Thanks, Neil! This was absolutely eye opening!

I had not heard of Hernandes de Soto previously and the idea of guaranteeing the rights to property being a large problem in places around the world is not obvious for people who have grown up being used to owning property with official documents recognized by the government. I'm definitely going to check out his book.

There was a recent NPR Planet Money piece: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/07/583999476/episode-337-the-secret-document-that-transformed-china

It talks about the first nationally recognized experiment to transition from communism to capitalism. Farming in communist China was performed on land that was jointly owned and the food would be collected and re-distributed to everyone in the country. The farmers were always hungry, but because there was no incentive to work harder, nobody was willing to increase crop yields. The secret document refers to a group of farmers that decided to split the land and then also plan a certain amount that would be given to the government and allow the rest to be kept by the individual farmer. This provided incentive for them to work harder because they would very directly benefit from it. The trouble that almost occurred was when the local police caught wind of it. Thankfully, the farmers were already in touch with a higher level party official, so they protected from the local police.

All in all, that is to say people are incentivized to put in effort if it translates to an obvious direct benefit to them. The rules of law and ledgers are important to guarantee that their efforts aren't wasted by recording what people own so that they can build on top of it in the long term. And lastly, the law and ledgers must be recognized by a larger body of people in power for it to have an effect.