incur all kinds of taxes that the slum dwellers could ill afford to pay; secondly, what use was a legal title at all to a house at the top of a hill that was inaccessible?

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

Lim, Demystifying the Mystery of Capital: Land Tenure and Poverty in Africa and the Caribbean (London: Glasshouse Press, 2004); Bishwapriya Sanyal, “Intention and Outcome: Formalization and Its Consequences,” Regional Development Dialogue 17, no. 1 (1996). 28 Staffan Granér, “Hernando de Soto and the Mystification of Capital,” Eurozine, no. 13 (Jan. 19, 2007): 6. 29 Donald A. Krueckenberg, “The Lessons of John Locke or Hernando de Soto: What If Your Dreams Come True?” Housing Policy Debate 15, no. 1 (2004): 3. 10 ARRIVING IN STYLE 1 Gerben Helleman and Frank Wassenber, “The Renewal of What Was Tomorrow’s Idealistic City, Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer High-Rise,” Cities 21, no. 1 (2004); Ronald Van Kempen et al., eds., Restructuring Large Housing Estates in Europe (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2005). 2 Helleman and Wassenber, “The Renewal of What Was Tomorrow’s Idealistic City, Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer High-Rise,” 8. 3 Maurice Crul and Liesbeth Heering, eds., The Position of the Turkish and Moroccan Second Generation in Amsterdam and Rotterdam (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 63–85, 166. 4 Doug Saunders, “Citizen Jane,” The Globe and Mail, Oct. 11, 1997. 5 William H.

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One study estimates that in the developing cities of Asia, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arab states, between 25 and 70 percent of the urban population is living on land with no clear title.19 For a great many politicians and economists during the past 20 years, the major issue surrounding arrival cities has been the question of property ownership. That, they believe, is the beginning and the end of the social-mobility issue. The debate began in the 1980s, when a Peruvian economist began a drive to turn that country’s millions of rural-arrival squatters into property owners. Hernando de Soto established a network of formalization committees, which turned the jumble of arrival-city land titles into proper deeds and allowed people to form small businesses in a few days with a couple of forms, rather than the hundreds of days and scores of forms previously required. It was an exercise in immersing the very poor in a real economy.

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., “Changes in Earnings in Brazil, Chile and Mexico: Disentangling the Forces Behind Pro-Poor Change in Labour Markets” (Brasilia: IPC-IG [UNDP], 2009). 18 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 19 A. Durand-Lasserve and L. Royston, Holding Their Ground: Secure Land Tenure for the Urban Poor in Developing Countries (London: Earthscan, 2002), 3. 20 Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). 21 de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (London: Black Swan, 2000), 35. A number of critics have pointed out that this number is unverifiable. 22 L.

Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

I would also like to thank the individual authors and everyone who participated in the November 2005 seminar in Buenos Aires—also titled “Explaining the Development Gap between Latin America and the United States”—for their thoughtful contributions. In addition to the authors, the seminar participants included Hernando De Soto, John W. Diamond, Pablo Guidotti, Celso Lafer, Juan Pablo Nicolini, Andrés Reggiani, Fernando Rocchi, Julio María Sanguinetti, Catalina Smulovitz, Ernesto Zedillo, and George Zodrow. Thanks are also due to Valeria Sobrino, who provided key logistical support, and Charles Roberts, who translated into English all of the chapters originally written in Spanish.

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Robinson, “Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” American Economic Review 91 (2001): 1369–1401. 25. Simeon Djankov, Rafael La Porta, Florencio López-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer, “The Regulation of Entry,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117 (2001): 1–37. See also Hernando de Soto, The Other Path (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). 26. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “Colonial Origins of Comparative Development.” 27. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 28. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “Colonial Origins of Comparative Development.” 29.

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Perhaps the single most important institutional deficit that runs through virtually all Latin American countries has to do with a weak rule of law. This includes not just property rights, but physical security against crime and access to the legal system more generally, particularly for the poor. Hernando de Soto has documented extensively how exclusion from the formal legal system, and the enormous amounts of red tape, inefficiency, and corruption present in it, drives large numbers 278 Conclusion of Latin Americans into the informal sector.11 There, they make use of social capital to run businesses or to squat on property, but without the protection of the state and its laws.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Wu, The Master Switch, 83, 312, 314; Robert Lee Hale, Freedom through Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). 221. Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (describing the inequality generated by the new digital economy). 222. Hale, Freedom through Law, 541. 4 Finance’s Algorithms: The Emperor’s New Codes 1. Hernando de Soto, The Other Path (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). 2. Hernando de Soto and Karen Weise, “The Destruction of Economic Facts,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 28, 2011, http://www.businessweek .com /magazine/content /11_19/b4227060634112.htm. 3. As leading fi rms obsessed over short-term profit opportunities, one economist half-jokingly concluded that fi nance’s core competencies were “fi nding fools for counterparties,” evading regulations, and “disguising gambling as hedging.”

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Opaque aspects of fi nance keep the leading Internet firms on their toes as surely as the Internet firms’ mysterious ranking mechanisms keep everyone else alert and worried about any possible loss of standing. It is therefore to this final and most forceful aspect of the new political economy—finance—that we now turn our attention. 4 FINANCE’S ALGORITHMS: THE EMPEROR’S NEW CODES I N 20 04 , the Cato Institute awarded Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto the $500,000 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Despite two assassination attempts by communists, de Soto had tirelessly proselytized market solutions for Peru’s poor. American leaders loved his message, since he credited U.S. prosperity to rock solid financial markets and private property protections.1 By 2011, de Soto was lambasting the American economic system.

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Without the great brokerages, and “bank holding companies,” how would we price debt, equity, or the more exotic risks assimilated into derivatives?172 Yet the rise of fi nancialization has created enormous uncertainty about the value of companies, homes, and even (thanks to the pressing need for bailouts) the once rock solid promises of governments themselves. Recall Hernando de Soto’s observation at the beginning of this chapter: when the basics of owing and ownership are in dispute, it’s hard for real markets to operate. Finance thrives in this environment of radical uncertainty, taking commissions in cash as investors (or, more likely, their poorly monitored agents) race to speculate on or hedge against an ever less knowable future.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

As Frankie puts it, “If you need something, just ask around because someone here will have it or know where you can find it.” Then he adds, with a junkie’s knowing smile, “but there’s only so much that you can actually get.” ANDREW ROSS 5 The Disney Price THE EXACT ROUTE taken by Hernando de Soto in his foolhardy 1539 journey through the territory of modern-day Florida is much disputed. Some amateur historians propose that, on their trek north from Tampa Bay, de Soto and his companions passed through the Reedy Creek watershed, the location now occupied by Disney World.1 Most scholars these days chart his path a good bit farther to the west.2 But the Disney connection makes for a good allegory.

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Its nineteenth-century resort hotels played host to dignitaries and moneyed travelers, offering alligator hunts and steamboat trips on the Kissimmee River, which meandered more than a hundred miles down to Lake Okeechobee. In the wake of the Seminole Wars, these visitors were drawn by the thrill of sampling the southern frontier of American settler colonialism, on the edge of a tropical expanse that the Spanish bluntly called Los Mosquitos. Feral hogs left behind by Hernando de Soto blazed trails through the palmetto and scrub pines that would eventually morph into six-lane highways. But in the 1880s, Kissimmee was as far as the railroads, and the visitors, came. The town was also the headquarters for Hamilton Disston’s massive effort to drain the river valley’s floodplains and open up a canal route to Tampa Bay.

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Moore-Willson, History of Osceola County; and Alma Hetherington, River of the Long Water (1980), as cited by Jim Robison in Kissimmee: Gateway to the Kissimmee River Valley (Kissimmee: Osceola County Historical Society, 2003), pp. 17–18.   2.  Charles Hudson provides a more authoritative account of the journey in Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997). Also see Michael Gannon, ed., The New History of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996).   3.  Tim Ingham, “What the Music Business Can Learn from Disney+’s Subscriber Success,” Rolling Stone, April 13, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/disney-plus-music-business-lessons-981880/.   4.  

Data for the Public Good by Alex Howard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, Kickstarter, lifelogging, machine readable, Network effects, openstreetmap, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, social software, social web, web application

Principles for Data in the Public Good As a result of digital technology, our collective public memory can now be shared and expanded upon daily. In a recent lecture on public data for public good at Code for America, Michal Migurski of Stamen Design made the point that part of the global financial crisis came through a crisis in public knowledge, citing “The Destruction of Economic Facts,” by Hernando de Soto. To arrive at virtuous feedback loops that amplify the signals that citizens, regulators, executives and elected leaders inundated with information need to make better decisions, data providers and infomediaries will need to embrace key principles, as Migurski’s lecture outlined. First, “data drives demand,” wrote Tim O’Reilly, who attended the lecture and distilled Migurski’s insights.

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid by C. K. Prahalad

"World Economic Forum" Davos, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, call centre, cashless society, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, do well by doing good, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, information asymmetry, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, microcredit, new economy, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, shareholder value, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, time value of money, transaction costs, vertical integration, wealth creators, working poor

The focus of development aid has also shifted from infrastructure, education, and structural adjustments over the decades. 3. Hernando de Soto. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. Basic Books, New York. 4. It is important to distinguish the informal, extralegal sector from the private sector even though the informal sector is about entrepreneurship under very hostile conditions. 5. C. K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond. “Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably.” The Harvard Business Review, September 2002. 6. CII-McKinsey Report on Learning from China to Unlock India’s Manufacturing Potential, March, 2002. 7. Hernando De Soto. Presentation at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, 2004. 8.

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The record of aid and loans from the various donor countries and the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other institutions is at best mixed. More recently, the development community is paying attention to the role of the private sector in building markets. There have been few voices of dissent to the dominant logic of the development community. Hernando De Soto, in his path-breaking book, The Mystery of Capital, challenged the assumption that poor countries are poor.3 Poor countries could often be asset-rich but capital-poor. Assets cannot become capital unless the country guarantees a rule of Reducing Corruption: Transaction Governance Capacity 79 law—primarily the law of contracts—whereby the ownership of assets is clear; and because of clear legal title, these assets can be sold, bought, mortgaged, or converted into other assets.

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When Cemex organizes women, it not only gives them the tools and the materials required for them to build a kitchen; it also gives them a legal identity. The women are bound to the firm and vice versa. Neither party can break the contract without penalty. That is a proof of legal identity. The importance of legal identity cannot be underestimated. Without it, BOP consumers cannot access the services we take for granted, such as credit. Hernando de Soto documented the problems of a lack of legal identity at the BOP. The status of a “nonperson” in legal terms can confine people to a cycle of poverty. 108 The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid Women Are Critical for Development A well-understood but poorly articulated reality of development is the role of women.

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, belling the cat, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Live Aid, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, moral hazard, Multics, Ponzi scheme, rent-seeking, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Third, they should continue to press for genuine free trade in agricultural products, which means that the US, the EU and Japan must scrap the various subsidies they pay to their farmers, enabling African countries to increase their earnings from primary product exports. Fourth, they should encourage financial intermediation. Specifically, they need to foster the spread of microfinance institutions of the sort that have flourished in Asia and Latin America. They should also follow the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s advice and grant the inhabitants of shanty towns secure legal title to their homes, so that these can be used as collateral. And they should make it cheaper for emigrants to send remittances back home. In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo does not pull her punches. ‘In a perfect world,’ she writes, ‘what poor countries at the lowest rungs of economic development need is not a multi-party democracy, but in fact a decisive benevolent dictator to push through the reforms required to get the economy moving.’

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Could it actually be that the countless development agents and agencies and innumerable man-hours deployed to send cash to Africa have been for naught – attempting to address a problem that simply does not exist? That, in fact, the core problem with Africa is not an absence of cash, but rather that its financial markets are acutely inefficient – borrowers cannot borrow, and lenders do not lend, despite the billions washing about. In The Mystery of Capital, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto suggests that the value of savings among the poor of Asia, the Middle East and Africa is as much as forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. He argues that were the United States to hike its foreign-aid allocations to the 0.7 per cent of national income (as prescribed by the United Nations at Monterrey), it would take the richest country more than 150 years to transfer to the world’s poor resources equal to those that they already have.

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

To further foster entrepreneurship, in 2008 Omidyar Network also started to focus on public policy. “Effective government is crucial to social impact. So we will invest in strengthening governments and institutions,” says Omidyar. He is particularly keen on the agenda of strengthening the property rights of poor people, as described by the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto in his book The Mystery of Capital. Skoll shares Omidyar’s view that philanthropists can pursue social good through for-profit activities as well as giving, although he chooses not to combine these approaches within a single organization. He believes there is a huge opportunity for leverage by supporting movies with a social message; that, he hopes, will shape public opinion and so shift resources.

