Joshua sighed.
Joshua’s situation was his own fault, and he acknowledged his guilt. It had all started when he’d mediated for Ping for her brutal treatment of the old Benevolent Advisor. Upon concluding that Ping had, even if accidentally, wound up ruling the country, he had demanded that she learn about economics and law. He had also demanded she study an obscure paper from the previous century on how to rapidly uplift countries by outsourcing critical infrastructure, notably the system of justice, to implement and enforce property rights.
Much of the blame for Joshua’s predicament could be traced to the brilliant Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who demonstrated with meticulous research in the late 80s that the poor people of the world had trillions of dollars of assets. However, t
