Cambridge University Press has a blog called 1584. They asked me to write something about my book and I thought I’d post it here too:
Economists tend to forget our own countries’ history and make economic development seem much faster and easier than it really is. We forget that it took hundreds of years for Great Britain and the United States to become industrialized, rich, and democratic. As Hernando De Soto noted in The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (Basic Books, 2000), we have seemingly forgotten how long and messy the history of property rights was in the US. For instance, when George Washington asked his lawyer how to evict squatters from his Virginia property, the latter advised against eviction, arguing that the squatters would likely return and burn his property down (p. 117). Or the US Supreme Court Justice Joseph Storey…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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