Thanks for your response Meg. But I'm not so sure, having perused Amazon's editorial on the book just now, that he is going in the same direction (at least as I am) here. Rather it seems he is prescribing what "other folks" should do like "us" so all would be well with "our" current system. I don't think so... It must be a goodie to some people though. I logged on to our local library site to reserve it and found I am number twelve on a waiting list of twelve (even Boomeritis only has a list of ten!). Given the editorial I'm not too hopeful (see excerpts below) ...
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... ...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... Let's see what other responses we get re some "Q4" discussion... Winston
