Paul,
As I read this essay by Hernando de Soto it seems to me to be off the track of the debate sketched in the WSJ article. The structure of the argument seems to be to sketch certain characteristics of the property system in places like the US, contrast it with the property system in Africa, Latin America, etc. and note that the absence is what makes it impossible for those countries to grow. Does that sound correct?
If so, then it is tilling a different field from the argument in the WSJ article. There, as I understand it, is what are the steps to get from one to the other, whether the shock therapy of the 90s is helpful or not. I start off being more sympathetic, as you might expect, with Stiglitz's argument that shock therapy sacrifices the very populations it is meant to help. A little like the Vietnam era bit that we're going to save this country even if we have to destroy it to do so.
I started to read Stiglitz' book but backed off. I'm not sufficiently interested in the argument to bring my economics literacy up to speed. I'm still back with Heilbroner's bit about the "dismal science." Doesn't say good things about me; just a personal confession.
So I really don't know enough in depth about economics to evaluate these argument. I simply have the places from which I start thinking about the issues. One such place is that it's much too easy, when thinking about macro issues, to get caught by abstractions that don't carry the human experience. My discipline does that just as economics does it. So I'm not picking on the ecos. But a locked in devotion to "free markets" is capable of producing a terrible toll on populations as witness the Russian experience in the 90s. Similarly, a locked in devotion to state dominated societies can produce equally devastating results. Somewhere in there, hopefully, there is a mix in which the aim is to improve human welfare without getting captured by abstractions.
Whoops, got carried away. My apologies. |
