The Other Path
by Hernando De Soto · first published 1989
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…action by those they have only a very limited control over is a bad idea. > what do you think happens in countries that don't have limited liability companies? There is an excellent book on this, The Other Path by the economist Hernando de Soto, on extra-legal systems in Peru. And in Third World countries where you don't have good formal legal systems, the environmentally destructive exploitation projects still…
on “Third-Biggest U.S. Coal Company Files for Bankruptcy” ↗Glad to be of service! If you want another possibly transformational read, Hernando De Soto's The Other Path has a lot of interesting things to say about rule of law and property rights.
on “Ask HN: What are the biggest obstacles to vertical farms?” ↗…schools and hospitals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah_social_services Hernando de Soto talks about how the Shining Path provided social services to build legitimacy in his incredible book, "The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World": http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-Path-Invisible-Revolution/dp... Sudhir Venkatesh also talks in his book about how drug dealers in Chicago provide similar…
on “Yakuza” ↗I reccomend the work of Hernando de Soto on extralegality: http://www.amazon.com/Other-Path-Hernando-Soto/dp/0465016103... In a country (Peru) where formal legal systems functioned extremely badly, there was a huge extralegal economy: houses, businesses, transport, etc all of which didn't officially…
on “Bitcoin, The Economic Singularity: From Holland with Love” ↗…independence from colonialism. The argument that the regulatory burden on small businesses can be bad for economic growth does have some real validity - the great work on this is Hernando De Soto's The Other Path on Peru. However, that's an argument for making the tradeoff in an informed way and exempting small businesses (something the EU is extremely bad at!), while being against severance pay in its entirety…
on “Ask HN: Who Is Firing?” ↗Not everywhere has US style property taxes. More likely the problem relates to ownership and title: quite likely a lot of property will technically be squatting. The book "The Other Path" by Hernando de Soto goes into this; the best solution is to award title to long term occupiers.
on “Why are there so many unfinished buildings in Africa?” ↗Related work in this area includes Scotland's "violence reduction unit", similarly effective by using social inclusion; and de Soto's book "The Other Path" about bringing land ownership and small businesses into legality in order to reduce the power of Shining Path's Maoist guerillas.
on “Ecuador legalized gangs and murder rates plummeted” ↗The exact lunacies and irrationality that this Economist article describes are something that the Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto described in enormous detail in his book "The Other Path" (El Otro Sendero) roughly three decades ago when describing the at the time deeply dysfunctional aspects of regulatory administration in his native country, and in other Latin American states. He later…
on “India: Income Tax Bill allows officials to forcibly access social media, email” ↗