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The rise of the knowledge economy means that a growing number of the new rich can plausibly claim to have made their fortunes without exploiting anyone—the Google guys being perhaps the example par excellence. In principle, that ought to make it easier for society to applaud them and any philanthropy they do. However, not all of today’s new rich can brush off s critique so easily. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist whose bestseller The Mystery of Capital is a powerful call for capitalism to be redesigned to better include the poor, contrasts the form of capitalism in which Gates thrived with what passes for capitalism in many poor or badly run countries. “At the end of the day, the argument Bill Gates can use against anybody in the U.S. is ‘you could have done it, too.’

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Although the list is too long to include everyone who has given us their valuable time and insights, it includes Patty Stonesifer, Larry Brilliant, Kurt Hoffman, Mary Robinson, Joel Klein, David Blood, Muhammad Yunus, Tom Vander Ark, Bobby Shriver, Steve Gunderson, Judith Rodin, Trevor Nielson, Jamie Drummond, Melissa Berman, Doug Bauer, Diana Aviv, Andrew Hind, Adam Meyerson, Jeffrey Sachs, Amir Dossal, Peter Singer, Linda Rottenberg, Peter Kellner, Hernando de Soto, Diana Leat, Phil Buchanan, Carlos Danel, Bill Drayton, William Zabel, Paul Schervish, Lester Salomon, Joan Di Furia, Vartan Gregorian, Luc Tayart de Borms, Sam Jonah, Volker Then, David Green, David Carrington, Pamela Hartigan, John Elkington, Geoff Mulgan, Rowena Young, Larry Mone, Lael Brainerd, Alex Nicholls, Rob John, Fritz Mayer, Robert Dufton, Carl Schramm, Etienne Eichenberger, Felicitas von Peter, Charles MacCormack, Thomas Tierney, Bruce Lindsay, Michael E.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert A. Sirico

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, creative destruction, delayed gratification, demographic winter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, informal economy, Internet Archive, liberation theology, means of production, moral hazard, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, profit motive, road to serfdom, Tragedy of the Commons, zero-sum game

He exports goods worth tens of millions of dollars annually, and because his workers can now afford more goods and services, the local economy is enriched.4 Unfortunately, would-be entrepreneurs like Flores are often blocked from putting their imagination and hard work to use. Bureaucratic regulation and a corrupt political culture makes starting a legal business virtually impossible for people in many parts of the world. In his book The Mystery of Capital, the internationally respected development economist Hernando de Soto describes in tragicomic detail the almost surreal amount of red tape and bureaucracy a poor person in the developing world usually has to go through to obtain a business license. De Soto notes that when he began investigating this in the early ’80s, all of the big law firms he consulted in Peru assured him that setting up a formal business to get access to investment capital would be quick and easy.

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Fifty-two percent of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty in 1981; by 2005, 25 percent did. 2 Peter Bauer, Dissent on Development: Revised Edition (Harvard University Press, 1971, 1979), 115. 3 Interview with President Paul Kagame in Kigali, Rwanda, PovertyCure, November 30, 2007, http://www.povertycure.org/voices/president-paul-kagame/#paul-kagame-the-entrepreneur-president. 4 Daniel Córdova, “Defeating Poverty Doing Business: The Case of the Flores Family and Topy Top,” in Lessons from the Poor: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit, ed. Alvaro Vargas Llosa (Independent Institute, 2008), 55–120. 5 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (Basic Books, 2000), 190. 6 This segment of her interview is featured in Acton Media’s DVD Series on global poverty, scheduled for release in the second half of 2012. 7 See their website for more information at www.enersahaiti.com. 8 Quoted testimony begins at minute 59 of the March 10, 2010, U.S.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

The question that remains to be answered is whether or not we have any business exporting this high-risk model to the rest of the world. As Safe as Housewives Quilmes, a sprawling slum on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires, seems a million miles from the elegant boulevards of the Argentine capital’s centre. But are the people who live there really as poor as they look? As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto sees it, shanty towns like Quilmes, despite their ramshackle appearance, represent literally trillions of dollars of unrealized wealth. De Soto has calculated that the total value of the real estate occupied by the world’s poor amounts to $9.3 trillion. That, he points out, is very nearly the total market capitalization of all the listed companies in the world’s top twenty economies - and roughly ninety times all the foreign aid paid to developing countries over between 1970 and 2000.

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In both El Alto and Castlemilk I heard how men were much more likely to spend their wages in the pub or the betting shop than to worry about making interest payments. Women, I was told repeatedly, were better at managing money than their husbands. Of course, it would be a mistake to assume that microfinance is the holy grail solution to the problem of global poverty, any more than is Hernando de Soto’s property rights prescription. Roughly two fifths of the world’s population is effectively outside the financial system, without access to bank accounts, much less credit. But just giving them loans won’t necessarily consign poverty to the museum, in Yunus’s phrase, whether or not you ask for collateral.

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itemID=32032031. 62 Credit Suisse, ‘Foreclosure Trends - A Sobering Reality’, Fixed Income Research (23 April 2008). 63 See Prabha Natarajan, ‘Fannie, Freddie Could Hurt U.S. Credit’, Wall Street Journal, 15 April 2008. 64 Economic Report of the President 2007, tables B-77 and B-76: http:// www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/. 65 George Magnus, ‘Managing Minsky’, UBS research paper, 27 March 2008. 66 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (London, 2001). 67 Idem, ‘Interview: Land and Freedom’, New Scientist, 27 April 2002. 68 Idem, The Other Path (New York, 1989). 69 Rafael Di Tella, Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Schargrodsky, ‘The Formation of Beliefs: Evidence from the Allocation of Land Titles to Squatters’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122, 1 (February 2007), pp. 209-41. 70 ‘The Mystery of Capital Deepens’, The Economist, 26 August 2006. 71 See John Gravois, ‘The De Soto Delusion’, Slate, 29 January 2005: http://state.msn.com/id/2112792/. 72 The entire profit is transferred to a Rehabilitation Fund created to cope with emergency situations, in return for an exemption from corporate income tax. 73 Connie Black, ‘Millions for Millions’, New Yorker, 30 October 2006, pp. 62-73. 74 Shiller, ‘Recent Trends in House Prices’. 75 Edward L.

In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg

anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, capital controls, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Glaeser, export processing zone, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, open economy, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, zero-sum game

Property rights provide an incentive for foresight and personal initiative, spurring growth and distributing the fruits of it equally, on average, between rich and poor. Thus the introduction of safeguards for private property in a society has a distributive effect as favorable to the poor as a commitment to universal education. Studies indicate that protecting private ownership is the economic reform most conducive to growth.19 The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has done more than anyone else to show how poor people lose out in the absence of property rights. In his revolutionary book The Mystery of Capital, he turns the orthodox view of the world’s poor upside down. The problem is not that they are helpless or even that they lack ‘‘property,’’ in the sense of the physical assets themselves.

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Compare David Dollar and Aart Kraay, Property Rights, Political Rights, and the Development of Poor Countries in the Post-Colonial Period (Washington: World Bank, 2000), http://www.worldbank.org/research/growth/pdfiles/dollarkraay2.pdf and Growth Is Good for the Poor. Concerning the importance of property rights for economic development, see Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 20. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (London: Bantam Press, 2000). 21. James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, Chris Edwards, Walter Park, Veronique de Rugy, and Smita Wagh, Economic Freedom of the World 2002 (Vancouver: Fraser Institute, 2002), http://freetheworld.com; Gerald P.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

Th ese examples warn us of the existence of a whole battery of seem­ ingly "progressive" solutions that not only m ove the problem around but actually strengthen while simultaneously lengthening the golden chain that imprisons vulnerable and marginalized populations within orbits of capital circulation and accumulation. Hernando de Soto argues influen­ tially that it is the lack of cle ar property rights that holds the poor down in misery in so much of the global south (ignoring the fact that poverty is abundantly in evidence in societies where clear prop erty rights are readily established). To be sure, there will be instances where the grant­ ing of such rights in Rio's favelas or in Lima's slums l ib erates individual energies and entrepreneurial endeavors leading to personal advance­ m ent.

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Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question: 23. Usha Ramanathan "I llegality and the Urban Poor:' Economic a n d Political Weekly, July 22, 2006; Rakesh Shukla, "Rights of the Poor: An Overview of Supreme Court;' Economic and Political Weekly, September 2, 2006. Much of this thinking follows the work of Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York: Basic Books, 2000; see the critical examina­ tion by Timothy Mitchell, "The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World;' Archives Europeennes de Sociologie 46: 2 (2005} : 297-320. NOTES TO PAG ES 21 TO 30 1 69 1 9 .

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

one relief group, Concern Worldwide: Dipankar Datta, Anne Ejakait, and Monica Odak, “Mobile Phone–Based Cash Transfers: Lessons from the Kenya Emergency Response,” Humanitarian Exchange Magazine, October 2008, http://www.odihpn.org/humanitarian-exchange-magazine/issue-40/mobile-phone-based-cash-transfers-lessons-from-the-kenya-emergency-response. Perhaps inevitably, then, someone like Duncan: Elizabeth Rossiello, interviewed by Paul Vigna, May 9 and 18, 2014. a hacker house called iHub: http://www.ihub.co.ke/. from what Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto calls: Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (Basic Books, 2000). Jonathan Mohan, who works at Ethereum: Jonathan Mohan, speaking at the Inside Bitcoins conference, New York, April 7, 2014. 9. The Everything Blockchain Joseph Gleason, better known as Fireduck: Joseph Gleason, “Anyone Want to Run My Bitcoin Casino,” Bitcoin Forum, April 17, 2012, posted under “fireduck,” http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/segz0/anyone_want_to_run_my_bitcoin_casino; identified as Joseph Gleason via Gleason’s Web site, http://1209k.com/bitcoin/faq.php.

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“There’s a much bigger story here,” Rossiello says. “We’re just getting started.” The root causes of financial isolation in poor countries go beyond people’s lack of bank accounts and how much it costs to send money. They start with the underprivileged being typically cut off from what Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto calls the “mystery of capital,” the idea that economic growth and the creation of wealth depend on clearly defined and documented property rights. De Soto has done as much as anyone else to further the idea that economic development should focus on documenting poor people’s assets—the homes that slum dwellers rightfully own but for which they have no title; the unlicensed businesses they operate; the under-the-table jobs for which they are paid.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Coca-Cola did this not because it became more environmentally sensitive but because it wanted to increase its profits. One of the most striking demonstrations of the importance of property rights is the fact that the absence of property rights protections is a major cause of world poverty. As Hernando de Soto notes in his book The Mystery of Capital, many of the poorest countries in the world possess enormous amounts of capital, but their ownership is insecure because of faulty or nonexistent property law or property rights protections.10 The value of private savings in the “poor” countries of the world, says de Soto, is forty times the amount of foreign aid they have received since 1945.

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Ludwig von Mises, The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth (New York: Volcker Fund, 1962), 67. 8. Leonard Read, “I, Pencil,” Foundation for Economic Education (http:11209.217.49.168/vnews.php?nid=316). 9. Friedrich Hayek, “The Pretense of Knowledge: Nobel Lecture,” American Economic Review, May 1975. 10. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 11. Ibid., 6. 12. Ibid. 13. Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell Jr., How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 116–17. 14.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Cherished institutions and familiar ways of working will be threatened along with the privileged role of professional, authoritative sources of knowledge. The idea that sharing might become the economy’s motive force is deeply unsettling to some because it turns conventional wisdom on its head. From Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations written in 1749 through to Hernando de Soto’s recent The Mystery of Capital, economists have argued that private property provides the basis for capital – the elixir at the heart of capitalism, which propels its constant growth and renewal. Karl Marx called capital ‘the hen that lays the golden eggs’ – that part of a nation’s assets that allows new ventures to be initiated and productivity increased.

…

A house, parcel of land, piece of machinery or factory becomes capital only if it is fixed in a tangible form, as property, so that it can be used as collateral – to be borrowed against or notionally divided so others can invest in it. The distinction between assets and capital is a tricky one, but assets are a stock of wealth – like reserves of oil – whereas capital is more like a flow of energy the oil creates when it is refined into petrol. The charismatic Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues on this basis that much of the world remains poor because although many people have savings, land and houses, these assets have not been fixed as property and so cannot play the role of capital. The considerable assets of poor economies have not been put into a form – private property – that propels the economy into ceaseless motion, which is what happened in the capitalist West.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Making Capitalism Work: Formalizing the Informal Economy The renewal of the alliance between citizens and their local government, rooted in the government’s capacity to provide jobs, regulations, and private-public cooperation and in the citizen’s inclination to participate in local decision making and neighborhood affairs, is the urban key to ameliorating inequality. Social observers and civic advocates like Hernando de Soto, the director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, have long recognized, however, that urban economics is as much about informal power as about city government, as much about the invisible economy as about public jobs or formal corporate institutions. As Katherine Boo poignantly shows, the reality in third-world megacities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia is an informal economy that offers employment to the technically “jobless,” lodging to the technically “homeless,” and hope, however wan and perverse, to the actually “hopeless.”

