BOOK REVIEW: MUHAMMAD YUNUS: Utopia On Earth Or Wishful Thinking?

BOOK REVIEW: FOR THE SUNDAY PIONEER

TITLE:     A WORLD OF THREE ZEROS

THE NEW ECONOMICS OF ZERO POVERTY,

ZERO UNEMPLOYMENT,

AND ZERO NET CARBON EMISSIONS

AUTHOR:      MUHAMMAD YUNUS  with KARL WEBER

PUBLISHER:    HACHETTE INDIA, 2017

PRICE:          Rs. 599/- hardback

Utopia On Earth Or Wishful Thinking?

 This is Micro-Credit Maestro and Bangladesh’s Nobel Laureate For Peace (2006) Muhammad Yunus’s 4^th book.

It paints a broad swathe across the bigger alternative canvas of “poverty economics”. Yunus offers several conceptual panaceas here. They are thematically akin to the small-is-beautiful and people, well chosen, can be trusted world of micro-credit that he pioneered nearly fifty years ago.

He does quote the celebrity “inequality” economist Thomas Piketty, but the refreshing thing is Yunus spends little time and effort railing against the system. Instead he wants to persuade it to pay countless billions towards the more equitable changes he wants to bring about.

He sets about trying to charm the leading Capitalist nations, like an Economist Ismail Merchant of film-makers Merchant-Ivory fame, into rebooting into its alternative save-the-world avatar.

Yunus wants Capitalism to address the bottom of the pyramid as an act of global survival.  He starts in early by indicting traditional and indeed modern Capitalism for breeding inequality. The author says just 8 people in 2017 own wealth exceeding that of the bottom half of the world’s population, or 3.6 billion people. And that this rich- get-richer trend is getting stronger.

However, the wealthy, particularly in the West, he readily acknowledges, do give away billions of dollars in charity every year. Western Governments too pursue  extensive Welfare agendas to help the poorest of their number.

But Yunus wants them to do more. He wants Capitalism to change its very focus and cites the example of the Grameen Bank to illustrate how well his ideas can work. That he originally founded it in Bangladesh in the happening Seventies makes it confident and familiar territory.

Yunus highlights that what he began with a few rupees in credit, now lends $2.5 billion per annum to 9 million poor women. And this, not so much on the basis of collateral which they do not have, and track records which they often have yet to build, but on plain if not blind, trust. And yet, the Grameen Bank still enjoys a stellar repayment rate of 98.96%.

Muhammad Yunus is a Fulbright Scholar and former Head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University. He wants the “economic engine” to embrace the concept of  “Social Business” based on “Selflessness” as opposed to “Selfishness”,  in an almost Buddhist application of its “detachment” doctrine.

At the centre of Yunus’ Selflessness, is the controversial idea that profits cannot be taken out of enterprises to benefit only their investors, promoters, or owners. Instead, the enterprise must work like a cooperative to raise up its poor members.

Yunus  describes Social Business to mean : “ non dividend companies” dedicated to “solving human problems”. That it sounds Utopian does not seem to embarrass him.

He  goes on to emphasise entrepreneurship over jobs, and financial services designed to assist those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Most of his economic remedies are already being practiced in India by those with no access to pelf, power or much education. We call a good deal of it the “unorganised sector”, which actually employs over 80% of those holding jobs in India.

Yunus cites Uganda for his entrepreneurship model, where more than 28% of the population has started in business in the last 3.5 years. His concept of entrepreneurship at the grassroots could mean opening small shops for all manner of inexpensive consumables, milk production and animal husbandry beginning with a single goat or cow, a taxi service with a single vehicle, making a few handmade craft items for sale.

Small entrepreneurs are encouraged to open tailoring establishments, nurseries, craft businesses, rice mills, beauty parlours, restaurants, hair-cutting saloons, boutiques, copy centres, stamp paper vendors, fruit and vegetable dealers, courier services, tattoo parlours.

And the essential tool to finance Yunus style entrepreneurship: micro credit to the erstwhile unbanked demographic, and the few layers above.

Qualified professional people may have to do work like this too, because there are not enough mainstream corporate jobs to be found. Except perhaps in providing a plethora of imaginative services in tourism, telecommunications, real-estate, design, government services out-sourced, printing, interior décor, and so on. And India has grown best in the Services Sector, hopping over problematic manufacturing actually, and it accounts for more than 50% of its GDP now.

The problem of not enough jobs and even chronic unemployment ,Yunus states is not restricted to the poorer countries of the world.  Jobless people under 25 is at 18.6% on average in Europe, as of December 2016.

And in some individual EU countries, such as touristy Greece, Spain ( where resource rich Catalonia is attempting to break away now), and large, multi-faceted Italy - the rate is 40% plus. 

With increasing automation and digitisation, there is no easy solution in sight, even in the long run.

Yunus urges unsuccessful “job seekers” to turn entrepreneurs and become “job creators” instead. But it is not all glibness. He makes multiple suggestions from the bottom of the pyramid.

For “Zero Net Carbon” he wants to structure environmentally sustainable micro businesses that sell goods and services that address deforestation, plastic trash, potable water, and so on.

He wants the G20 to cancel $55 billion of debt owed by the poorest countries. Note the number when his Grameen Bank, even today, deals in just $ 2.5 billion. Yunus wants the United Nations (UN) adopted Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) which include items such as eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, universal primary education and other such lofty goals, acted upon urgently.

The true significance of such a book that soars over the inequities of the world, is in its sincere attempt to create wealth and promote equity for the poorest in every country, and not just in the Third World.

And to achieve this, Muhammad Yunus, who did win his Nobel Prize for Peace, says his model of “Social Business”, and not Capitalism’s core profit motive, will overcome poverty, and ensure: “peace among people”.

For: The Sunday Pioneer BOOKS

(984 words)

October 20^th, 2017

Gautam Mukherjee