• But what do you do when vested political interests turn this upside down and nurture squatter constituencies?

That’s bound to happen. But once you know that only 20 per cent of the people’s property rights function under the legal system while 80 per cent of them are outside it, the politics will ensure that the majority is brought into the legal system. Of course, safeguards must also be put so that the transition is not hijacked.

• So, how do countries like India, China, Brazil, Russia and South Africa get capitalism to work for them?

By first quantifying the problem of property rights. And then getting the poor to make their properties legal by enabling them to buy.

• But how will the poor buy? If they could, they would.

You can have long mortgages, where they buy on monthly instalments and so on. But as I mentioned before, the first challenge is to quantify the problem.

• After Mystery of Capital, there has been no new work from you.

I’m currently doing a lot of things, but not writing, as I’m neither an academic nor a professional writer. I write only when I have something strong to say and on an average it takes me eight years to put that together. But for your information, I am indeed writing a new book.

• And what’s that about?

It is a book about why the market economy has so manydeficiencies in spite of being the only solution. Why it does not manage to include everybody. It is a book about why a market economy works better because it captures knowledge much more and that it can really only work decently if looked at from a knowledge point of view which it hasn’t been so far.