![]() ![]() Yunus acknowledges that people are selfish, eager to enrich themselves. In businesses not directed towards profit but social impact, businesses that are financially self-sustaining but plow the profits back into the business rather than the pockets of shareholders. We all want to express our creative power." Instead, he believes in socially conscious entrepreneurship. ![]() "Human beings," Yunus sniffs, "are not to be kept in charity. So Universal Basic Income, an increasingly popular idea, gets short shrift. With jobs for vast numbers threatened by technology, Yunus argues that solutions founded in "old-fashioned economic thinking" just won't cut it. There is no "moral justification", he says, contrasting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's attitude towards granting Bangladeshi Hindus citizenship to his reluctance to even acknowledge Rohingya Muslims as legitimate refugees fleeing a crisis.Ī World of Three Zeros decries inequality, stresses the iniquity of just eight people (eight!) owning more wealth than 3.6 billion people (3.6 billion!). Yunus is "very disappointed" too with India's response, with how a country "with great influence on Suu Kyi is walking away from a situation of horror". She has, he said, "deviated from her path" and encouraged her to "visit the Rohingya people in Bangladesh and tell them that Burma is as much their country as it is hers". Still, Yunus roused himself for one more passionate denunciation of fellow Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, "a symbol of violence and atrocity". He was taking time out from the UN General Assembly session, where he'd been speaking at events on the sidelines and lunching with the likes of French president Emmanuel Macron. ![]() Indeed, speaking on the phone from New York last month, he sounded tired, scratchy, a 77-year-old man saddled with too arduous a responsibility. In the 40 or so years since the founding of Grameen Bank, Yunus has won a Nobel Peace and been recognised as one of the world's top 'global thinkers' but refuses to be put out to gilded pasture. "Microcredit has since unleashed," he writes, "the entrepreneurial capabilities of over 300 million poor people around the world, helping to break the chains of poverty and exploitation that have enslaved them." ![]() A professor in Chittagong, Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in 1976, he reminds us in the opening chapter of his new book A World of Three Zeros. By Shougat Dasgupta: Muhammad Yunus is most famous for his successful experiments in microcredit, in loaning out small sums at low interest rates to poor people seeking opportunities, not handouts. ![]()
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