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Microfinance, a strategy pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, also seeks to bootstrap women out of poverty by recognizing their economic potential when catalyzed by small loans that allow them to turn creativity into new local business ventures.32 In what can be seen as a kind of ingenious amalgam of Richard Florida and Hernando de Soto, Yunus effectively recognizes the human capital represented by women’s creative entrepreneurial energy and releases it with the help of microfinance. Originally aimed primarily at village women, the approach has also been used in cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. By acknowledging and facilitating the special role women play in family and neighborhood in stabilizing society, microfinance becomes a fiscal strategy for urban integration.

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See http://www.citymayors.com/news/metrones-Americas.html, May 28, 2013. 26. The Nation devoted a special issue to the question “Can We Trust Government Again,” April 9, 2012, answering: not so much that we do or can, but that we must! 27. Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, New York: W. W. Norton, 2012, p. 267. 28. Hernando de Soto, cited in Alan Budd, “A Mystery Solved,” Times Literary Supplement, December 15, 2000. 29. De Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York: Basic Books, 2000, p. 46. 30. I have offered criticism in depth of de Soto as well as of C. K.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Prahalad’s strategy of mining “the fortune at the bottom of the [consumer] pyramid” by turning the world’s poor into paying consumers; Muhammad Yunus’s idea for lifting women and their families out of poverty through microcredit, a small-loan program for the impoverished to jump-start market development in communities barred by poverty from market participation; and Hernando de Soto’s inventive idea of addressing poverty by legalizing informal and black-market elements of the private economy that represent real but largely unrealized wealth among populations that are poor in name rather than substance—if their invisible wealth can be unlocked. Each of these proposals, which I will only touch on here, has the virtue of relying on the market itself to cure what seems to be the market’s inability to address global inequalities and use its capitalist potential to treat world poverty and overcome global inequality.

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It depends on a market logic but conceives of the market as part of a larger world of values and norms for which the wealthy are no less responsible than the poor. In a third example of what can be called self-reforming market capitalism, the Peruvian economist and head of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy Hernando de Soto has attracted wide attention for his proposal to confront apparent poverty by finding ways to capture hidden wealth in the world of the poor. Market zealots like Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman as well as justice-seeking egalitarians like former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar have alike welcomed de Soto’s effort to bring “dead capital” into the real economy by titling untitled assets and thereby empowering the poor to whom the assets belong as players in that economy.

…

Yunus also gives a high priority to building social capital, which helps sustain individuals in their new endeavors. Muhammad Yunus, “What Is Microcredit?” January 2003, available on-line at www.grameen-info.org/mcredit/. 45. Alan Budd, “A Mystery Solved,” Times Literary Supplement, December 15, 2000. 46. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 49. 47. Allen D. Kanner, “Globalization and the Commercialization of Childhood,” Tikkun, vol. 20, no. 5 (2005), p. 49. 48. See Peter W. Singer, Children at War (New York: Pantheon, 2005).

Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth

accounting loophole / creative accounting, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, digital divide, full employment, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, megacity, microcredit, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Pepto Bismol, pirate software, planned obsolescence, profit motive, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, yellow journalism

Every single one of the computer dealers in Ciudad del Este is now a legal, registered, taxpaying company (indeed, Alex reported with a kind of perverse pride that Icompy is now the fiftieth-largest taxpayer in Paraguay), and their imports are all open and on the record and on the books. On the surface, this appears to be a major vindication of the idea advanced more than two decades ago by the Peruvian economist, entrepreneur, and think-tank leader Hernando de Soto. De Soto is one of the pioneers in thinking about System D. His book The Other Path, issued in Spanish in the mid-1980s and in English in 1989, was, essentially, the first mainstream volume to acknowledge the vitality, validity, and value of System D. He offered a simple and intuitive response: simplify the workings of regulations and legal codes to make it easier for System D businesses to join the licensed, registered, incorporated world.

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These things are part of the DNA of their system—and, like the Ciudad del Este computer dealers, any merchants who do business at the side of the road will need to see some serious and direct incentives if they are going to consider going legit. The idea that formalization offers an automatic avenue to commercial and social success is captivating, but it hasn’t worked. Even when countries have adopted de Soto’s paradigm, growth has remained elusive. As Princeton sociologist Alejandro Portes told me, “The promise of Hernando de Soto’s ‘Other Path,’ that you would open the markets and lift regulations and the economy would take off because of the energy of these small enterprises, has not materialized.” The main issue here is that de Soto and most other economists view System D from the outside. When your world involves incorporation, registration, and licensing, you see the barriers to achieving these things as the key problem.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

They had never seen reptiles as large as the iguana, and they puzzled that there were not only no horses or cows in the New World but also no four-legged animals larger than a fox on the islands of the Caribbean. The explorers and conquerors missed the familiar trees of Europe, but they marveled at the exquisite flowering plants of the Caribbean, later determined to number more than thirteen thousand. Horses, cattle, and uninvited rats throve in their new habitat. Hernando de Soto led a four-year expedition across the southeast of the North American continent. With many of his provisions on the hoof, he trekked across what is now North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas, leaving behind a host of European pigs to propagate in the New World. Conquistadors, given vast tracts of land, began to raise cattle while the horse made its way north, transforming the culture of the Plains Indians.

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Nor does he place faith in globalization per se because the entrance of India and China has made it much harder for latecomers to get into the world marketplace. A former official with the World Bank, Collier recognizes the tyranny of the already tried and urges a revitalized debate on the subject.25 The best ideas for tackling poverty have come from people, like Muhammad Yunus, Hernando de Soto, Amartya Sen, Frances Moore Lappé, Walden Bello, Raj Patel, and Peter Barnes, who want to use the strengths of capitalism in new ways to enhance everyone’s life. This of course is what Marx wanted to do: build on the capitalistic base of wealth to provide for the entire society. He failed to foresee the danger of joining a society’s economic and political power through state ownership of property.

…

Governments must assume the responsibility, in his view, to make sure that their citizens have developed their potential. His emphasis has changed the way that aid and deprivation are evaluated. Many poor suffer because their governments fail to address their most basic needs, a neglect less likely to occur where freedom is respected, he says. Hernando De Soto is another warrior in the fight against poverty. A Peruvian economist with strong connections to international banking and engineering firms, he now heads Peru’s Institute for Liberty and Democracy. The institute concentrates on a different way to empower the poor: get them legal title to the land they occupy and the outfits they operate.

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

These new, democratically elected leaders started from the premise that underdevelopment was not due to the inherent inequities of capitalism, but rather to the insufficient degree of capitalism that had been practiced in their countries in the past. Privatization and free trade have become the new watchwords in place of nationalization and import substitution. The Marxist orthodoxy of Latin American intellectuals has come under increasing challenge from writers like Hernando de Soto, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Rangel, who have begun to find a significant audience for liberal, market-oriented economic ideas. As mankind approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy, the doctrine of individual freedom and popular sovereignty.

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These public-sector companies cannot go bankrupt, and use employment as a form of political patronage. Prices throughout the Brazilian economy, and particularly within the public sector, are set less by the market than by a process of political negotiation with powerful unions.23 Or take the case of Peru. Hernando de Soto in his book The Other Path documents how his institute in Lima attempted to set up a fictitious factory according to the formal legal rules established by the Peruvian government. Going through eleven bureaucratic procedures required took 289 days and a total cost of $1,231 in fees and lost wages (including the payment of two bribes), or thirty-two times the minimum monthly wage.24 According to de Soto, regulatory barriers to the formation of new businesses constitute a major obstacle to entrepreneurship in Peru, particularly on the part of poor people, and explains the burgeoning of a huge “informal” (that is, illegal or extra-legal) economy of people unwilling and unable to cope with state-imposed barriers to trade.

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Hirschman, “The Turn to Authoritarianism in Latin America and the Search for Its Economic Determinants,” in David Collier, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 85. 23 On the public sector in Brazil, see Baer (1989), pp. 238-273. 24 Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), p. 134. 25 In the Foreword to ibid., p. xiv. 26 Quoted in Hirschman (1979), p. 65. 27 See Sylvia Nasar, “Third World Embracing Reforms to Encourage Economic Growth,” New York Times (July 8, 1990), pp.

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, capital controls, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, export processing zone, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, microcredit, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, the new new thing, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

The impossibility of showing which interventions trump the rest is easily forgotten, because development advocates generate a steady stream of claims to the contrary: The key to kick-starting development is said to lie in microfinance, or population control, or greater rights for women, or various other worthwhile challenges. Perhaps the most impressive recent claim of this genre comes from Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist, who points out that the poor often lack legal title to their land. Change that, de Soto says, and you give them collateral, and therefore a chance to borrow money and start small businesses.7 But although de Soto’s insight is important, land tenure is not a silver bullet.

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Within a few years, one of the world’s greatest export booms created millions of new jobs, despite the fact that China’s national institutions were frequently rotten with corruption.8 Yet the enclave argument, for all its persuasiveness, raises its own set of questions. What good are export zones if corrupt national institutions lay you open to financial meltdown? And if national institutions are corrupt, won’t national politicians be tempted to extract bribes from supposedly uncorrupt enclaves? Rather like Hernando de Soto’s land tenure idea, enclaves might start you down the road toward development. But in the end you can’t duck the question of national governance, however daunting it might be. Because neither the kick-start theories nor the enclave arguments are fully convincing, Wolfensohn was right that the Bank should be comprehensive.

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If it is hard to measure poverty, it’s even harder to measure different ways of fighting it. See “Bhalla Versus the World Bank: An Outsider’s Perspective,” by Jeromin Zettelmeyer, Finance & Development, June 2003, pp. 50ff. 7. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, by Hernando de Soto (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 8. “Asia’s Reemergence,” by Steven Radelet and Jeffrey Sachs, Foreign Affairs 76, no. 6, November/December 1997. 9. Wolfensohn interview, April 20, 2003. 10. Paul Collier interview, January 19, 2003. 11. David Dollar of the World Bank’s research department has asked how different donors respond to a one standard deviation improvement in rule of law and one standard deviation improvement in democracy (both indexes are created independently of the World Bank).

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

In contrast to these holistic approaches encompassing a very long list of reforms, others attempted to come up with a new big fix. The hedgehogs’ big idea this time was not trade; it had to be something else. But the reasoning took a similar form: “Poor countries are poor primarily because they lack X: give them X and we will have solved the problem of world poverty.” For the Peruvian economist and activist Hernando de Soto, X was formal titles to property. Give poor people a piece of paper which gives them legal ownership rights over their house or their land, he thought, and you will turn them into entrepreneurs and successful capitalists.27 For the Bangladeshi economist and banker Muhammad Yunus, X was credit.

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Krueger, “Meant Well, Tried Little, Failed Much: Policy Reforms in Emerging Market Economies,” Remarks at the Roundtable Lecture at the Economic Honors Society, New York University, New York, March 23, 2004. 26 Arvind Panagariya, “Think Again—International Trade,” Foreign Policy (November–December 2003). 27 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 28 Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (New York: Public Affairs, 2003). 29 William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin, 2006). 30 This approach, called “the Growth Diagnostics framework,” was developed by Ricardo Hausmann, Andres Velasco, and myself.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, he approached Carla Hills, the U.S. trade representative, with the idea of negotiating a free-trade agreement between Mexico and the United States. The resulting North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented in 1994.5 Latin America did not simply passively receive lessons in free-market economics from the rest of the world. Prominent regional economists like the Peruvian Hernando de Soto became important contributors to the new liberal economics, with De Soto doing much to argue the case for the importance of property rights for the poor.6 Nonetheless, the new economics pursued across the continent came with the approval of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

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Timothy Garton Ash is eloquent on the importance of roundtable negotiations as part of the peaceful transition to democracy in Central Europe. 4. Reid, Forgotten Continent, 123. 5. Maxwell Cameron and Brian Tomlin, The Making of NAFTA: How the Deal Was Done (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 2. 6. See Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (London: Black Swan, 2001). 7. Williamson’s own account of what he meant can be found in John Williamson, “A Short History of the Washington Consensus,” Fundación CIDOB paper, presented at a conference titled “From the Washington Consensus Towards a New Global Governance,” Barcelona, September 24, 2004.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

The large amount of shadow activity shows that markets can function where the state is not merely absent but even disruptive. Does this mean that the state is irrelevant to markets? Would the market participants supply for themselves all the market-supporting mechanisms they need, if only the state stayed out of things? Hernando de Soto, in his deservedly famous book The Other Path, depicted Peru’s vigorous shadow economy as a democratic system, run by the people themselves quite independently of the state.25 Unlicensed entrepreneurs developed informal passenger transportation, to such an extent that in the 1980s officially licensed operators ran just 10 percent of Lima’s mass-transit vehicles.

