Hernando de Soto podcast

This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season four, episode two. De Soto’s central argument is that the world’s poor are not poor because they lack assets but because they lack the formal property rights that would allow those assets to function as capital. His concept of ‘dead capital’ (assets that exist but cannot be leveraged economically because they lack legal recognition) is a striking and counterintuitive framing of why development stalls. Bill Clinton called him ‘the world’s greatest living economist’, which Pete and Gav flag with appropriate scepticism. Goes beyond the standard spec, but the development economics and property rights themes are accessible and thought-provoking, and this is a good episode for students studying the global economy or interested in poverty and development.  Listen here (via show page)