When Yunus got the Nobel Prize, Walden Bello had a long piece, I think it was in Common Dreams and/or The Nation. My memory of what Walden said: microcredit is way overblown, it is moderately helpful for smoothing consumption for some poor people; Yunus knows it's way overblown, he's not as simple-minded as his acolytes (Patrick may dispute this); microcredit is championed by people who want to pretend that you can do development without the state, government spending on infrastructure, etc.
which all seems quite plausible to me.
But if you compare this to much (most? nearly all?) of the agenda of the World Bank... suppose you could reallocate all the money from education and health sector and water privatization and building large dams to microcredit. wouldn't that be a good thing?
some folks want the World Bank to support state-directed development. I think this is a pipe dream. People who are serious about state-directed development send the World Bank packing, as Venezuela has done. In the meantime, however, the World Bank still has a lot of power, particularly in the smaller low-income countries, and so it's worth fighting over.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2007 14:13:31 -0700 Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Announcing Muhammad Yunus' Candidacy to Head the World Bank
For the World Bank to become useless would be a great step forward.
On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 02:35:31PM -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Jun 1, 2007, at 1:56 PM, Robert Naiman wrote:
>
> > Announcing Muhammad Yunus' Candidacy to Head the World Bank Hotlist
> > by Robert Naiman Fri Jun 01, 2007 at 09:43:04 AM PDT
>
> Do you have any evidence that microlending actually works? I haven't
> looked at the issue in a while, but last time I did, it was useless.
>
> Doug