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But these rights are not as secure as they would be under an effective legal system, for there is some risk of expropriation. As a result, entrepreneurs are reluctant to make expensive, immobile investments in plant and equipment, investments that might enable them to grow beyond simple processing into manufacturing advanced goods. Operating outside the law “involves tremendous costs,” Hernando de Soto concluded. “The apparent chaos, waste of resources, invasions, and everyday courage are the informals’ desperate and enterprising attempts to build an alternative system to the one that has denied them its protection.” The shadow economy has its limits. When you examine the shadow economy anywhere, from Lima to New York, what is most striking is its dynamism: its bustling, life-sustaining energy.

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, centre right, corporate governance, demand response, Doha Development Round, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, Hernando de Soto, information asymmetry, liberal world order, Live Aid, Nick Leeson, Pareto efficiency, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

the missing dimensions of stateness 21 negative effects of excessive state scope are in the long-run counterbalanced by the positive effects of greater administrative capacity.3 The New Conventional Wisdom Much of what has been laid out about the importance of state strength is now taken for granted within the development policy community, whose mantra since at least 1997 has been the dictum that “institutions matter” (World Bank 1997, World Bank 2001). The concern over state strength, which goes under a variety of headings including “governance,” “state capacity,” or “institutional quality,” has always been around under different titles in development economics. It was highlighted in Hernando de Soto’s book The Other Path (1989), which reminded the development community of the importance of formal property rights and, more broadly, of the consequences of well-functioning legal institutions for efficiency. De Soto (1989, 134) sent his researchers to find out how long it took to get a small business license in Lima, Peru; 10 months, 11 offices, and $1231 later, they came back with legal authorization to start a business.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

British Empire, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, invention of movable type, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

The lick at the end of the road, because it had a salt supply, was a suitable place for a settlement. Villages were built at the licks. A salt lick near Lake Erie had a wide road made by buffalo, and the town started there was named Buffalo, New York. When Europeans arrived, they found a great deal of salt making in North American villages. In 1541, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, traveling up the Mississippi, noted: “The salt is made along a river, which, when the water goes down, leaves it upon the sand. As they cannot gather the salt without a large mixture of sand, it is thrown into certain baskets they have made for the purpose, made large at the mouth and small at the bottom.

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Salt Domes: Gulf Region, United States, and Mexico. Houston: Gulf Publishing, 1967. Osborne, Roger. The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology. London: Pimlico, 1998. General History Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. The Mummies of Ürümchi. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Bourne, E. G. Narratives of the Career of Hernando De Soto. Vol. I. Ed. E. G. Bourne. New York, 1904. Boutin, Emile. La Baie de Bretagne et sa contrebande. Laval: Siloë, 1993. Chadha, Yogesh. Gandhi: A Life. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997. Chalmers, Harvey. The Birth of the Erie Canal. New York: Bookman Associates, 1960. Condor, George E. Stars in the Water: The Story of the Erie Canal.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

But there is a crucial difference between those assets and their counterparts in the developed world: The owners have no legal title to the property. They cannot legally rent it, subdivide it, sell it, or pass it on to family. Perhaps most important, they cannot use it as collateral to raise capital. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has argued convincingly that these kinds of informal property arrangements should not be ignored. He reckons that the total value of property held but not legally owned by poor people in the developing world is worth more than $9 trillion. That is a lot of collateral gone to waste, or “dead capital” as he calls it.

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Government bureaucrats throw up hurdles so that they can extort bribes from those who seek to get over or around them. Installing a vending machine in Moscow becomes much easier if you hire the right “security firm.” What about opening a business elsewhere in the developed world? Again, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has done fascinating work. He and fellow team members documented their efforts to open a one-person clothing stall on the outskirts of Lima as a legally registered business. He and his researchers vowed that they would not pay bribes so that their efforts would reflect the full cost of complying with the law.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

The holder of a mortgage, pledge, or other security interest may not have full title to the asset, but she has a stronger right than creditors without such protection, 14 c h a P te r 1 i.e., the unsecured creditors.49 Bankruptcy can therefore be called the acid test for the legal rights that have been created long before bankruptcy loomed. Hernando de Soto, a life-long advocate for bringing property rights to the poor, has suggested that these rights can turn “dead land” into “life capital,” because owners can mortgage their land or other assets to obtain investment capital.50 And yet, this is only half of capital’s full story. Without additional legal safeguards, debtors risk losing their assets to creditors if and when they default on their payments, even if this happens through no fault of their own.

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Note that the terms “collateral” and “security” or “secured interests” are often used interchangeably. For an analysis of the legal techniques and practices of collateral in global capital markets, see Annelise Riles, Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 50. See also Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 46, arguing that property rights can turn “dead” land into “life” capital. 51. This feature of legal personality has been dubbed “asset shielding” or “asset partitioning.” See Henry Hansmann and Reinier Kraakman, “The Essential Role of Organizational Law,” Yale Law Journal 110, no. 3 (2000):387–475, and Henry Hansmann, Reinier Kraakman, and Richard Squire, “Law and the Rise of the Firm,” Harvard Law Review 119, no. 5 (2006):1333–1403.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Western social scientists don’t begin to comprehend fully the complex process of state formation and rule of law in the West, so they shouldn’t be too quick to predict how it will work anywhere else. Property Rights Property rights also determine whether markets work. Do I have title to the land, building, and equipment making up my taco stand? Hernando de Soto noted in his great book The Mystery of Capital that the majority of land occupied by the poor urban majorities in the developing world does not have legal title—nobody owns it. Only if I felt secure that I would keep my taco stand would I invest in more sanitary food-processing equipment. I can borrow from a bank to purchase such equipment only if I have title to the property to put down as collateral.

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Devoid of revenue bases, it declared a 3 percent tax on the value of land on July 8, 1873. What was more revolutionary was that the emperor declared all land, which had been allocated by village custom, to be the private property of those who farmed it. The government issued certificates of ownership.3 Land could be bought and sold, and used as collateral for loans—the famous Hernando de Soto formula for unlocking the “mystery of capital.” Although externally imposed land reforms have often been disasters, a homegrown reform that respected local custom was more successful. However, when the land tax was insufficient to cover state spending, the inexperienced rulers printed money.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

PAUL GETTY, one of the world’s first billionaires, once declared that “the meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.”1 Getty—who made his first million dollars in the Oklahoma oil fields—was on to something. Although dozens of economists have written about the critical role that private-property rights play in building wealth in developing countries (among the more notable: Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto), few, if any, have considered the importance of private ownership of mineral rights.2 And fewer still have written about America’s anomalous status as the only country on the planet that allows individuals, rather than the state or the crown, to own the minerals beneath their feet. The private ownership of mineral rights in the United States is a key—but perennially overlooked—reason why the nation has become so prosperous, and why the American oil and gas industry continues to lead the world in developing new technologies to extract hydrocarbons.

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In July 2008, total production was 1.734 trillion cubic feet, or about 57.6 billion cubic feet per day. 25 Energy Information Administration, “Natural Gas Navigator,” http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngcld.htm. 26 Ibid. Chapter 24 1 For more on mineral rights, see Robert Bryce, “The Meek Need Mineral Rights,” Energy Tribune, December 26, 2007, http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=737. 2 For more on de Soto, see Dario Fernandez-Morera, “Hernando de Soto Interview,” Reason.com, November 30, 1999, http://www.reason.com/news/show/32213.html. 3 This is my estimate. In 1992, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 1.2 million wells had been abandoned. See Roberto Suro, “Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells Become Pollution Portals,” New York Times, May 3, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/03/us/abandoned-oil-and-gas-wells-become-pollution-portals.html.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

With the media in authoritarian regimes tending toward selfcensorship, market-interventionist policies—the most prevalent cause of disrupted distribution of food—go unreported and uncorrected until too late. The importance of property rights is a larger issue than that of creating incentives to invest by established business or even incentives for inventors tinkering in a garage. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, came to the Federal Reserve in January 2003 to brief me on a seemingly radical idea to elevate the standard of living of a significant segment of the world's impoverished. One of the aspects of my job was meeting with foreign visitors who passed through my office when they were in town.

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In the endeavor to modernize, many provincial and local Chinese authorities in their version of creative destruction periodically confiscate peasants' land for development. Riots have been widespread. Granting clear legal ownership rights to peasants for the land they till would go a very long way toward putting an end to such discontent.* Though the means to get there may not be altogether clear, Hernando de Soto's goal is a very appealing one. Protection of property has always been a moving target as the law continually tries to keep up with the nature of economic change. Even in the *"Recognition" of property rights by China's National Congress of t h e People in March 2007 shied away from granting unequivocal rights to rural land. 254 More ebooks visit: http://www.ccebook.cn ccebook-orginal english ebooks This file was collected by ccebook.cn form the internet, the author keeps the copyright.

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In a land not far removed in time from the collective farm, loosely articulated urban property rights appear to be enforced; otherwise, foreign investment in real estate, factories, and securities would long since have dried up. Investors behave as though they expect to get returns on their investments and return of principal. And they have.* Chinese citizens have been granted the right to own and sell homes, creating a major opportunity to accumulate capital. Hernando de Soto, I assume, is pleased. And in March 2007, the National People's Congress passed a more comprehensive right of ownership that grants the same legal protection of property that is granted to the state. But the right to own property still falls far short of the status of property rights in developed countries.

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Parkinson's law, post-war consensus, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, technological determinism, Thomas Malthus, urban sprawl

For Adair’s quote and more on the Cherokees and Iroquois, see Wright, Stolen Continents, chaps. 4 and 5. A century after Franklin, Friedrich Engels was equally impressed by the Iroquois, noting among other things the balance of power between the sexes (ibid., p. 117). 31. Thirty-metre. 32. Societies of this type were seen by the Spaniards under Hernando de Soto throughout the Southeast, and the French found equally developed hierarchies along the Mississippi. Impressive earthen pyramids can still be seen at Cahokia, near modern St. Louis; at Etowah, near Atlanta; and at several other eastern sites. 33. European nations, including Britain, became more democratic than at any time since their humble beginnings a thousand years before.

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

As is standard with cryptocurrency code, decentralized governance software, too, would be open source and forkable, so that anyone can create his own blockchain nation and government services in this collaborative platform for DIYgovernance. In the area of titling and deeds, as Bitcoin is to remittances, decentralized blockchain government services is to the implementation of a property ownership registry, and could be the execution of the detailed plans set forth by development economists such as Hernando de Soto.113 Decentralized blockchain-based government services such as public documents registries and titling could be a useful tool for scaling the efforts already in place by organizations such as de Sotos’s Institute for Liberty and Democracy, or ILD, which has programs to document, evaluate, and diagnose the extralegal sector and bring it into alignment with the legal system.

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

Adventurers Most of us know the period of Europe’s drive for colonial expansion primarily by the names of the great adventurers commissioned and financed by their sovereigns to carry out great voyages of discovery, plunder, and slaughter. In search of a westward sea route to the riches of Asia, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) landed on the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the West Indies in 1492 and claimed it for Spain. Hernando De Soto (1496–1542) made his initial mark trading slaves in Central America and later allied with Francisco Pizarro to take control of the Inca Empire based in Peru in 1532, the same year the Portuguese established their first settlement in Brazil. De Soto returned to Spain one of the wealthiest men of his time, although his share in the plunder was only half that of Pizarro.3 By 1521, Hernán Cortés had claimed the Mexican Empire of Montezuma for Spain.

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For detailed documentation on the real purpose and consequence of contemporary trade agreements, see Korten, When Corporations Rule the World; International Forum on Globalization, ed. John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander, Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002); Lori Wallach and Patrick Woodall, 3. Ibid., s.v. “Hernando de Soto.” 4. The Reader’s Companion to American History, s.v. “America in the British Empire” (by Richard S. Dunn), Houghton Mifflin College Division, online edition, http:// college.hmco.com/history/ readerscomp/rcah/html/ ah_003000_americainthe.htm (accessed October 22, 2005). 5. Encyclopaedia Britannica 2003, deluxe ed.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Price controls have made meat scarce. Chávez scored points when the Caracas mayor seized an exclusive golf course to build housing for the poor, but urban squalor persists as ever. Despite over $20 billion in annual oil revenue, per capita GDP is at best half the level of 1954. Venezuela remains what economist Hernando de Soto calls a “society of accomplices.” Chávez went after the state oil company, PDVSA, dismantling its technocracy, which had so skillfully created the nation’s entire system of public utilities a generation ago. His surrogate, military-managed apparatus now produces over one million barrels less than peak capacity.

