The Mystery Of Capital [Paperback]

"People with nothing to lose are trapped in the grubby basement of the pre-capitalist world." This is the nub of The Mystery of Capital. Read just that one sentence and you catch a glimpse of the reason why, as the author puts it, four-fifths of humanity lack the ability to turn dead assets into live capital.

A great deal of the power of legal property comes from the accountability it creates, argues Hernando de Soto, from the constraints it imposes, the rules it spawns and the sanctions it can apply. The lack of legal property thus explains why citizens in developed and former communist nations cannot make profitable contracts with strangers, cannot obtain credit, insurance or utilities services. Because they have no property to lose, they are only taken seriously as contracting parties by their immediate family and neighbours. To put it another way, while most western homeowners dream about paying off their mortgage, their counterparts in the less developed countries could transform their existence if they could only access such sums.

It's rare to come across a book about such an arcane subject that is simultaneously interesting and illuminating, entertaining and thought-provoking. The Mystery of Capital is all these and more. De Soto paints a procession of vivid pictures, from Cairo to the Wild West, from the Andes to the Urals. "The cities of the Third World and the former communist countries are teeming with entrepreneurs," he says, dismissing the notion that entrepreneurialism is the exclusive preserve of the west. "You cannot walk through a Middle Eastern market, hike up to a Latin American village or climb into a taxi in Moscow without someone trying to make a deal with you. The inhabitants of these countries possess talent, enthusiasm and an astonishing ability to wring a profit out of practically nothing."

In The Mystery of Capital, de Soto believes he points to a way in which capitalism can be used to help developing nations. In his vision, the poor are not the problem. They are the solution. --Brian Bollen --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"A revolutionary book..." Independent. "A very great book...powerful and completely convincing." Ronald Coase, Nobel Laureate in Economics; "Remarkable...no less than the blueprint for the new industrial revolution" The Times. "A hugely persuasive and important book, the more so because of the moving simplicity of it's central idea" Telegraph. "One of the few new and genuinely promising approaches to overcoming poverty to come along in a long time" Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History. "A crucial contribution. A new proposal for change that is valid for the whole world." Javier Perez de Cuellar, former secretary-general of The United Nations.

'Has already led the cognoscenti to put him in the pantheon of great progressive intellectuals of our age.'

'A crucial contribution. A new proposal for change that is valid for the whole world'

'Remarkable . . . no less than the blueprint for the new industrial revolution.'

Beautifully and clearly written, this is a radical solution to the failure of capitalism in four-fifths of the world.

Why does capitalism triumph in the West but fail almost everywhere else? Elegantly, and with rare clarity, Hernando de Soto revolutionizes our understanding of what capital is and why it has failed to benefit four-fifths of mankind -- and explains the solution.

'A revolutionary book . . . may not be in the class of Das Kapital, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or Keynes's General Theory. But if the criteria for joining that exclusive club is a capacity not only to change permanently the way we look at the world, but also to change the world itself, then there are good grounds for thinking that this book is surely a contender.' Donald Macintyre, The Independent

'Few people in Britain have heard of Hernando de Soto . . . but The Mystery of Capital has already led the cognoscenti to put him in the pantheon of great progressive intellectuals of our age.' Mark Leonard, New Statesman

'A crucial contribution. A new proposal for change that is valid for the whole world' - Javier Perez de Cuellar (Former Secretary United Nations)

Why does capitalism triumph in the West but fail almost everywhere else? Elegantly, and with rare clarity, Hernando de Soto revolutionizes our understanding of what capital is and why it does not benefit five-sixths of mankind. He also proposes a solution: enabling the poor to turn the vast assets they possess into wealth.

Hernando de Soto is the founder and President of the Institute of Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru, regarded by The Economist as the second most important think-tank in the world. He has also been an economist for GATT (now WTO), CEO of one of Europe's largest engineering firms, and as a governor of Peru's Central Reserve Bank. As President Alberto Fujimori's Personal Representative and Principal Advisor, he initiated Peru's economic reforms and played a leading role in modernizing its economic and political system. In 1993 de Soto drew up and negotiated the strategic plan that reversed Fujimori's coup d'etat and returned the country to electoral democracy. He and ILD are currently working in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America on the practical implementation of the measures for bringing the poor into the economic mainstream introduced in The Mystery of Capital. He was recently listed by Time magazine as one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the twentieth century. His previous book, The Other Path, was published in more than ten languages and was a number one bestseller throughout Latin America.