what can your city do if it has no bank investing in people's liveliehoods?

[chris macrae]

the start of a discussion we have been tracking for 7 years with 10000 youth and muhammad yunus 1  2  3   4

Muhammad Yunus: The World’s most Valuable EconomistAn outline for a book by Chris Macrae and friends of pro-youth [e-mail]  Washington DC 1-301 881 1655  ECUwww.economicscrisisunion.com 

[Introduction]

At time of writing the world is in meltdown, in financial terms, in ecological terms and in terms of trust. These problems are compounded by the fact that the deleterious effects of rapid globalization include the widespread use of media in such a way that image and reality are in conflict with one another. The meaning of words is often confused, sometimes in frank opposition to common sense ruling. Two words that are of particular concern to us are “valuable” and “economics”.

 

Who are the people who are most valuable to their fellows, and to the fabric of society? In terms of the rewards distributed by the economic system and the prestige reflected in the media, the people with most apparent value are those who have and make the most money and those possessed of “celebrity”: successful actors, musicians, sportsmen or simply people with “a high media profile.” Such apparent value is fictitious; few of the individuals involved make any real contribution to the welfare of others, and many are actively dangerous to it, especially to the future prospects of the young and generations to come. There is, however, a population of largely-unsung individuals whose endeavors are of genuine value not merely to their contemporaries but to future generations. These are people who collaborate in making the future safer, by creating employment and developing solutions to economic and environmental problems, in order that individuals and organizations can continue to serve their own needs and the needs of others effectively, and in the long term: the only secure basis for the pursuit of happiness.

 

The science of economics began as an attempt to codify the principles adopted and put into practiced by genuinely valuable individuals and the organizations they found and direct; its primary focus was on long-term goals, with a broad concept of welfare, money being seen as a means to the ends implicit in that welfare. After the two world wars, however, a different kind of economics became established, in which money became simply as a means of making more money, as rapidly as possible, and the notion of broader and longer-term goals vanished. Macroeconomics—the analysis and organization of large-scale economic systems designed to facilitate the rapid reproduction of money—largely replaced the microeconomic analysis and organization of small-scale economic systems designed to serve human needs.

 

This book is intended not merely, nor primarily, to argue and demonstrate that Mohammed Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, is a uniquely valuable economist, whose ideas, if applied more generally, might ameliorate the world’s ongoing catastrophe, but also, and above all, to provide some practical guidance on collaboration and involvement in the application of those ideas. In essence, it  is intended to urge its readers to join in the formation of a network dedicated to the promotion of the most vital, exciting and productive goals relevant to today’s youth. We shall do this by providing narrative examples of exciting projects that Muhammad Yunus and others applying his ideas have mounted in order to help people—particularly women and young people—fulfill their goals: primarily and essentially to escape from the present and future poverty into which current macroeconomic policies are plunging communities and individuals at an ever-increasing rate. Yunus’ goal, and ours, is to involve as many people as possible in helping to make every community on Earth one whose children have a fair chance of discovering their abilities and putting them to use, for the maximization of their own joy and the welfare of the community as a whole. This is the measure by which economic value and economic success ought to be assessed, not the rate at which money can be reproduced and concentrated in fewer hands.

*sections coming as soon as we can find appropriate community investing practices and correspondents

 

As a matter of personal transparency, the opportunity that my father, Norman Macrae, had in his last three years of life of getting to know Muhammad Yunus also opened up an opportunity for me to enhance my understanding of my father’s life and work. I had never quite understood what made father The Economist’s Unacknowledged Giant during forty years of writing weekly leaders for what became the world’s favorite “global viewspaper.” Yunus and my father both had definitions of the word “entrepreneur” that I try never to let any friend of my family forget. In Yunus’ definition, “an entrepreneur is she who creates more jobs than she takes.” My father’s definition recalled the French origin of the word—“between taker”—as a reference to cutting off heads, the heads requiring severance, literally or figuratively, being those of any aristocracy that tends to monopolize the assets of human productivity.  Following these dicta with less crudity and brutality than the Terror would provide the basis for an entrepreneurial revolution more appropriate to the twenty-first century, of which the world is direly in need if the social and moral gains we have made since 1789 are to survive into the twenty-second.* Grameen Bank integrates the economic development of eight million illiterate mothers and over twenty-five million literate daughters and sons. More than a third of Bangladeshis are sustained by a free micromarket system that helps them maximize their productive lifetimes. Speaking of this microeconomic development paradigm, the ex-US President Bill Clinton said: “Grameen and Bangladeshi microbanking system designs make a measurable contribution to the national economy. In recent years, Bangladeshhas had one crisis after another—the kind of thing that tanks the stockmarkets—but in spite of all this trouble, this economy continues to grow about 6% or 7% a year. Unheard of! It’s coming from the grassroots, through the interlocking networks of microentrepreneurs.”* Among many crossroads at which macroeconomists took wrong turns during the second half of the twentieth century, my father’s must blunt warning was expressed in The Economist survey of “The Next Forty Years” in 1972: “The risk of complete meltdown of global financial system will be guaranteed if stockmarkets are only populated by global corporations who feel no responsibility for that place's youth development and jobs.” Hunts for type 2 stocmarkets to come