Independent research for global prosperity
I tend toward curmudgeonry, as you might have noticed. And I don't spare new technologies of my skepticism even though I am a natural computer programmer. (Really, what was so bad about punch cards?) I don't have a smart phone, but am pleased with two features of my dumb phone: It can receive calls. And it can make them too.
Nicholas Kristof's column today is about the promise of microsavings. He starts by describing what must be a Village Savings & Loan Association (VLSA), operated by Catholic Relief Services in Nicaragua:
“We used to buy a three-liter bottle of Coke every day,” recalled Socorro Machado, a 49-year-old homemaker in a village here in northwestern Nicaragua. That was a bit less than a gallon, and the cost of $1.75 consumed a large share of the family’s budget.
2009 brought an embarrassment of riches in readings on the impacts of microfinance: Portfolios of the Poor, two randomized studies of microcredit and one
Beth Rhyne just elaborated on my post in which I quote her 1992 writings at length. She explores why her perspective, not so surprisingly, did not catch on much:
I wrote about how, since all Wall Street stock pickers are smart, it is hard for any one of them to consistently out-smart the rest---and even harder for you, the small investor, to pick such a winner in advance.
Schumpeter is a sort of patron saint in this field. I may be alone in thinking that he should be treated like a patron saint: paraded around one day each year and more or less ignored the rest of the time.---Robert Solow, 1994
Ketaki Gokhale, who won a Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Internship to work at the Wall Street Journal this year, and who ignited some controversy this summer with a story asserting widespread microcredit overlending in India, has continued to cover microfinance in In
