"Their causal model is a sort of conspiracy theory where the elites control the educational institutions and prevent the unprivileged from using them, thus keep social inequality going."
Some aspects of Latin America institutions are kind of a conspiracy theory in action. I once spent a couple of hours talking to the South American free market economist De Soto about property rights. The picture I took away is that a lot of land ownership in Latin America traces back to huge land grants that the King of Spain signed over in the 1500-1700s. E.g., about ten or twenty guys owned most of huge Los Angeles County in 1840. Individual land grants in Southern California might be worth a few hundred billion dollars today.
These property holdings are so large that the heirs let the servant class live on what's nominally their land so the servants can be at hand to serve them instead of having to commute over the horizon. The servant class has developed informal rights to their plots of land that everybody recognizes are transmitted to their heirs. So it's not a totally abusive system. But ... the landowning class is averse to allowing their workers to have formal legal rights to their customary land, which they could then mortgage to finance their own businesses.
In other words, the lower class might have customary rights to $100,000 worth of property, but they can't move up to the middle class by borrowing $50,000 to start a business by risking it because they don't have formal legal title to their house.
Why are you convinced that their lack of ownership rights in the plots they occupy at the sufferance of their masters is the main obstacle that prevents such Latin American domestic servants from becoming more affluent? Could it not be largely due instead to lack of aptitude for higher-paying employment or innate lack of ambition?
"[A] lot of land ownership in Latin America traces back to huge land grants that the King of Spain signed over in the 1500-1700s."
A lot? What percent, I wonder, of current Latin American landowners obtained a substantial portion of their real property as a result of a long, unbroken chain of ancestral inheritance going back to recipients of grants from Spanish monarchs?
I enjoyed the 'dry' commentary.
"Their causal model is a sort of conspiracy theory where the elites control the educational institutions and prevent the unprivileged from using them, thus keep social inequality going."
Some aspects of Latin America institutions are kind of a conspiracy theory in action. I once spent a couple of hours talking to the South American free market economist De Soto about property rights. The picture I took away is that a lot of land ownership in Latin America traces back to huge land grants that the King of Spain signed over in the 1500-1700s. E.g., about ten or twenty guys owned most of huge Los Angeles County in 1840. Individual land grants in Southern California might be worth a few hundred billion dollars today.
These property holdings are so large that the heirs let the servant class live on what's nominally their land so the servants can be at hand to serve them instead of having to commute over the horizon. The servant class has developed informal rights to their plots of land that everybody recognizes are transmitted to their heirs. So it's not a totally abusive system. But ... the landowning class is averse to allowing their workers to have formal legal rights to their customary land, which they could then mortgage to finance their own businesses.
In other words, the lower class might have customary rights to $100,000 worth of property, but they can't move up to the middle class by borrowing $50,000 to start a business by risking it because they don't have formal legal title to their house.
Why are you convinced that their lack of ownership rights in the plots they occupy at the sufferance of their masters is the main obstacle that prevents such Latin American domestic servants from becoming more affluent? Could it not be largely due instead to lack of aptitude for higher-paying employment or innate lack of ambition?
"[A] lot of land ownership in Latin America traces back to huge land grants that the King of Spain signed over in the 1500-1700s."
A lot? What percent, I wonder, of current Latin American landowners obtained a substantial portion of their real property as a result of a long, unbroken chain of ancestral inheritance going back to recipients of grants from Spanish monarchs?