WORK
The Other Path
De Soto's 1986 study of Peru's informal economy — subtitled The Invisible Revolution in the Third World — whose 289-day business registration experiment transformed the global debate about poverty.
The Other Path introduced de Soto to global audiences and established the empirical methodology that defined his subsequent work. The book documented the scale and functioning of Peru's informal economy through original fieldwork conducted by researchers at the Institute for Liberty and Democracy. Its most famous experiment — attempting to legally register a small garment workshop in Lima — required 289 days, multiple government offices, dozens of trips, and fees equivalent to thirty-one times the monthly minimum wage. The experiment supplied a quantitative answer to a qualitative question: why do the poor remain poor despite being industrious and creative? The answer was architectural. The institutional infrastructure had been designed, often unwittingly, to exclude the majority. The book's title positioned the informal economy as an alternative path — invisible to formal institutions but carrying most of the country's economic life.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Published in Spanish in 1986 and in English in 1989, the book emerged from research conducted by de