De Soto’s titling thesis drew plausibility from neoliberal ideology, not field evidence.

Evidence

What makes the intuition plausible is that it resonates with the work of neoliberal institutional economists like Douglas North and neoliberal theorists of development like Peter Bauer. It assumes that a world without formal property rights is anarchic and that once the proper rules are in place a natural spirit of self-interested endeavor will be set free. It derives its plausibility more from the reader’s familiarity with certain texts of neoliberal economics than from any knowledge of informal communities. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1958

Categorization

• XREF: Connects the de Soto debate to the reader’s existing work on the neoliberal intellectual network and its intellectual-debt structure.