“Want a job at the Pig?” asked my best friend Steve. By my reaction, you would have thought he’d asked if I wanted a date with Kathy Ireland rather than inquiring about a job as a grocery sacker at the Piggly Wiggly. But I was living at Steve’s parent’s house rent-free, and needed to earn some money. And in Clarksville, Texas in 1985, the prospects of an inexperienced teen finding a good job were only slightly better than chances of dating a supermodel.

In 1887, L. L. Zamenhof proposed a universal language as a means for ushering in a new era of international peace and prosperity. The language, now known as Esperanto, was carefully constructed to be easily absorbed and understood across cultures and countries, but it failed to take hold. Zamenhof was focused on solving a knowledge problem in linguistics—struggling to improve the ways people relate and share information with each other. Yet his efforts were doomed from the start, set on constructing a system from top to bottom when language is far better suited to develop through organic, emergent human exchange.

When I was twelve my family lived on a small, dry piece of land in rural Texas. Since we lived far outside of any city limits, we couldn’t rely on services like water (we had a well), sewage (we had a septic tank), or sanitation (we had a 12-year-old boy and a 50-gallon burn barrel). Before my weekend free-time could begin, I’d have a list of chores to get done, including burning the week’s trash and burying the ashes in a pit dug in the back field. One terrible Saturday I learned a valuable lesson about not burning spray paint cans when the wind is gusting at speeds that would get you ticketed in a school zone. The explosion was small but the brush was dry, and the ensuing fire came perilously close to my neighbors on three sides.

Economic globalization has brought many economic benefits to the planet, but it’s also true that the benefits have been uneven. One continent which has lagged behind much of the rest of the world is Latin America. As a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “Latin America Hangs On to Its Economic Gloom” pointed out: This year, once again, Latin America is shaping up as an economic disappointment. Brazil’s economy likely shrank slightly in the year’s first half, and Mexico’s didn’t grow at all. Argentina is now tumbling toward another episodic financial crisis. Then, of course, there is Venezuela, which won’t have much of an economy left after it shrinks another 25% to 35% this year.