Sorry for butting in, but there are a few things here that made me think.
First is, Glasgow has it's own community bank, the Glasgow Credit Union, and I keep meaning to put my savings in it. They give out small loans at realistic rates, to the sort of people who would otherwise have to get pay-day loans, at 1,000% APR.
Second, apparently there's been a lot of harm done by microloans in India - more oranisational than deliberate, but a bit worrying
Third, something Amartya Sen is fond of saying is that no functional democracy has ever had a famine (he says that 19th C Ireland was not a functioning democracy) which leads me to think that we should be creating democracies. It's not that simple, and Sen's brilliant book Development as Freedom spends a lot of time examining how aid can be used to develop freedom.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-02-03 04:33 pm (UTC)First is, Glasgow has it's own community bank, the Glasgow Credit Union, and I keep meaning to put my savings in it. They give out small loans at realistic rates, to the sort of people who would otherwise have to get pay-day loans, at 1,000% APR.
Second, apparently there's been a lot of harm done by microloans in India - more oranisational than deliberate, but a bit worrying
Third, something Amartya Sen is fond of saying is that no functional democracy has ever had a famine (he says that 19th C Ireland was not a functioning democracy) which leads me to think that we should be creating democracies. It's not that simple, and Sen's brilliant book Development as Freedom spends a lot of time examining how aid can be used to develop freedom.
Thanks for making me scratch my head :)