Archives For Hernando de Soto

Repaso: Letter to OWS, transparent church, mission & culture, powerful photos of 2011, global financial mess, spiritual theology & relevance, blessing & cursedness at Christmas

December 9, 2011 — 2 Comments

1. A Letter to OWS
Makoto Fujimura, head of the International Arts Movement, has written a letter to the Occupy Wall Street Movement. He has a love/hate relationship with movements, he says, and encourages and implores those involved with OWS to remember a few essential things:

The value of your movement is in spontaneity, diversity, and flexibility.  Do not let extreme ideologies hijack your movement.  Do not let the media define who you are. Avoid every temptation to name a spokesperson or a leader, no matter how charismatic that person is.  Keep pressing into raising questions more than giving answers. Be generous, mysterious, and enigmatic. A movement is organic and generative, and your passion must be carried into the conversation for the next generation, from Wall Street to dining room table discussions. Above all, do all things out of love.

2. The transparent church
Skye Jethani blogs about a public art installation in Belgium resembling a see-through church, and what it can teach us as Christians:

The architects said they were motivated by the growing number of abandoned churches in Belgium, and the declining role of religion in the highly secularized country. They have titled their structure “Reading Between the Lines” because it “extends this idea of transparency onto the church and equally onto the observer who must learn to read between the lines even among things that are seemingly transparent. Just because you can see something doesn’t make it real, neither does something not exist because it can’t be seen.”

3. Do missions destroy cultures?
This one by Jordan Monson, a church planter in Spain, has sparked a good conversation at RELEVANT on the role missions and missionaries play (or don’t) in changing other cultures. Monson says, in effect, that missionaries have great power for good and for ill in the cultures to which they are sent:

Christians—and missionaries—can be at times the best and at other times the worst representatives of Christ. They’re not perfect. They will make mistakes, and they will take some cultural presuppositions with them no matter how much they are trained not to. Missionaries will unapologetically keep campaigning against female mutilation, deceivingly referred to as female circumcision; they will fight against cannibalism, witchcraft and human sacrifice. But they will also miss the mark sometimes and carry their Western values too far. Missionaries are still sinners, but when they follow Christ and make His glory their chief end, they elevate culture and follow the call of Jesus.

4. Most powerful photos of 2011
This collection of photos is stunning and sobering. It’s been a rough year for many in our world, and I was struck by just how many photos of natural disasters and mass protests were included.

5. Who owns this mess?
In this New York Times Magazine piece, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto (who I’ve blogged about here and here) weighs in on the global financial crisis (see also his bio at the end of the piece for why he’s to be taken seriously):

Once it is clear that this recession is about the organization of knowledge or, more precisely, the lack of organization, Western governments can step in to get the facts. That will allow them to target the disease without getting stuck in the left-versus-right controversy about regulation and government oversight. We need increased truth-telling; increased recognition of what exists and who owns it.

6. Eugene Peterson, spiritual theology and relevance
Patton Dodd writes for freq.uenci.es on Eugene Peterson’s important and counter-cultural legacy within North American evangelicalism (and the irony that the world’s biggest rock star admires him):

When Peterson set out to make the Bible relevant, he didn’t mean to make it hip, or even successful. He meant to make it ordinary—to make it spiritual. He meant to show people that spirituality is nothing special as we normally understand “special.” It’s the quotidian quality of Jesus. In Peterson’s straightforward words, “life, life, and more life.” Peterson is straining to help Christian believers to understand that that message is the message of God.

7. “Far as the curse is found”
Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Seminary, writes a wonderful reflection based on the lyrics of “Joy to the World”:

There certainly is a lot of cursedness around these days. There are the “macro” curses of homelessness, poverty, political oppression, the sexual slave trade, religious persecution, whole populations devastated by war and disease. But there are also the “micro” curses that afflict many individual lives in highly personal ways: grief, abandonment, loneliness, abuse, fear of the future, difficult illnesses—and much more. The good news of Christmas is that Jesus has come—born a baby in the manger of Bethlehem… God chose to experience the curse in a very intimate way, experiencing our cursedness from the inside by becoming one of us. The final “conquering,” of course, came at the end, when Jesus was crucified, buried, and rose victoriously from the tomb. But it had to begin with his utter helplessness in the Bethlehem stable. “God with us”—in the cursedness of our helpless estate.

Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!

[Photo credit: Randy L. Rasmussen/The Oregonian via Buzzfeed]

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Hernando de Soto on economic apartheid and the only game in town

June 9, 2011 — 8 Comments

During grad school a couple of years ago for a class focused on microfinance we read The Other Path by Hernando de Soto, the famous Peruvian economist. I really enjoyed the book. But for some inexplicable reason, I didn’t get around to reading his most famous work, The Mystery of Capital until just now.