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While traveling in the region, I learned a great deal from Andrew Wilson, Berik Otemurat, Fabrizio Vielmini, Josh Machleder, Alexander Sosnin, Assel Rustemova, Oraz Jandosov, Azamat Ablazimov, Kassymzhomart Tokaev, Murat Auezov, Yerbol Suleimenov, Meiirzhan Mashan, Adil Abishev, Azamat Abdymomunov, Nikolay Kuzmin, Kadyr Toktogulov, Nicolas Ebnother, Rosa Oltambaeva, Edil Baissalov, Shakirat Toktosunova, Elbek Khojayev, Catherine Eldridge, Susan Carnduff, Farkhad Tolipov, Jeff Erlich, Steve Labensky, Jon Purnell, Ulugbek Ishankhodjaev, Abdujabar Abduvakhitov, and Ulugbeck Khasanoff. As a Latin America neophyte, I am very thankful for the assistance of Moises Naim, Carlos Lozada, Javier Corrales, Kai Poetschke, Bill Hinchberger, David de Ferranti, Hernando de Soto, Shahnaz Radjy, Meredith Davenport, Maria Hutcheson, Timothy O’Neil-Dunne, Jan Boyer, Andres Oppenheimer, Jenny Caplan, Jose Yunis, Juan Enriquez, Hillary Batjer-Johnson, Erica Breth, Moises Benamor, Michael Shifter, Lorena Barbaria, Gilberto Dupas, Paulo Roberto de Almeida, Rubens Barbosa, Eiiti Sato, Amado Cervo, Shepard Forman, Adriana Abdenur, David Henschel, Nathalie Cely, Cecelia Zarate, Maria Teresa Petersen, Peter Schechter, Blas Pérez Henríquez, Sylvie Naville, Joerg Schimmel, Pedro Burelli, Michael Penfold, Dante Pesce, Steve Reifenberg, and Katty Kauffman.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Tumlir, “Strong and Weak Ele­ments,” 55. 356 NOTES TO PAGES 255–258 212. 213. 214. 215. Petersmann, Constitutional Functions and Constitutional Prob­lems, 16. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 403. Tumlir expressed hope that Mestmäcker would pres­ent on the idea of the economic constitution at a conference in Peru or­ga­nized by Hernando de Soto, to which Tumlir successfully invited Hayek to speak. Tumlir to Hayek, April 10, 1979, Hayek Papers, Duke, box 53, folder 28. De Soto received a master’s in international law and economics from the Gradu­ate Institute in Geneva in 1967 and worked at GATT thereafter. The November 1979 conference launched his Institute for Liberty and Democracy, which in the early 2000s would lead a multimillion-­dollar World Bank program to formalize property rights in Peru.

…

Litan, “Regulatory Reform in the Third World: The Case of Peru,” Yale Journal on Regulation 4, no. 1 (1986): 58; Timothy Mitchell, “How Neoliberalism Makes Its World: The Urban Property Rights Proj­ect in Peru,” in Mirowski and Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 389–390. For De Soto’s most influential works, see Hernando De Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper and Row, 1990); de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Tumlir, “International Economic Order and Demo­cratic Constitutionalism,” 81.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Typically, a Cairo house owner will build up to three illegal storeys on top of his house and rent them out to relatives. Good for him. However, entrepreneurs who start businesses in the West usually finance them with mortgages, and you cannot get a mortgage on an illegal dwelling. The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto estimates that Africans own an astonishing $1 trillion in ‘dead capital’ – savings that cannot be used as collateral because they are invested in ill-documented property. He draws an instructive parallel with the young United States in the early nineteenth century, where the formal codified law was fighting a rearguard action against an increasingly chaotic confusion of informal squatters’ rights to property.

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They include: Bruce Ames, Terry Anderson, June Arunga, Ron Bailey, Nick Barton, Roger Bate, Eric Beinhocker, Alex Bentley, Carl Bergstrom, Roger Bingham, Doug Bird, Rebecca Bliege Bird, the late Norman Borlaug, Rob Boyd, Kent Bradford, Stewart Brand, Sarah Brosnan, John Browning, Erwin Bulte, Bruce Charlton, Monika Cheney, Patricia Churchland, Greg Clark, John Clippinger, Daniel Cole, Greg Conko, Jack Crawford, the late Michael Crichton, Helena Cronin, Clive Crook, Tony Curzon Price, Richard Dawkins, Tracey Day, Dan Dennett, Hernando de Soto, Frans de Waal, John Dickhaut, Anna Dreber, Susan Dudley, Emma Duncan, Martin Durkin, David Eagleman, Niall Ferguson, Alvaro Fischer, Tim Fitzgerald, David Fletcher, Rob Foley, Richard Gardner, Katya Georgieva, Gordon Getty, Jeanne Giaccia, Urs Glasser, Indur Goklany, Allen Good, Oliver Goodenough, Johnny Grimond, Monica Guenther, Robin Hanson, Joe Henrich, Dominic Hobson, Jack Horner, Sarah Hrdy, Nick Humphrey, Anya Hurlbert, Anula Jayasuriya, Elliot Justin, Anne Kandler, Ximena Katz, Terence Kealey, Eric Kimbrough, Kari Kohn, Meir Kohn, Steve Kuhn, Marta Lahr, Nigel Lawson, Don Leal, Gary Libecap, Brink Lindsey, Robert Litan, Bjørn Lomborg, Marcus Lovell-Smith, Qing Lu, Barnaby Marsh, Richard Maudslay, Sally McBrearty, Kevin McCabe, Bobby McCormick, Ian McEwan, Al McHughen, Warren Meyer, Henry Miller, Alberto Mingardi, Graeme Mitchison, Julian Morris, Oliver Morton, Richard Moxon, Daniel Nettle, Johann Norberg, Jesse Norman, Haim Ofek, Gerry Ohrstrom, Kendra Okonski, Svante Paabo, Mark Pagel, Richard Peto, Ryan Phelan, Steven Pinker, Kenneth Pomeranz, David Porter, Virginia Postrel, C.S.

Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies by Jared M. Diamond

affirmative action, Atahualpa, British Empire, California gold rush, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, James Watt: steam engine, Maui Hawaii, QWERTY keyboard, the scientific method, trade route

I pray that he may come quickly, for I desire to see him. No harm or insult will befall him.' "The Governor concealed his troops around the square at Cajamarca, dividing the cavalry into two portions of which he gave the command of one to his brother Hernando Pizarro and the command of the other to Hernando de Soto. In like manner he divided the infantry, he himself tak- ing one part and giving the other to his brother Juan Pizarro. At the same time, he ordered Pedro de Candia with two or three infantrymen to go with trumpets to a small fort in the plaza and to station themselves there with a small piece of artillery.

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We forget that North America also supported popu- lous Indian societies in the most logical place, the Mississippi Valley, which contains some of our best farmland today. In that case, however, conquis tadores contributed nothing directly to the societies' destruction; Eurasian germs, spreading in advance, did everything. When Hernando de Soto became the first European conquistador to march through the southeast- ern United States, in 1540, he came across Indian town sites abandoned two years earlier because the inhabitants had died in epidemics. These epi- demics had been transmitted from coastal Indians infected by Spaniards visiting the coast.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Energy-rich countries are subject to the “resource curse” in which so much money is available from the oil and gas industries that the elite simply focuses on taking the “rents” from that business; other sectors are neglected. In many countries, it is simply too hard to open a business. In the 1980s, the economist Hernando de Soto tried to open a small garment workshop in Lima, Peru. To get legal authorisation took 289 days of work, at an average of six hours a day. The cost was 31 times the monthly minimum wage. In many countries, it is very time-consuming and expensive for someone to get legal ownership to their land; in Haiti, it took 19 years, de Soto found.

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“Top five reasons to end US sugar subsidies”, Americans for Tax Reform, November 15th 2015, https://www.atr.org/top-five-reasons-end-us-sugar-subsidies 21. “The entrepreneurial state”, Schumpeter, The Economist, August 31st 2013 22. See Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths 23. Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy 24. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else 25. Source: http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings 26. Source: https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-spending.htm Chapter 16 – A truly global economy: the developing world, 1979–2007 1. Radelet, The Great Surge, op. cit. 2.

Bacon: A Love Story: A Salty Survey of Everybody's Favorite Meat by Heather Lauer

British Empire, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, if you build it, they will come, index card, Ronald Reagan

In an effort to keep the unruly hogs at bay, the residents of Manhattan erected a wall along the northern edge of the settlement. And the street that eventually bordered the wall was called Wall Street. Now that this area of New York City is overrun with stockbrokers and hedge fund managers, some might say the swine problem was never really solved. Americans believe that we have Christopher Columbus and Hernando de Soto to thank for all the bacon, ribs, and tenderloins we enjoy, as they had pigs with them on their ships. Back when it took multiple weeks to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a journey to the New World, pigs were a popular travel companion (nowadays, not so much—unfortunately most airlines won’t let you carry a pig on the plane even if it’s small enough to fit underneath the seat in front of you, and U.S.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Donald Davies, double helix, Hernando de Soto, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, negative emissions, ocean acidification, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Freeman, “How Deltas Work: A Brief Look at the Mississippi River Delta in a Global Context,” in Perspectives on the Restoration of the Mississippi Delta, John W. Day, G. Paul Kemp, Angelina M. Freeman, and David P. Muth, eds. (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2014), 30. had been assured by a Bayogoula guide: Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 42. wading “mid-leg deep” to get to their cabins: Cited in Morris, The Big Muddy, 45. “I do not see how settlers can be placed on this river”: Cited in Morris, The Big Muddy, 45. “The site is drowned under half a foot of water”: Cited in Lawrence N.

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

And unlike many countries, India has not recognized the “right to property” as a fundamental one since 1978, which makes it far more difficult for landowners to contest development plans and to ensure that the growth and expansion of markets do not steamroll over their livelihood. Reforms in land titling and property rights, and linking such titles into the national I.D. system, would be a big step for our land markets. And this would provide powerful momentum toward more inclusive markets—the economist Hernando de Soto noted that the right to property and clear land titles are essential for bringing down poverty.5 Land is particularly useful for the poor since it is a source of funds, a starting fuel for economic mobility, and instrumental as collateral for obtaining loans from banks. But bringing IT into India’s land markets presents a classic clash of the old and the new.

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Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Period, Wharton School Publishing, 2004. 3 Simon Szreter, “The Right of Registration: Development, Identity Registration, and Social Security, A Historical Perspective,” World Development 35, 2007. 4 Jos Mooij,“Smart Governance? Politics in the Policy Process in Andhra Pradesh, India,” Working Paper 228, Overseas Development Institute, October 2003. 5 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Basic Books, 2003. CHANGING EPIDEMICS: FROM HUNGER TO HEART DISEASE 1 Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, North Point Press, 2007. 2 Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India, Cambridge University Press, 1994. 3 David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856, University of Washington Press, 2006. 4 Ghanshyam Shah, Public Health and Urban Development:The Plague in Surat, Sage Publications, 1997. 5 Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India, Cambridge University Press, 1994. 6 Ira Klein, “Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India,” Modern Asian Studies, November 1988. 7 Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India, Cambridge University Press, 1994. 8 A.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

As noted earlier, the cost-of-production approach to price theory had put economics in a box, a box containing a bombshell that could annihilate the classical system of natural liberty. It would take a revolutionary breakthrough in economic theory to rejuvenate the dismal science and restore the foundations of Adam Smith's model. That is the subject of chapter 4. 9. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has written several popular books on the need for legal and economic reforms in Latin America and developing countries in general. See Soto (2002, 2003). Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723-90) was a professor of moral pi In 1776, Adam Smith published the "crown jewel" of economics, Tt Nations.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The wrenching personal implications of these slum clearances is movingly described in Rohinton Mistry’s book A Fine Balance. An alternative approach has been to focus on upgrading existing informal settlements. One method for this that has gained popularity among some economists is to make property markets work more effectively. This school of thought, led by the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, starts with the observation that people in these places often lack the incentives or financial means to invest in improving their homes and neighbourhoods due to the absence of formal ownership rights and a high risk of eviction.50 Granting land titles is seen as the solution. These would not only make it possible for those living there to invest in improving their homes, but also allow them to more easily take out loans for setting up small businesses or educating their children.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

In São Paulo, having a residential address is extremely important. It confirms a person’s citizenship, gets them an ID, and makes it possible to participate in the formal economy and receive the limited government services that exist in Brazil.232 The Brazilian government, following the recommendations of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, has in some cases granted property rights to favela dwellers, who make up about 20 percent of the urban population. However, critics contend that this simply leads to gentrification as developers purchase and redevelop the properties, pushing the poor to the extreme edges of the city, making it harder for them to get to work or access services.233 One thing Brazilians will tell you about favelas without hesitation is that they are dangerous places.

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

‘Although to introduce socialism as the punishment for our sins would be to go too far, past injustices might be so great as to make necessary in the short run a more extensive state in order to rectify them.’ Anarchy, State and Utopia, Basic Books 1974, p.231. See also Fredrik Segerfeldt, The New Equality: Global Development from Robin Hood to Botswana, Timbro, 2014, pp.105ff. 22. Hernando de Soto, The mystery of capital: Why capitalism triumphs in the west and fails everywhere else, Bantam Press, 2000. 23. Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae, lines 590, 650. 24. Trotsky did not mind using that principle against his opposition but protested when Stalin used it against Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is It Going?

