Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Nobel Peace Prize-winner Muhammad Yunus argues that social business is an achievable way of exploiting capitalism to help the poor. Yunus moves the debate beyond the argument that the rich should donate to the poor and says the free market can be used to the advantage of the poor. Policymakers and philanthropists can learn from this.
We went wrong in our depiction, our interpretation of the human being – we have done it in a very narrow way. In economics a human being is one dimensional – someone who devotes his or her life to making money. But human beings are in fact multi-dimensional. They are selfish, but at the same time they are selfless. You can’t extract just the selfish part of the person and build a whole economic theory out of it – everything is for me, everyone is doing things for themselves but they are not worrying about others. In fact, we are part of a bigger thing, we are linked to each other. I exist here today because everybody else exists otherwise I wouldn’t exist here. That part has been forgotten. So the selflessness – I want to change the world, I want to solve the problems, I want to make an impact - that part is not incorporated into economics.
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Professor Yunus is a Bangladeshi banker, founder of Grameen Bank, economist and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize recipient. As a professor of economics he developed the concepts of microcredit and microfinance – loans for those too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. He has lifted millions of Bangladeshi families out of poverty. Yunus serves on the board of directors of the United Nations Foundation, a public charity created in 1998 with entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner’s $1 billion gift to support UN causes.
