Hernando de Soto, Naomi Klein, and Joseph Stiglitz On Economic Power

Hernando de Soto, Naomi Klein, and Joseph Stiglitz with moderator David Harvey (see bios below) discuss power through the lens of the economy. This discussion took place at the City University of New York (CUNY) on October 20th 2008 and runs just over 1 hour.

I thought de Soto made some very important points about property rights; without property rights, the true potential of markets cannot be realized. The US has shown the powerful liberation of potential of all individuals in a marketplace if each individual understands that the law will protect them from theft or fraud, and that they are just as accountable to the same law. It is the property rights system that allows market individuals to make deals with one another without necessitating confidence (which is time-consuming to build and foster) in the other party; this mitigates or even eliminates the first-mover problem which is essential to doing business.

Stiglitz and de Soto highlight that in our current financial crisis, the US resembles a banana republic because the property rights system, or the financial rule of law, does not exist on derivatives. This is a truly scary prospect as the derivatives market is at least an order of magnitude larger than the entire globe's GDP.



Hernando de Soto - Hernando de Soto is President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, headquartered in Lima, Peru and considered by The Economist to be one of the two most important think tanks in the world. Time and Forbes have chosen him as one of the leading innovators in the world, and more than 20,000 readers of Prospect and Foreign Policy ranked him as one of the world's top 13 public intellectuals. He has served as President of the Executive Committee of the Copper Exporting Countries Organization, as CEO of Universal Engineering Corporation (one of Europe's largest consulting engineering firms), as a principal of the Swiss Bank Corporation Consultant Group, and as a governor of Peru's Central Reserve Bank. He is the author of several books and papers on economic policy, including the seminal work The Mystery of Capital.

Naomi Klein - Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker. Her first book, the international bestseller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, was translated into twenty-eight languages and called "a movement bible" by The New York Times. She writes an internationally syndicated column for The Nation and The Guardian and reported from Iraq for Harper’s Magazine. In 2004, she released The Take, a feature documentary about Argentina's occupied factories, co-produced with director Avi Lewis. She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws degree from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia.

Joseph E. Stiglitz - Joseph Stiglitz was chief economist at the World Bank until January 2000. Before that he was the chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. He is currently a finance and economics professor at Columbia University. He is the author of Globalization and Its Discontents and The Roaring Nineties.

David Harvey - David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) and author of various books, articles, and lectures. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for nearly 40 years.