 from fork admin URL mailto fork admin URL on behalf of dave long sent thursday august NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER am to fork URL subject re the curse of india s socialism when i d read that getting legal title can take NUMBER years when i believe that NUMBER year ought to be more than sufficient and helped by the cairo reference i d assumed that we were talking about the urban poor if i see people living in mansions or even in suburban subdivisions i assume they didn t have too much trouble with their titles pg NUMBER in another country a local newspaper intrigued by our evidence of extralegal real estate holdings checked to see if the head of state s official residence had a recorded title it did not pg NUMBER the value of land in the formal sector of lima averages us NUMBER per square meter whereas in the area of gamarra where a great deal of peru s informal manufacturing sector resides the value per square meter can go as high as us NUMBER NUMBER i d have made the same assumption you did de soto says that isn t correct you can find mansions that don t have title a lot of them in fact but they can t be used for collateral for a loan or otherwise participate as capital because of their extra legal status mr long i think you d particularly enjoy the de soto work on the to find list any chance of an explanation of that bell jar in the meantime french historian fernand braudel so braudel s bell jar not de soto s the key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past which i would not hesitate to call capitalist should have lived as if in a bell jar cut off from the rest why was it not able to expand and conquer the whole of society why was it that a significant rate of capital formation was possible only in certain sectors and not in the whole market economy of the time it would perhaps be teasingly paradoxial to say that whatever was in short supply money certainly was not so this was an age where poor land was bought up and magnificent country residents built how do we resolve the contradiction between the depressed economic climate and the splendors of florence under lorenzo the magnificent de soto s theory is that the bell jar is formed when you segregate those who have practical access to legal property rights and those who do not the poor NUMBER have property lots and lots of property what they don t have is access to the systems where we turn property into capital and allow it to start growing their property can only be exchanged with a small section of people who know them personally NUMBER actual poor people not poor americans with a living standard that is the envy of most of the world URL 