PERSON
Hernando de Soto
Peruvian economist (b. 1941) whose four decades of fieldwork on the informal economy transformed global development thinking and now provides the sharpest available framework for analyzing institutional exclusion in the AI age.
Hernando de Soto founded the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima in 1980 and has spent the subsequent four decades documenting the institutional barriers that exclude the majority of the world's population from formal capitalism. His signature works — The Other Path (1986) and The Mystery of Capital (2000) — established that the poor possess trillions of dollars in assets that cannot generate capital because no formal system exists to recognize them. The concept of dead capital reshaped property rights reform in dozens of countries. Named by Time as one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century and one of the hundred most influential people in the world, de Soto continues to advocate for institutional frameworks — increasingly incorporating blockchain and digital infrastructure — that extend economic inclusion to populations capitalism has historically excluded.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Born in Arequipa, Peru in 1941, de Soto studied in Switzerland and worked in international finance