Hernando de Soto

De Soto is the economist of the invisible. Where others saw the poor of Lima, Cairo, and Manila as lacking resources, he saw them as possessing trillions of dollars in assets that the formal system could not recognize—houses built without titles, businesses registered without legal standing, labor and creativity deployed outside the institutional infrastructure that converts productive activity into compounding wealth. His concept of dead capital—assets that are real and functional but locked outside the system that would allow them to generate economic life—provided a precise vocabulary for the central injustice of global capitalism: not that the poor lack assets, but that the system lacks the capacity to see what they possess. When the AI transition collapsed the distance between imagination and artifact, creating the possibility that a developer in Lagos could build the same product as an engineer in San Francisco, de Soto’s framework delivered an unflinching verdict: the tool has been democratized, but the system has