Hernando de Soto devotes a chapter to the 'propertization' of Japan following WWII. It's a fascinating and virtually unknown story. One other relevant item from de Soto's book is the research done in Egypt. They estimated that the Egyptian people (ie the poor, huddled masses) created $500 billion in wealth. This is 50 times all the foreign aid and foreign investment in post-war Egypt. The problem is that it is dead capital. The people can't get to that capital in order to invest and create more.
The key is to get property into the hands of the ordinary families and get out of their way, while they create the wealth and power their economy and their countries. People with property are less likely to risk that than people with nothing.
Bottom line, it's not democracy as such, it's decentralization and individual responsibility that is the key.
Poverty = lack of wealth
Wealth = property
Ending poverty = getting property in the hands of the poor.
Here's the way to go about it. I recommend to everyone to read this book, it'll open your eyes.
Click Here for page at Amazon.com.
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
by Hernando De Soto, Hernando De Soto
Our Price: $16.00
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Paperback - 288 pages 1st edition (August 2002)
Basic Books; ISBN: 0465016154
In-Print Editions: Hardcover (1st)
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 23,363
Popular in: Latin America (#13) , Peru (#8) . See more
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
It's become clear by now the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in most places around the globe hasn't ushered in an unequivocal flowering of capitalism in the developing and postcommunist world. Western thinkers have blamed this on everything from these countries' lack of sellable assets to their inherently non-entrepreneurial "mindset." In this book, the renowned Peruvian economist and adviser to presidents and prime ministers Hernando de Soto proposes and argues another reason: it's not that poor, postcommunist countries don't have the assets to make capitalism flourish. As de Soto points out by way of example, in Egypt, the wealth the poor have accumulated is worth 55 times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including that spent on building the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.
No, the real problem is that such countries have yet to establish and normalize the invisible network of laws that turns assets from "dead" into "liquid" capital. In the West, standardized laws allow us to mortgage a house to raise money for a new venture, permit the worth of a company to be broken up into so many publicly tradable stocks, and make it possible to govern and appraise property with agreed-upon rules that hold across neighborhoods, towns, or regions. This invisible infrastructure of "asset management"--so taken for granted in the West, even though it has only fully existed in the United States for the past 100 years--is the missing ingredient to success with capitalism, insists de Soto. But even though that link is primarily a legal one, he argues that the process of making it a normalized component of a society is more a political--or attitude-changing--challenge than anything else.
With a fleet of researchers, de Soto has sought out detailed evidence from struggling economies around the world to back up his claims. The result is a fascinating and solidly supported look at the one component that's holding much of the world back from developing healthy free markets. --Timothy Murphy --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From The Industry Standard
"An increasingly important economist provides a fascinating lesson in why capitalism works by looking at the places where it doesn't." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
