De Soto attributed informal economic activity to state overregulation, not backwardness

Evidence

The plan was developed from the work of the internationally known Peruvian entrepreneur and development economist Hernando de Soto. Founder of the Instituto Libertad y Democracia (Institute for Liberty and Democracy) in Lima, de Soto became the country’s leading advocate of neoliberal reorganization in the 1980s and 1990s. He argued that informal housing and other forms of unregulated and illegal economic activity were a symptom not of economic backwardness but of overregulation by the state. Simplifying the process of registering property ownership would turn dead assets into live capital and transform every home owner into a capitalist entrepreneur (de Soto 1989, 2000). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1923

Categorization

• DEFINE: Capsules de Soto’s core ‘dead capital’ doctrine that underpinned Peruvian titling policy.
• XREF: Links to de Soto’s ‘The Other Path’ and ‘The Mystery of Capital’, and to the broader property-rights strand of neoliberalism the reader is charting. — connects to: De Soto’s theory of informal property grew from a failed Peruvian mining venture — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1947