Of course micro-credit isn't a miracle, but it does offer hope to connect poor people to the financial system so that they are not so cash-poor that it hobbles their development.
Boddi
On 10/16/06, Daniel Davies <d_squared_2002 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Joanna wrote:
>
> >>We've tried fairness for the last fifty years and it didn't work...?
>
> That one must have passed me by I guess. But now that we know it doesn't
> work, I suppose we must forge ahead.<<
>
> A somewhat flippant remark I agree but one I will stand by in the context of
> aid policy, on exactly the same grounds that JKG first made this point. Even
> allowing for the politicisation of aid, overstating of amounts, promises not
> kept, etc etc, I find it hard to take seriously the idea that anyone can look
> at the policy of distributing aid on a purely needs-based basis over the last
> fifty years and say that it's working, even a little bit. Not all of those
> stories about villages refusing to build a tin shack to store grain because
> they heard that the next door village got one ready made for free are untrue.
> The research on private education versus public in Kenya can't be dismissed as
> hot air. I think that Galbraith's theory of the "non-adapted minority" has a
> lot of truth to it here, as well as some of the facts about the socially and
> psychologically destructive effects of the dole, summed up in a piece by Noel
> Pearson that Rob Schaap (yo Rob) sent to the list a long while ago:
>
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2000/2000-September/016135.html
>
> Now it might in principle be the case that in an ideal world of justice where
> the Third World had never been a secondary theatre of the Cold War, or where
> reasonable reparations had been paid for the destruction of the colonial era,
> that needs-based aid would work just fine. But if we're waiting around for
> that then we might as well wait for world socialist revolution. Distributing
> (development, non-emergency) aid on the basis of willingness to make use of it
> is an inegalitarian policy, but it at least deserves a try as potentially a
> less horrifically wasteful way to go about things.
>
> best
> dd
>
>
>
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