A third reason for the popularity of the paper was that it enabled the sponsors of the project in Peru, the World Bank and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, to ignore its failures and describe its outcome as a success. The World Bank had to face the failure of the project to produce its intended result, an increase in lending to the poor. It seized on the fact that the project's beneficiaries appeared to be working longer hours as an unexpected but welcome outcome (World Bank 2004, 11). Meanwhile, the Peruvian organization responsible for the original scheme, de Soto's Institute for Liberty and Democracy, had fallen out of favor in Lima and was pursuing opportunities to design and implement similar experiments in other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Egypt. Unable to point to evidence that the original project achieved its promised outcome, the ILD cited the apparent increase in working hours in its efforts to win funding for further projects abroad (Institute for Liberty and Democracy n.d.).

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1933