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

And in the real economic world, there is a free lunch, an extraordinary free lunch, and that free lunch is free markets and private property.14 The first Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty was given on May 9, 2002, at the Cato Institute’s twenty-fifth anniversary dinner in Washington. The prize, which includes a $500,000 cash award, is given every other year to an individual who has made a major contribution to advancing liberty. Its first three recipients have been, in 2002, British economist Peter Bauer, who unfortunately died before it was presented; in 2004, Hernando de Soto, the South American advocate of libertarian ideas; and, in 2006, former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar, who implemented free market reforms in his country. Friedman demonstrated his attachment to exact expression in his extemporaneous talk on Bauer at the 2002 dinner: It was a “shame”—no, he corrected himself—“tragedy”15 that Bauer died before the award could be presented to him.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

These trends increase the importance of communications and connections between people and between businesses, and of the infrastructure that enables this. Standards, Frameworks, and Norms Economists have long known that effective rules, institutions, and norms can encourage investment. Conversely, Hernando de Soto memorably showed how bad institutions—specifically, weak property rights—discouraged poor people in the developing world from investing in their own houses, developing businesses, and thereby escaping poverty (Soto 2001). The invention of the limited liability corporation encouraged business investment by safeguarding business owners’ assets from repossession if the company failed.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

In the UK and much of the Western world, the mid-twentieth century rise of individual homeownership also spread landownership to large sections of the population, with broadly beneficial consequences for economic growth, resilience and equality (Saunders, 2016), at least up until the 1970s. The power of private property has also led some economists to identify it as the key to tackling entrenched poverty in developing economies. Hernando de Soto (2000) argued that granting poor slum dwellers legal title to their informally held homes and business properties would enable a massive transfer of land from the pre-modern state of possession to full private property and trigger broad-based economic growth as the newly entitled owners leveraged their property to fund business expansion.

1494: How a Family Feud in Medieval Spain Divided the World in Half by Stephen R. Bown

Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, charter city, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, Peace of Westphalia, proprietary trading, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, two and twenty, UNCLOS

The Mayan city-states in the Yucatán Peninsula and Guatemala were subjugated by Pedro de Alvarado in 1523, and Francisco Pizarro led his band of privateers south to Peru in 1531. By 1533, Pizarro had defeated the Inca Empire and conquered the city of Cuzco by treacherously capturing Emperor Atahualpa. In Florida, Hernando de Soto led an expedition in search of the Fountain of Youth and the Seven Cities of Cibola in 1539. In all these endeavours, the native peoples of the Americas—enslaved, starved, displaced and ravaged by disease—suffered horribly. Many were killed outright, others were compelled to labour, chained in work gangs or bent under the lash in silver mines in Peru and Mexico.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

Numerous people talked to me about the various topics in this book. I am especially grateful for conversations with Bill Ackman, Julian Alexander, Michael Ashner, Lanny Breuer, Yaron Brook, Jeff Campbell, Dana Carney, Kathy Casey, Walker Clark, Simon Copleston, Jeff Critchfield, Patrick Daniels, Hernando de Soto, Sanford DeVoe, Gurpreet Dhaliwal, Andrew Dittmer, Jesse Eisinger, Anne Erni, Allen Farrell, Jerome Fons, Mary Fricker, Koji Fukumura, Maria Gavrilovic, Gordon Gerson, Jonathan Glater, Francesco Guerrera, Scott Harrison, Margaret Heffernan, Sheena Iyengar, James Jacoby, Rob Jafek, Roy Katzovicz, Adam Kolber, Eric Kolchinsky, Unni Krishnan, Steve Kroft, Stephen Labaton, Irene LaCota, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster, Angel Lau, Donald Lawrence, Joe Lonsdale, Angel Lopez, John Lovi, Jeff Madrick, Peter McLeod, Ralph Nader, Chuck O’Kelley, André Perold, Stephen Porges, Ernesto Reuben, Christine Richard, Darren Robbins, John Rogers, Jennifer Schenker, Todd Simkin, Robert P.

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Yet economies chug along merrily because they don’t depend on individuals’ understanding. An economy works because we each do our own little part. The economy is a great example of the hive mind, an incredibly complex system that emerges from the cooperation of many individual minds. Here’s what the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has to say about the underpinnings of an economy: “Remember, it is not your own mind that gives you certain exclusive rights over a specific asset, but other minds thinking about your rights in the same way you do. These minds vitally need each other to protect and control their assets.” In chapter 8 we talked about how the beliefs of a community are powerful, strong enough to make intelligent people believe outrageous things.

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

Trees extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and this reforestation led to so much of the gas being sequestered in wood that the earth cooled (the opposite of the greenhouse effect we are witnessing today). Similarly, the massive waves of death that Cortés, Francisco Pizarro (who conquered the Inca Empire in Peru) and Hernando de Soto (who led the first European expedition into what is now the United States) unleashed in the Americas in the sixteenth century caused a population crash that may have ushered in the Little Ice Age.6 The effect wasn’t reversed until the nineteenth century, when more Europeans arrived and began to clear the land again.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

Surprisingly, a lot of landownership: For a fascinating account, see Eduardo Peñalver and Sonia K. Katyal, Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 55–63. On the hidden social value of awarding landownership based on squatter’s possession, see Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000). adverse possession: “Code of Hammurabi, c. 1780 BCE,” trans. L. W. King (1910). According to the code, “If a chieftain or a man leave his house, garden, and field…and someone else takes possession of his house, garden, and field and uses it for three years: if the first owner return and claims his house, garden, and field, it shall not be given to him, but he who has taken possession of it and used it shall continue to use it.”

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

In about 1500 the Etowah valley fell under the sway of the kingdom of Coosa, by which time most of the original population appears to have left and moved on, leaving behind little more than a museum of earthworks for the Coosa to lord it over.50 Some of those who walked away concentrated around the new capitals. In 1540, a member of Hernando De Soto’s expedition described the mica of Coosa and his core territory (a place now known, oddly enough, as Little Egypt) in the following terms: The cacique came out to welcome him in a carrying chair borne on the shoulders of his principal men, seated on a cushion, and covered with a robe of marten skins of the form and size of a woman’s shawl.

…

—. 1978. Mesolithic Europe: The Economic Basis. London: Duckworth. Clastres, Pierre. 1987 [1974]. Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. New York: Zone Books. Clayton, Lawrence A., Vernon J. Knight and Edward C. Moore. 1993. The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Clement, Charles R. et al. 2015. ‘The domestication of Amazonia before European conquest.’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282: 20150813. Clendinnen, Inga. 1987. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570.

Living in a Material World: The Commodity Connection by Kevin Morrison

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, energy security, European colonialism, flex fuel, food miles, Ford Model T, Great Grain Robbery, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price mechanism, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, young professional

Production starts with the depletion of resources and ends with pollution. ‘In order to put an economic value on the environment, it has to become a commodity through government legislation, by creating property rights that entitle the holder to ownership of the underlying asset and permits allowing the right to pollute,’ said Daly. Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto writes in his book The Mystery of Capital that the use of documents to prove ownership is one of the main conditions for the success of capitalism in the West. In developed nations, writes De Soto, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment or store of inventories is represented by a property document.

A Pipeline Runs Through It by Keith Fisher

accounting loophole / creative accounting, barriers to entry, British Empire, colonial rule, Dmitri Mendeleev, energy security, European colonialism, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Blériot, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

However, a few small companies such as the informally organized Trinidad Petroleum Co. began exporting small amounts of asphalt to the US and France.196 Stollmeyer, writing to Lord Cochrane, entertained hopes that a Boston coal-oil manufacturer might purchase Trinidadian pitch as a raw material and that ‘the influence of Americans and their ways would soon change La Brea into a second Newcastle’.197 NORTH AMERICA There is archaeological evidence of bitumen being put to use from about 8,000 years ago, during the Early Holocene period, on the Californian coastal region of what would become the United States.198 The first European reports of petroleum came from the Hernando de Soto expedition in 1543 when, forced ashore by the weather onto the coast of Texas near Sabine Pass, they found oil floating on the sea and used it for caulking their boats.199 Contemporaneous archaeological finds indicate that the Chumash Indians of southern California were processing bitumen before putting it to a number of uses, including waterproofing water containers – and it has been speculated that this may have had a negative impact on their health.200 Over a century later, several expeditions of French Jesuit missionaries to North America came across petroleum springs just south of the Great Lakes.

…

Clark, Stanley, The Oil Century: From the Drake Well to the Conservation Era (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958). Clayton, G. D., Britain and the Eastern Question: Missolonghi to Gallipoli (London: University of London Press, 1971). Clayton, Lawrence A., Vernon James Knight, Jr and Edward C. Moore, The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1993). Clemens, A. H. P., and J. Th. Lindblad, eds., Het belang van de Buitengewesten: Economische expansie en koloniale staatsvorming in de Buitengewesten van Nederlands-Indië, 1870–1942 (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1989). Clinton, De Witt, An Introductory Discourse delivered before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York (New York: David Longworth. 1815).

Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, income per capita, inflation targeting, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil-for-food scandal, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Tragedy of the Commons, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

They believed that, by being what they were, they had earned the right to take; and the higher the officer, the greater the crookedness— if that word had any meaning. . . . I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can easily break you. 53 P o i s o n e d We l l s The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, in his best-selling book The Mystery of Capital, argues that property rights are the bedrock upon which the edifice of capitalism is built. In Angola after independence, property was nationalized, chaotically. This ministry was given responsibility for that building, but nobody told them that another ministry had allocated it to someone else.

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz

access to a mobile phone, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business process, business process outsourcing, clean water, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, Kibera, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, market design, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, tontine, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Sachs (Penguin Press) The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C.K. Prahalad (Wharton School Publishing) Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Norton) The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando de Soto (Basic Books) Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer (University of California Press) Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green (Bloomsbury Press) Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester R.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

All that the keepers of the formal economy have to do, Neuwirth says, is meet the squatters halfway—help them secure their tenure and give them time to gradually join the formal world, which will no doubt be reshaped by their joining it. Program by program, nation by nation, the world is learning how to engage the boundless resourcefulness of urban squatters. One idea put forward early was Hernando de Soto’s. In his seminal 1989 book, The Other Path, he was the first to honor the way the informal economy works, based on research in the squatter communities of Lima. His theory was that squatters could break out of poverty if only they could get bankable title to their shacks. The idea has been tried, but it mostly doesn’t work in urban slums: The practice doesn’t help with credit, it encourages building owners to become absentee landlords, and it attracts rich raiders.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Every redevelopment plan, as they pointed out, was not what it appeared: when politicians and developers claim to be helping Dharavi, they often mean that they want to sell something. Dharavi offers an alternative, a rebuke even, to the mall and the air-conditioned business park beyond. Thus the Slum Rehab Schemes of the government were all market solutions and did not actually address the real needs of the neighbourhood. In the 1990s the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto proposed that the slum dwellers’ right to the city was linked with access to the formal marketplace. If only the poor could trade with the rest of the city, they would soon integrate. De Soto suggested that each slum dweller should be given land rights over their informal property. This simple act of legal rubber-stamping, legitimising what had already taken place, would release ‘trillions of dollars, all ready to put to use … transformed into real capital’.19 Ironically this policy has already been adopted by the many left-wing parties in Latin America as well as the Indian Communist Party, but de Soto’s promise turns out not to be what it seems.

Alistair Cooke's America by Alistair Cooke

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, Ford Model T, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, interchangeable parts, joint-stock company, Maui Hawaii, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

After him, the Spanish made frequent, unauthorized, raids into Florida for slaves to work the West Indies; and they mounted several official expeditions to seek out the rumored piles of gold. They were all defeated by the native Indians, who had learned a lively detestation of the slave raiders, and on one of the last of these fruitless voyages the body of the commander, Hernando de Soto, was buried by his men in the Mississippi River to save it from desecration by the Indians. But these setbacks did not disabuse the Spanish of their belief in a whole literature woven around the mystical legend that declared that somewhere in the New World there was that ‘terrestrial paradise,’ an actual Heaven on earth that would redeem the hard life of the true believer here below.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Empirical evidence suggests that countries with strong property rights systems have economic growth rates almost twice as high as those of countries with weak property rights systems, and that a market system with significant private property rights is an essential condition for democracy. According to Hernando de Soto, much of the poverty in the Third World countries is caused by the lack of Western systems of laws and well-defined and universally recognized property rights. De Soto argues that because of the legal barriers poor people in those countries can not utilize their assets to produce more wealth.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Second, all involved parties have satisfied themselves that they have received identical sets of properly signed legal documents related to this financing. Posting all documentation for the Ornua–Seychelles Trading transaction on the blockchain reduced a seven-day process to four hours. In June of 2016 the Republic of Georgia announced a project in conjunction with economist Hernando de Soto to design and pilot a blockchain-based system for land title registry in the country. It is expected that moving elements of the process onto the blockchain can reduce costs for homeowners and other users, while also reducing possibilities for corruption (since the land records, like everything else on the blockchain, will be unalterable).

