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Welcome to Hernando de Soto's Blog

This is Hernando de Soto's blog. Here, you will find excerpts of his lectures and articles, as well as direct comments. Your commentary is welcome.

  • Marx, Adam Smith and the division of labor

    Both Marx and Adam Smith were fascinated by the division of labor. You will remember that Adam Smith begins The Wealth of Nations discussing what it takes to produce a simple pin: somebody to buy the wire, somebody to stretch it, somebody to cut it into different pieces, another person to put a point at one end, another person to round it off on the other end and put the head on.

  • Nature and Economy

    One of the things that captures our imagination is the question “Where was life born? Where did organic evolution begin?” That opened our eyes to a variety of things that we found useful for thinking about the origins and evolution of markets, because, essentially, what Einstein and even Dar­win have told us is that the universe can be a sort of mindless vacuum.

  • Giving the Poor Their Rights

    Margaret Atieno Okoth, 49, sells cabbage six days a week from a cramped stall in the teeming Toi market of Nairobi, alongside vendors hawking everything from secondhand shoes to bicycle parts. The $2 a day she takes home allows her to send three of her 12 children to school, while her husband John seeks out odd domestic jobs in the middle-class estates within walking distance of their home. Thanks to her enterprising spirit and a community-savings scheme, she can obtain small loans to keep her business going or cover the costs of a family emergency...

  • TOXIC Paper

    MWall Street harshly judged U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's proposals for saving the nation's banks. His televised remarks in mid-February were supposed to reassure watchers by outlining the Obama administration's plan for fixing the financial markets, but the market plunged as he spoke. Yet Wall Street was wrong. The lack of details in Geithner's presentation doesn't really matter right now. More important is the fact that the administration has finally focused the U.S. on the primary cause of the current economic crisis: the trillions of dollars of "toxic paper" on the balance sheets of financial institutions. This poisonous paper...