The pilot titling project chose favorable neighborhoods to prove the neoliberal theory.

Evidence

It is also significant that the first wave was a pilot project, run by de Soto’s Institute for Liberty and Democracy rather than the government. It was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of a rapid formalization program, the centerpiece of the neoliberal reforms adopted by the new government of Alberto Fujimori, whom de Soto initially served as a principal adviser. Anxious to raise both domestic political support and international development funds for the program, there would have been clear incentives to choose the right kinds of neighborhoods for the demonstration. … As we will see, this was only one possible way in which the project’s need to demonstrate the truth of neoliberal economic theory entered into the kinds of economic knowledge it later helped produce. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1965

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how demand-driven selection bias contaminates the empirical evidence behind foundational policy reforms — echoes the Milgrom work on institutions and selection into regimes. — connects to: Neoliberal policies produced experiments whose results fed yet more neoliberal projects — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1983
• SEED: Potential essay angle: how demonstration projects in development policy are engineered to confirm the theory they are meant to test (selection bias as a political tool, not an accident).
• QUESTION: How common is this pattern — pilot programs designed to prove rather than test a theory — across the wider neoliberal reform literature?

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal policies produced experiments whose results fed yet more neoliberal projects #exemplifies (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1983