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New Yorker article on microfinance and Yunnus
Here is the link. The second half of the article is more interesting than the first; here is one short bit:
Omidyar and his colleagues say that the biggest obstacle to commercialization of the sector is philanthropic capital. They say that it distorts the market—not only by filling channels that might otherwise draw commercial investors but also by keeping unsustainable programs alive.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 24, 2006 at 03:45 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
I suspected as much about philanthropy.
Posted by: josh at Oct 24, 2006 6:18:10 PM
One wonders whether microfinance will be overtaken by mobile banking, a nice reversal of the grameen phone idea.
Posted by: adamsmithee at Oct 24, 2006 6:21:49 PM
Did anyone actually find Omidyar's position appealing, based on the article? I'm sure one could have framed it in a way that would be more favorable to him, but based purely on that article, I found it hard to be sympathetic. The poverty-relief donors mentioned, for example, were hardly looking to dump money into programs that didn't get results; the Gates money, as I recall, only got committed after a year of study and evaluation. Profit's fine, but this guy struck me as Randroid in his zeal.
Posted by: X. Trapnel at Oct 25, 2006 10:03:49 AM
I'm inclined to agree with Omidyar here. The situation seems to be screaming for an increase in microcredit in perhaps most of the so-called developing world.
Who cares which method, for-profit or non-profit gets there first? The main idea is to get there, assuming it is all it is cracked up to be. But Omidyar's method has a huge advantage over the non-profit method, namely that the for-profit method scales up generically without needing more and more donor dollars to increase scale. Omidyar's method is in effect a perpetual motion machine, and if there are enough capitalists (or quasi-capitalists in the case of Tufts, can one say a univeristy endowment is capitalist?) then this frees up philanthropist dollars like Gates' to try to do good somewhere somehow via other means. Perhaps "free" K-12 education?
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Oct 25, 2006 3:36:44 PM
For Yunus, The Nobel Committee, and all donors to microcredit:
That use is not forbidden usury,
Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
—William Shakespeare
Then, beauteous miser, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
—William Shakespeare
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Preved Medvedi!
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