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Declines of income are rare exceptions, and we pray that soon even such countries will reform in a bourgeois ideological direction, and join the blade of the hockey stick, in the way again of China and India—once also grotesquely mismanaged against “capitalism” in the name of the poor, a mismanagement that locked the poor into poverty. We bleeding-heart libertarians wholly approve, incidentally, of the one-time-and- never-again attack on property called “land reform,” such as Hernando de Soto’s proposal to give property rights to squatters in slums.13 We lament that land reform has not happened in every country in Latin America. But we lament, too, that our colleagues on the left have assailed de Soto’s poor-friendly proposals with the same arguments that the left long applied, equally mistakenly, to the enclosure movement in eighteenth-century England—namely, that private property hurts poor people.14 No, it doesn’t.

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Ogilvie again provides a crucial fact, that rent-seeking guilds were unusually weak in Holland and Britain after 1500 by comparison to Italy or Germany or Spain.16 In London or Amsterdam you could set up in business with a relatively free hand, which is the crucial condition of entry that the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has brought to attention.17 In France from the sixteenth century onward, by contrast, L’État closely regulated the betterments of the bourgeoisie, and tempted it with offers to acquire for ready cash a tax-free nobility of the robe. The Dutch and eventually the British ideology came gradually to be one of betterment free from monopolizing guilds or interfering autocrats.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

All of these features, moreover, underwrite the fact that land is bankers’ favoured form of collateral: collateral is security pledged for payment of a loan, and land is, in all senses of the term, secure. It endures. And through its functioning as collateral, crucially, land-as-wealth helps beget further wealth. In mobilizing land as collateral for credit, which can be used to finance the production of goods and services, ‘the West’, argues the economist Hernando de Soto, ‘injects life into assets and makes them generate capital’. This, for de Soto, constitutes the eponymous Mystery of Capital.2 Last but not least, land is readily divisible, as any locus of capitalist wealth-embodiment must be, lest wealth not be distributable, measurable, and able, in Marx’s words, ‘to fluctuate, to decrease and to increase, to fly from one hand to another’.

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

After a short distance, they came to an immense open plaza surrounded by low buildings containing capacious halls, presumably barracks for the Inca's soldiers. Pizarro was determined to occupy this area. Pizarro immediately dispatched a small force toward the Indian encampment, commanded by his brother Hernando Pizarro and his senior colleague Hernando de Soto. De Soto would later make his mark exploring in Florida for the Fountain of Youth; he died in 1542 on the shores of the Mississippi, having found neither the Fountain of Youth nor any North American gold, but he would have a Chrysler car model of the 1930s named after him. In addition, there was one Indian member of this detachment, who had been taught enough Spanish to act as interpreter.

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

Liobera, The God of Modernitv.. The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994), pp. ix-x. 17. Ibid., p. xiii. 18. See William McNeill, Polyethnicitv and National Unity in World History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). 19. Ibid., p.7. 20. Hernando de Soto, The Other Path (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., p.6. Chapter 6. The Megapolitics of the Information Age: The Triumph of Efficiency over Power 1. Neil Munro, "The Pentagon's New Nightmare: An Electronic Pearl Harbor," Washington Post, July 16, 1995, p. C3. 2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 13 of "The Natural Condition of Man as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery." 3.

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Donner party, estate planning, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, James Watt: steam engine, Joi Ito, Khyber Pass, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, plutocrats, safety bicycle, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

The Mississippi was the first of the three to be seen. A sinuous line approximating its position had already been marked on Spanish maps made as early as 1513; it was most probably first properly viewed six years later, in 1519. There was the certain and definitive encounter with the river twenty years later still, when Hernando de Soto, plundering and destroying his way across the southeastern quadrant of the country, stood on a limestone bluff just south of where Memphis lies today and, astonished, saw the great brown river unwinding slowly hundreds of feet below. These men, the first Europeans definitely to see America’s defining river, assembled crude log barges and managed to cross the stream, which at this point was “almost halfe a league broad,” and as an English translation of one the conquistadores’ diaries had it, . . . if a man stood still on the other side, it could not be discerned whether he were a man or no.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

As the world’s urban masses become the overwhelming majority of the global population, the so-called youth bulge is not an impending challenge but an actual one. If it is not put to work today, then it will not earn enough income to stabilize socially and settle professionally. An estimated 30–40 percent of the world population works in the informal economy, a supply-demand universe if ever there was one. Hernando de Soto, the pioneering advocate of property rights for the poor, has pointed out that most of the self-immolating Arabs during early 2011 were extralegal entrepreneurs cut off from the capital they needed to start businesses capable of surviving food price shocks and petty local corruption. They represent the industrious yet dispossessed youth I’ve seen loitering around Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and elsewhere—those who would choose jobs over jihad if the former were offered but take the path that provides them shelter and respect.

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

Does the selection reflect the biases of a middle-aged Scotsman, the archetypal beneficiary of Western predominance? Very likely. But I cherish the hope that the selection will not be disapproved of by the most ardent and eloquent defenders of Western values today, whose ethnic origins are very different from mine – from Amartya Sen to Liu Xiaobo, from Hernando de Soto to the dedicatee of this book. A book that aims to cover 600 years of world history is necessarily a collaborative venture and I owe thanks to many people. I am grateful to the staff at the following archives, libraries and institutions: the AGI Archive, the musée départemental Albert Kahn, the Bridgeman Art Library, the British Library, the Charleston Library Society, the Zhongguo guojia tushuguan (National Library of China) in Beijing, Corbis, the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz at Berlin-Dahlem, Getty Images, the Greenwich Observatory, the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna, the Irish National Library, the Library of Congress, the Missouri History Museum, the musée du Chemin des Dames, the Museo de Oro in Lima, the National Archives in London, the National Maritime Museum, the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri (Ottoman Archives) in Istanbul, PA Photos, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, the Archives Nationales du Sénégal in Dakar, the South Carolina Historical Society, the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Sülemaniye Manuscript Library and of course Harvard’s incomparable Widener Library.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

biofilm, bioinformatics, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Drosophila, energy security, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Hernando de Soto, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, peak oil, pneumatic tube, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, women in the workforce

If a sandwich can be said to have terroir, that quality of place that the French believe finds its way into the best wines and cheeses, this sandwich had it, a sense of place and history you could taste. Since the Europeans first set foot on these shores, the pig has been the principal meat animal in this part of the country. Indeed, the words “meat” and “pork” have been synonymous for most of Southern history. The Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto brought the first pigs to the American South in the sixteenth century. For centuries, the descendants of those hogs ranged freely in the Carolinas, feeding themselves on the abundant mast produced by the oak-and-hickory forest. This means that, at least before pigs were confined to farms, the flavors of the Eastern hardwood forest could find their way into their meat by two routes: first as acorn and hickory nuts and then as wood smoke.

The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--And the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation by James Donovan

active measures, colonial rule, cotton gin, El Camino Real, financial independence, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, invention of gunpowder

Since Cortés had conquered the Aztec empire in 1521, Mexico City had become the center of Spain’s empire in the New World. The wealth of the Aztecs, and that of the Incas of Peru, had funded Spanish wars and further voyages of exploration. But after two major expeditions in the mid-1500s—Coronado’s epic trek across much of the American Southwest, and Hernando de Soto’s journey through the Southeast, neither of them finding the fabled cities of gold or any wealth at all—Spain abandoned any further exploration into the far northern frontier of its colonies. In 1690, the church-controlled Spanish authorities decided to establish missions near the Rio Grande to Christianize the natives there, not just for altruistic reasons but also for political reasons, to help guard New Spain’s borders.

Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The rural towns of Mountain View and Eureka Springs hold quirky charm. Don’t be fooled by talk of Wal-Mart or backwoods culture. As one local put it, ‘Say what you want about Arkansas, but it’s a outdoor paradise.’ History Caddo, Osage and Quapaw Native Americans had permanent settlements here when Spaniard Hernando de Soto visited in the mid-1500s. Frenchman Henri de Tonti founded the first white settlement in 1686. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Arkansas became a US territory, and slave-holding planters moved into the Delta to grow cotton. Poorer immigrants from Appalachia settled in the Ozark and Ouachita plateaus.

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Florida Highlights Marvel at the bright-painted works of art in Miami’s museums and galleries (Click here) Paddle among the alligators and saw grass of the Everglades (Click here) Be swept up in the nostalgia and thrill rides of Walt Disney World (Click here) Join Mallory Square’s sunset bacchanal in Key West (Click here) Snorkel and dive the USA’s most extensive coral reef at John Pennekamp (Click here) Relax on the sugar sand beaches of Sarasota’s Siesta Key (Click here) Ponder the symbolism of the Hallucinogenic Toreador at St Petersburg’s Salvador Dalí Museum (Click here) Growl like a pirate among the historic Spanish buildings of St Augustine (Click here) Road-trip through the fun-loving beach towns and quiet silken sands of the Panhandle (Click here) History Florida has the oldest recorded history of any US state, and also the most notorious and bizarre. The modern tale begins with Ponce de León, who arrived in 1513 and claimed La Florida (for the Easter ‘Feast of Flowers’) for Spain. Supposedly, he was hunting for the mythical fountain of youth (the peninsula’s crystal springs), while later Spanish explorers like Hernando de Soto sought gold. All came up empty handed. FLORIDA FACTS »Nickname Sunshine State »Population 18.8 million »Area 53,927 sq miles »Capital city Tallahassee (population 168,979) »Other cities Jacksonville (821,780), Tampa (335,700) »Sales tax 6% (some towns add 9.5% to 11.5% to accommodations and meals) »Birthplace of Author Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), actor Faye Dunaway (b 1941), musician Tom Petty (b 1950), author Carl Hiaasen (b 1953) »Home of Cuban Americans, manatees, Mickey Mouse, retirees, key lime pie »Politics sharply divided between Republicans and Democrats »Famous for theme parks, beaches, alligators, art deco »Notable local invention frozen concentrated orange juice (1946) »Driving distances Miami to Key West 160 miles, Miami to Orlando 235 miles Within two centuries, Florida’s original native inhabitants – who formed small tribes across a peninsula they’d occupied for over 11,000 years – were largely decimated by Spanish-introduced diseases.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

6 The Red Guide to the Neoliberal Playbook For someone who has just spent a few hundred pages arguing that the economics profession has been proven hopelessly corrupt by virtue of its behavior during the crisis, and that the Neoliberal Thought Collective has managed to weather the crisis by expanding to fill the entire space of political discourse left void by the dereliction of the economists, I am now going to do something a little counterintuitive: I am going to start by agreeing (in a limited way) with one famous Mont Pèlerin member, Hernando de Soto. In a retrospective on the crisis, he insisted, “the recession wasn’t about bubbles but about the organization of knowledge.”1 Of course, this was not entirely unexpected, coming from a member of the NTC: it has persistently been an outlier in the history of reactionary movements, a political formation built upon a realization that their own core foundational commitments were epistemological, rather than simply “conservative” or capitalist or traditionalist;2 but I think it is more revealing than perhaps he himself would concede.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

” The one asking that question is Dexter Muller, whose office at the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce is only a few doors down from the Cotton Exchange on Front Street. The view from his window is a snapshot of the city’s transportation history: Cotton Row below, the muddy Mississippi beyond, and, in the distance, the long span of the Hernando de Soto Bridge bearing six lanes of truck traffic to and from points west. His unrepentant drawl and modest pompadour mark him as a native who grew up in the Age of Elvis. He is a third-generation Memphian; his grandfather was a cotton trader, and mother a local belle, while his father moved here from New York in 1937 to build a paper plant for Kimberly-Clark, only to see it promptly swept away in a flood.

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

While the Spanish were careful, as usual, to write down the diets of the people they came across on the Terra Firma, alcohol only appears on their own provision lists, or in expressions of grief over its absence. For instance, the destruction of communion wine by belligerent Indians near Mobile was ranked an equal loss to that of gunpowder, bullets, and valiant comrades by Rodrigo Rangel, a participant in Hernando de Soto’s crazed 1539 drive from Cape Canaveral to the Mississippi River. Although they found no evidence of indigenous tippling, both the Spaniards and the French had commented on the potential of the land for making wine. Every tree seemed draped with vines; indeed, the original name for the Island of Orleans opposite Quebec was Bacchus Island.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, William J. O'Neil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, British Empire, business process, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, refrigerator car, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, short selling, short squeeze, technology bubble, tontine, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, yellow journalism

That places the time at 1918 or later, as the first $500 bill was issued that year. The bill featured an engraving of pioneering Virginian John Marshall, who was secretary of state under President John Adams, then a Congressman, and later chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835. On the back was pictured the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto discovering the Mississippi in 1541. In 1928, another $500 bill went into circulation featuring President William McKinley. Bills over $100 were removed from circulation in 1969 by order of President Richard Nixon as part of a broad effort to battle the Mafia. Other high-denomination bills formerly in circulation included the $1,000 (featuring Grover Cleve land), $5,000 (James Madison), $10,000 (Salmon P.

