The Poverty of Nations

...That long struggle is a story of great importance to the world, and de Soto devotes a lengthy and fascinating chapter to it...

...and democracy remains non-existent or weak in most of Africa and Asia and parts of Latin America...

...On the other hand, at least some changes in culture are needed to propel political support for the institutional reforms de Soto calls for...

...But they were kept outside the legal economy, without protections of law, property titles, or sensible practice, and their activities were subject to official penalties and harassment...

...These two truths, like these two...

...Whatever the problems of Latin America, the picture of Africa that emerges from Daniel Etounga-Manguelle's essay is bleaker by orders of magnitude...

...What the Act really accomplished was the regularizing and legalizing of squatters' claims: Between 1862 and 1890 some two million Americans claimed lands on 372,649 farms...

...While more colorful and flamboyant figures were in battle all around him, de Soto quietly opened a research center in Lima called the Institute for Liberty and Democracy...

...One new note in The of Capital is the unbecoming voice of Cassandra in which de Soto warns bitterly of a coming world revolt against capitalism...

...De Soto is surely right that simple changes in law have had a dramatic effect on economic behavior...

...children under five die at rates in excess of 10 percent in thirty-five countries...

...The failure of analysts to recognize just how much capital the poor possess derives, in part, from a lack of technical and imaginative skill, and, in part, from charitable organizations' emphasis on the misery of the poor...

...The answer grew from his discovery that the vast majority of people in Peru were neither peasants nor proletarians but, in fact, small-scale entrepreneurs— and illegal entrepreneurs, at that...

...At the time, setting up a legal business in Peru required more than two hundred days of full-time effort, with fees and bribes that could easily amount to three times the average annual income...

...From this maelstrom came as well the most stimulating of the third Michael Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair of Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Take Peru, for instance, where, in 1971, an obscure diocesan priest named Gustavo Gutierrez published a book called A Theology of Lib^^-ation that stimulated revolutions all over Latin America...

...His first book, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution the Third World, concluded that socialist methods helped the poor very little, but that the existing versions of third-world capitalism were also failing...

...Such ignorance exists even in the United States...

...Most land in America, he points out, was settled before the Homestead Act of 1862...

...Before the poor can toil up out of poverty, de Soto decided, they need to be able to incorporate small businesses easily, to find low-cost entrepreneurial credit (micro-loans, really), and to acquire legal title to their homes and businesses...

...BY MICHAEL NOVAK In the overlooked parts of the earth, the most amazing forces of cultural dynamism are sometimes hidden...

...Lawrence Harrison—^who helped launch the new debate about culture with Development Is a State of Mind in 1985—adds to Culture Matters a stimulating introduction and conclusion, almost daring those who disagree to match fact for fact, distinction for distinction...

...After a half-century of development assistance, half of the adult population of twenty-three countries (mostly in Africa) are illiterate...

...De Soto's researchers calculate that the poor in the third world hold more than 9.3 trillion dollars of property—but it avails them little or nothing...

...In the ten years since, de Soto has been pursuing broader questions of economics, and now, in The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, he presents the fruits of his research...

...The failure of governments to see the existing wealth of their own poor—and thus bring it within the legal system so that it might be multiplied and, not so incidentally, taxed—he blames on the prejudice of privileged elites and on widespread ignorance about the origins of prosperity...

...In Lima, the great novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was turning away from the Left and entering politics, while a dynamic community of Japanese immigrants—among them, Alberto Fujimori—were mounting steadily upward in economic and social power...

...No laws or institutions exist by which they may use this capital as collateral for cash or credit...

...Huntington concludes that "culture had to be a large part of the explanation...

...Thus the cultural theories of Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Edward Banfield seem to offer better models...

...South Koreans value thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and discipline...

...Culture, not institutions, determines the success of a society...

...Thirty years later, South Korea is the fourteenth largest economy in the world, with a per capita income about that of Southern Europe...

...So which is it...

...Ghanaians had different values...

...One feels this is mostly rhetorical...

...Having left the land for the city, where there were few factories to employ them, they had built an entire economy of small businesses, supplying nine-tenths of the public transport in Lima and building half the houses...

...Another new note is de Soto's rejection of culture as an explanation for economic backwardness: "I humbly suggest that before any brahmin who lives in a bell jar tries to convince us that succeeding at capitalism requires certain cultural traits, we should first try to see what happens when developing and former communist countries establish property rights systems that can create capital for everyone...

...In short, cultures count...

...The entire book is a goldmine of suggestions, distinctions, and lively arguments...

...The central concept he employs is "dead capital...

...How did illegal squatters go from being "bandits" in George Washington's time to "brave pioneers" in Lincoln's time...

...Carlos Alberto Montaner, in his essay on "the culture and the behavior of elites in Latin America," examines politicians, the military, businessmen, the clergy, and intellectuals...

...So de Soto set his band of assistants a single question: How can the poor be brought within the circle of economic development...

...That makes an interesting contrast to the twenty-two authors that Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel I? Huntington have assembled in Culture Matters...

...The era of millions of "illegal settlements" lies forgotten...

...But new institutions can change a culture for the better...

...Jeffrey Sachs points out the ways capitalist institutions are resisted in non-capitalist societies and suggests that capitalism may be strongly favored by geography (in coastal states, for instance...

...Simultaneously, the primitive Marxists of the "Shining Path" were conducting a brutal war of intimidation in the Peruvian mountains...

...The three prominent theories of the twentieth century—that these failures are explained by colonialism, dependency, and racism—have lost their power to persuade...

...Huntington opens his foreword by recounting how some years ago he came upon economic data for Ghana and South Korea around 1960—and noticed how similar they were...

...Ghana thirty years later has a GNP about one-fifteenth of that...

...Is de Soto correct that institutions unlock the gate into development...

...Mariano Grondona outlines twenty contrasting cultural factors that influence economic progress, such as rival ideas on competition, dissent, justice, and optimism...

...Or is it culture...

...world's social thinkers, Hernando de Soto...

...De Soto's analysis was so persuasive that in the early and creative stage of the Fujimori administration, his institute was given public power to register 276,000 poor families as legal owners of their own property, and ten governments in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa requested similar assistance from him...

...The authors of the essays include Barbara Crossette, Francis Fukuyama, Nathan Glazer, David Landes, Seymour Martin Lipset, Michael E. I orter, Lucian W. I ye, and Tu Wei-Ming...

...life expectancy is below sixty years in forty-five countries...