Peru’s titling experiment was entangled with other state interventions, contaminating its results

Evidence

Second, there is seldom only one big experiment going on. The details of the Peruvian case suggest that problems may have arisen from the intersection of a number of related experiments. On the one hand, there was the difference between de Soto’s original pilot project, intended to achieve certain local and international effects by demonstrating not so much the long-term benefits of property rights as the immediate viability of a high-speed, low-cost, titling program. Such concerns may have shaped the selection of neighborhoods for the pilot program in ways that affected the later study. On the other hand, there was the intersection of different government and NGO programs to deal with the threat and after-effects of a revolutionary attempt to introduce a very different kind of property experiment. The government and the World Bank justified the titling program in part because the regulation of informal housing offered the state a way to assert its political authority over neighborhoods that had often been beyond its control during the years of attempted revolution. But in Huancayo, the city at the center of the region of insurrection, this project intersected in unpredictable ways with other more urgent interventions. The research experiment, in ways I have indicated, was unable to keep these intersecting experiments from shaping its results. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1978

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how policy experiments framed as neutral research are shaped by the political projects they emerge from and intersect with.
• XREF: connects to: Staggered rollout of a titling program enabled a natural experiment in Peru — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1938; Peru’s titling program was itself a large-scale neoliberal project — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1976; The CIA treated foreign nations as laboratories for experimentation. — Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Secrets in the…, 349

Broader Connections

• The CIA treated foreign nations as laboratories for experimentation. #expands (0.72) — Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Secrets in the…, 349