Michael Edeke

Pitt sophomore Michael Edeke was intrigued to read in Time magazine last spring about Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s controversial ideas for reducing global poverty.

Through his Lima think tank; his books, including The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (Basic Books, 2000); and as an adviser to heads of state and the World Bank, de Soto has argued the following: If governments in developing countries would guarantee their citizens legal title to their own homes and informally run businesses, along with ready access to credit and loans, entrepreneurial poor people could raise themselves out of poverty.

Edeke saw merit in de Soto’s theory but wondered how it would play out in countries with little or no tradition of Western-style land titles, relatively few private banks, and no big populations of potentially industrious slum-dwellers—Mongolia, for example, with its nomadic herding culture.

To find out for himself, the 19-year-old Edeke plans to visit Mongolia this summer to do research on private property rights there. To help prepare for the trip, he’s studying the Mongolian language through the University Honors College this term.

“One of the biggest contradictions I’ve seen in developing countries is that there are a lot of mineral resources, there is a lot of land wealth, but the people are still poor,” says Edeke, whose parents immigrated to the United States from Nigeria. “I thought maybe if people had the right to own the land, then they wouldn’t be so poor when they are sitting on all this wealth.

“In countries like Zaire that have lots of diamond wealth, gold wealth, the people are still some of the poorest in the world,” Edeke notes. Poor and sometimes corrupt governments have made it very difficult for entrepreneurs to open legal businesses, he says, and in Nigeria and some other developing nations “the parallel market rivals the legal market.

“De Soto recognizes all the government bureaucracy that keeps people from being able to open up a business legally and make income that is taxable by the government,” Edeke points out. In Haiti, for example, 240 government requirements must be met before an individual may open a business.

According to Edeke, Mongolia makes for an interesting economic laboratory in which to study de Soto’s theory “because people there aren’t stationary. A lot of their income comes from animal husbandry, and it’s tough to reconcile that with de Soto’s theory. That’s one of the reasons why it raised a red flag in my head that maybe his theory is not as solvent as I thought it was.

“I’ve recently read a lot of criticism about [de Soto’s theory], and I’m structuring my research program to address this criticism and to see if granting poor people private property rights really would do anything” to improve their lot.

De Soto’s critics—who range from enfranchised power elites to Peru’s Maoist Shining Path—claim that if poor people live on profitable land and are given title to it, wealthy people will simply push them off that land. Critics also say that the poor lack the resources to convert land into capital.

For now, Edeke suspects that de Soto’s theory “isn’t as nuanced as I thought it would be or think it should be. And I don’t think de Soto’s theory is as thorough as it ought to be. I don’t think imposing Western ideals of capitalism would really work with people who don’t have the same conceptions of ownership that we do.”

But rather than play armchair economist, Edeke will complete his Mongolian fieldwork before he passes judgment on whether or not de Soto’s theories are, in Edeke’s words, “the real deal.”

In the meantime, there is no doubt that Edeke himself qualifies as the real deal by University Honors College standards, according to college Dean G. Alec Stewart.

“Top-tier undergraduates have always emphasized scope as well as disciplinary depth,” Stewart says. “The thoroughbred undergraduate is the curious student who wants to read, write, think, and talk with competence across multiple disciplines. It takes drive and discipline for this kind of broad intellectual attainment. Edeke has it!”

In addition to working part-time as a Pitt Pathfinder, Edeke handles a full course load as an electrical engineering/political science double major. How does the study of private property rights in Mongolia fit in with those majors?

“I think a lot of the work with engineering has to do with developing countries, like helping people get the things they need,” Edeke explains. “Political science is all about how people get stuff—when, where, how—and so is engineering.”

Edeke’s family history also figures in. His Nigerian-born father is an electrical engineer who once worked in the defense sector of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. “A lot of people from my background and from other backgrounds come to America to get the education and then go back and help people who don’t have the basic infrastructure that they need: water resources, electrical power supplies, and telecommunications,” he says.

Edeke, who’s from Stafford, Va., is proud of his Nigerian heritage but is also, in many ways, a typical Pitt undergraduate. He loves movies, the theater, and the Steelers. And, like some locally raised students, Edeke makes sure to visit Posvar Hall’s ground floor lobby before a big exam. There, he seeks out the home plate that’s embedded in the floor on the very spot where, in Forbes Field, Maz homered to beat the Yankees in the 1960 World Series and Babe Ruth hit his last two home runs.

High-achieving student or not, Edeke likes to step on that glass-covered plate for good luck.