A Terrible Glory by James Donovan

California gold rush, Hernando de Soto, joint-stock company, Monroe Doctrine, transcontinental railway

THE LINE, WHICH had existed almost since the white man had begun to penetrate the vastness to the west, was the result of more than three centuries of clashes between Europeans and the native population. Spanish conquistadors had clashed constantly with the native inhabitants of Florida during their many expeditions in search of gold and other treasures. In the epic Battle of Mabila in 1540, in the area later known as Alabama, Hernando de Soto and several hundred Spaniards had destroyed an entire army of thousands of Indians to the last man. To the north, in the swampy Tidewater region of Virginia, the two-hundred-village-strong Powhatan Confederacy had aided the ill-prepared English settlers at Jamestown since their arrival in 1607.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

See Francis Fukuyama and Sanjay Marwah, “Comparing East Asia and Latin America: Dimensions of Development,” Journal of Democracy 11, no. 4 (2000): 80–94. 4 On the decline in inequality in the 2000s in Latin America, see Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva and Nora Lustig, eds., Declining Inequality in Latin America: A Decade of Progress? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2010). 5 On the general problem of informality, see Hernando De Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper, 1989); and Santiago Levy, Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes: Social Policy, Informality, and Economic Growth in Mexico (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008). 6 See, for example, the chapter on Chile in Hirschman, Journeys Toward Progress, pp. 161–223. 7 An “electoral authoritarian” regime validates itself through elections, but in a highly manipulated process that does not permit a true level playing field for democratic contestation.

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

Little information has survived about that assault, but whatever happened, it prompted the Spanish Crown to order the construction of the island’s first fortress.4 The Spanish governor who oversaw its construction was a woman. Isabel (or Inés) de Bobadilla arrived in Havana in 1538 with her husband, Hernando de Soto, a conqueror recently returned from Peru having collected part of the gold ransom for the Inca king executed by Francisco Pizarro. The Spanish king appointed de Soto governor of Cuba and charged him with organizing an expedition to conquer Florida, which the Spanish knew about but had not yet begun to colonize.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Frank, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 3. On the limitations of the contemporary microfinance movement, see David Roodman, Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance (Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development, 2012). On extending property rights to the poor, see Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (London: Bantam Press, 2000). 4. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 27. 5. For a much longer discussion of the role of recognition and dignity in politics, see Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, pp. 162–208. 6.

Parks Directory of the United States by Darren L. Smith, Kay Gill

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Asilomar, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donner party, El Camino Real, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hernando de Soto, indoor plumbing, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Southern State Parkway, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

History: Authorized on March 11, 1948. Location: At the northern terminus of 75th St. NW in Bradenton, Florida. Visitors can reach the park from I-75 or I-275. Facilities: Visitor center (u), museum/exhibit, self-guided tour/trail. Activities: Nature walk, interpretive programs. Special Features: The landing of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in Florida in 1539 and the first extensive organized exploration of what is now the southern United States by Europeans are commemorated here. With an army of 600 soldiers, Soto had come to the new world with a license from the King of Spain to explore, colonize, and pacify the Indians of the area known as ‘‘La Florida’’

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Facilities: Interpretive trails; visitor center with exhibit area, archeological laboratory, and gift shop; picnic area, playground, enclosed pavilion. Activities: Interpretive programs. Special Features: A National Historic Landmark, Park interprets the Mississippi Period Native American village located here from AD 1000 to 1550 and visited by the Hernando de Soto expedition in 1541. The mound site is jointly managed by Arkansas State Parks and the Arkansas Archeological Survey as a research station, museum, and interpretive center. ★1492★ PETIT JEAN STATE PARK 1285 Petit Jean Mountain Rd Morrilton, AR 72110 Web: www.petitjeanstatepark.com Phone: 501-727-5441 Size: 2,656 acres.

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.): LA 2540 Gold Head Branch: FL 1996 Gold mining (Colorado): CO 1144 Gold Rush (California): CA 365, 1532; UT 1054 Golden Gate Bridge: CA 125 Golden Isles: GA 85 Golden and Silver Falls: OR 3866 11. Special Features Index PARKS DIRECTORY OF THE UNITED STATES—5th EDITION Henry Reuss: WI 1059 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: MA 228 Heritage Hill: WI 4732 Heritage House: TX 4307 Herkimer (Nicholas): NY 3528 Hermon MacNeil: IN 146 Hernando de Soto: AR 1491 Hetch Hetchy Reservoir: CA 1139 Hiawatha: MI 2809 Hickok (James Butler ‘‘Wild Bill’’): NE 3176 Hickory Run Boulder Field: PA 4007 High Point Monument: NJ 3316 Highland Park: MI 1190 Highway of Waterfalls: OR 1237 Hill Annex Mine: MN 2907 Hill Shoals Creek Falls: GA 1157 Hillsman House: VA 4525 Historic Savanna Portage Trail: MN 2935 Historic Trail of Stones: IN 2345 Hohokam Culture: AZ 58, 179 Holten (Frank): IL 2228 Holyoke: MA 2700 Homolovi Indians: AZ 1127 Hood Museum of Art: NH 1206 Hooper Springs Park: ID 1162 Hoosic Tunnel: MA 2761 Hoover (Herbert): IA 178 Hopewell Culture: LA 2537 Hopewell Indians: OH 182 Hopi Indians: AZ 375 Horatio Gates: NY 3493 Horicon Marsh: WI 776 Horsehead Cliffs: VA 4533 Horsetail Falls: WA 1232 Horton (Henry H.): TN 4252 Hot Springs: AR 185 Hotel du Pont: DE 1153 Houghton County Historical Museum: MI 207 Houseman (Jacob): FL 1969 Houston Zoological Gardens: TX 4871 Howard Arden Edwards: CA 1515 Howard Steamboat Museum: IN 1172 Howe House: VA 4504 Hoyt Arboretum: OR 4951 Hubbard House: OH 1226 Hubbard Museum of the American West: NM 1209 Hubbell Trading Post: AZ 187 Huckleberry Mountain: OR 547 Hudson Bay Company: WA 134 Hudson (Henry): NJ 3304 Hudson-Meng Bison Bonebed Site: NE 532 Hudson River Trail: NY 3523 Hudson River Valley: NY 1101 Hudson’s Bay Company: WA 134 Huffman Prairie Flying Field: OH 88 Hull (Cordell): TN 4239 Humpback Mountain: NC 1220 Hunter (William and Amanda): MO 3009 Huntington (Anna Hyatt): CT 1825; SC 4121, 4141 Huron Dunes: MI 2837 Hyde Street Pier: CA 316 Hyner Mountain Snowmobile Trail: PA 4010 I Ice Age: KY 2462; WI 390 Ice Age National Scenic Trail: WI 469, 5119 Ice Age National Scientific Reserve: WI 1059, 4722, 4738, 4748 Ice Age Paleo Indians: GA 271 Icefields Parkway: AB 408 Ichetucknee Springs: FL 1968 Ida Saxton McKinley: OH 110 Idaho Batholith: ID 463 Ide (William B.): CA 1766 Ignacio Zaragoza: TX 4333 Illinois Indians: MO 3010 Illinois and Michigan Canal: IL 384, 1102, 2231, 2248, 2323 Illinois and Michigan Canal State Trail: IL 2214, 2323 Illinois River: IL 1167, 1169 Incline Village: NV 1203 Independence Hall: PA 188 Independence Mine: AK 1354 Indian Heaven Wilderness Area: WA 497 Indian Medicine Wheel: WY 460 Indian River Lagoon: FL 1155 Indian Wars: KS 120; NE 3145 Indianapolis Motor Speedway: IN 1171 Indiangrass Wildlife Sanctuary: TX 4810 Industrial Revolution: MA 229; PA 1098, 1103, 1109, 1111, 1112; RI 1094 Inscription Rock: OH 3701 Inside Passage: AK 1123 Interloken National Recreation Trail: NY 490 Internment camps: CA 235; ID 241 Inuit: NU 407 Inupiaq culture: AK 969 Iron Mission Museum: UT 4418 Iron Plantation: PA 183 Iroquois Hill: KY 4892 Iroquois Indians: PA 4075 Isaac Shelby: KY 2482 Ishi: CA 1543 Ishi Wilderness: CA 517 Isle au Haut: ME 3 J J.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

{831} Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov, The Turning Point: Revitalizing the Soviet Economy (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 49. {832} Peter Bauer, Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 102. {833} “No Title,” The Economist, March 31, 2001, p. 20. {834} Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 20. {835} Ibid., pp. 33–34. {836} Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures, Chapter 6. {837} Hudson Institute Center for Global Prosperity, The Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances, 2013: With a Special Report on Emerging Economies (Washington: Hudson Institute, 2013), p. 9

Cuba Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, cuban missile crisis, G4S, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Kickstarter, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, urban planning

Castillo de la Real Fuerza FORT OFFLINE MAP GOOGLE MAP On the seaward side of Plaza de Armas is one of the oldest existing forts in the Americas, built between 1558 and 1577 on the site of an earlier fort destroyed by French privateers in 1555. The west tower is crowned by a copy of a famous bronze weather vane called La Giraldilla . The original was cast in Havana in 1632 by Jerónimo Martínez Pinzón and is popularly believed to be of Doña Inés de Bobadilla, the wife of gold explorer Hernando de Soto. The original is now kept in the Museo de la Ciudad, and the figure also appears on the Havana Club rum label. Imposing and indomitable, the castle is ringed by an impressive moat and today shelters the Museo de Navegación OFFLINE MAP GOOGLE MAP (admission CUC$3; 9am-5pm) , which opened in 2008 and displays interesting exposés on the history of the fort and Old Town, and its connections with the erstwhile Spanish Empire.

USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

The rural towns of Mountain View and Eureka Springs hold quirky charm. Don’t be fooled by talk of Wal-Mart or backwoods culture. As one local put it, ‘Say what you want about Arkansas, but it’s a outdoor paradise.’ History Caddo, Osage and Quapaw Native Americans had permanent settlements here when Spaniard Hernando de Soto visited in the mid-1500s. Frenchman Henri de Tonti founded the first white settlement in 1686. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Arkansas became a US territory, and slave-holding planters moved into the Delta to grow cotton. Poorer immigrants from Appalachia settled in the Ozark and Ouachita plateaus.

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Florida Highlights Marvel at the bright-painted works of art in Miami’s museums and galleries (Click here) Paddle among the alligators and saw grass of the Everglades (Click here) Be swept up in the nostalgia and thrill rides of Walt Disney World (Click here) Join Mallory Square’s sunset bacchanal in Key West (Click here) Snorkel and dive the USA’s most extensive coral reef at John Pennekamp (Click here) Relax on the sugar sand beaches of Sarasota’s Siesta Key (Click here) Ponder the symbolism of the Hallucinogenic Toreador at St Petersburg’s Salvador Dalí Museum (Click here) Growl like a pirate among the historic Spanish buildings of St Augustine (Click here) Road-trip through the fun-loving beach towns and quiet silken sands of the Panhandle (Click here) History Florida has the oldest recorded history of any US state, and also the most notorious and bizarre. The modern tale begins with Ponce de León, who arrived in 1513 and claimed La Florida (for the Easter ‘Feast of Flowers’) for Spain. Supposedly, he was hunting for the mythical fountain of youth (the peninsula’s crystal springs), while later Spanish explorers like Hernando de Soto sought gold. All came up empty handed. FLORIDA FACTS » Nickname Sunshine State » Population 18.8 million » Area 53,927 sq miles » Capital city Tallahassee (population 168,979) » Other cities Jacksonville (821,780), Tampa (335,700) » Sales tax 6% (some towns add 9.5% to 11.5% to accommodations and meals) » Birthplace of Author Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), actor Faye Dunaway (b 1941), musician Tom Petty (b 1950), author Carl Hiaasen (b 1953) » Home of Cuban Americans, manatees, Mickey Mouse, retirees, key lime pie » Politics sharply divided between Republicans and Democrats » Famous for theme parks, beaches, alligators, art deco » Notable local invention frozen concentrated orange juice (1946) » Driving distances Miami to Key West 160 miles, Miami to Orlando 235 miles Within two centuries, Florida’s original native inhabitants – who formed small tribes across a peninsula they’d occupied for over 11,000 years – were largely decimated by Spanish-introduced diseases.