In The Other Path – written in 1989 as a provocative alternative to Sendero Luminoso (or “The Shining Path”), the Maoist guerrilla movement which claimed to defend the poor while using terrorist tactics – he writes about the huge portion of the population of Peru that is “extralegal,” operating businesses outside the law simply because the law, mired in bureaucracy, has made it so difficult for businesses to operate legally. He contends – rightly, I think – that to understand the plight of the poor in Peru and possible solutions to their poverty, one needs to pay attention to the hidden joys and sorrows of the booming extralegal sector. Only then, he says, will poverty alleviation be possible. And only then will capitalism be its tool.

The Mystery of Capital was written in 2000 and it expands upon his earlier ideas, applying them more generally to developing contexts in general. De Soto is a capitalist, but you might be forgiven for calling him a reluctant one. In an excellent New York Times Magazine feature in 2001, Matthew Miller wrote, “de Soto reached the conclusion that the left was great on social justice but didn’t know a thing about economics.” While clearly no fan of Communism, de Soto explains the dilemma for capitalists concerned with addressing poverty:

[T]he Marxist tool kit is better geared to explain class conflict than capitalist thinking, which has no comparable analysis or even a serious strategy for reaching the poor in the extralegal sector. Capitalists generally have no systemic explanation of how the people in the underclass got where they are and how the system could be changed to raise them up.

He admits that capitalism has often been used to “exploit and conquer” the vulnerable, but warns:

No amount of ranting and raving against writing, electronic money, cyber symbols, and property paper will make them disappear. Instead we must make representational systems [like capitalism] simpler and more transparent and work hard to help people understand them. Otherwise, legal apartheid will persist, and the tools to create wealth will remain in the hands of those who live inside the bell jar.

In conclusion, de Soto writes with wisdom, pragmatism and hope:

I am not a die-hard capitalist. I do not view capitalism as a credo. Much more important to me are freedom, compassion for the poor, respect for the social contract, and equal opportunity. But for the moment, to achieve those goals, capitalism is the only game in town. It is the only system we know that provides us with the tools required to create massive surplus value.

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Electoral baggage in Peru

June 3, 2011 — 2 Comments

This Sunday’s presidential runoff in Peru is shaping up to be a doozie. On the right is Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a notorious former president. She is taking on Ollanta Humala, who has been associated with the Shining Path guerrillas in the past but has lately worked hard to rebrand himself as more of a centrist. Recent polls are giving Fujimori a small lead, but most are too close to call.

Ollanta Humala

Two of the most famous Peruvians in the world, meanwhile, find themselves on opposite – and somewhat surprising – sides of the equation. Mario Vargas Llosa, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, once supported lefties like Fidel Castro, but has been a supporter of conservative political candidates for quite some time. He ran for president as a free market candidate in 1990. This time, however, he’s supporting the lefty Humala, who he considers the lesser of two evils. He also just pulled his column from Peru’s main newspaper, accusing the paper of being a “propaganda machine” for Fujimori. Whether Vargas Llosa is so passionately opposed to Fujimori primarily because he lost to her dad in the ’90 election is up for debate.

Keiko Fujimori

Hernando de Soto, meanwhile, a widely influential economist most famous for his book The Mystery of Capital (which I just finished reading!) has come out in support of Fujimori, who he says will be likely to implement some of his economic ideas that have worked in combating poverty around the world by ensuring property rights for the poor. De Soto once advised Fujimori’s father as president, but says they haven’t had contact since 1992 and that he has no plan to be part of Keiko’s government were she elected.

This polarizing and fascinating election has given journalists and commentators a lot of material. For instance, BBC says many Peruvians consider it a matter of “choosing between your wallet and your conscience.” The Miami Herald has a piece about how both candidates come with “serious baggage.” Sabrina Karim writes on the Americas Quarterly blog about the role gender is (or isn’t) playing.

Meanwhile, leaders of the anti-mining protests near the Peru-Bolivia border, which I wrote about earlier this week, have decided to hold off on further demonstrations until after the elections, “with the sole objective of not undermining the electoral process.”

Needless to say, Sunday’s election will be well worth watching.

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March Madness according to development economists

March 23, 2011 — Leave a comment

During grad school, one of my favorite books was White Man’s Burden, by an NYU economist named William Easterly. In a nutshell, he argues for economic development that is bottom-up rather than top-down. He calls the bottom-up folks searchers and the top-down folks planners. His arch-nemesis is Jeffrey Sachs, a well known economist (and planner) at Columbia.

I’d read Sachs first, but ended up liking Easterly so much that during my graduation speech I referenced him multiple times. Since then, I’ve been following his blog, and while his perpetual snarkiness drives me a bit crazy, yesterday’s post was a real gem. Basically, he takes all the main development economists who have recently written books for general audiences and applies their principles to the game of basketball.

If you’re not familiar with the key players and issues in development, it may not do much for you. But if you’ve read guys like Sachs, de Soto and Yunus, I think you’ll agree that Easterly is brilliant here.

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