Academic

FROM KEN ANDERSON MORE ON THE INDIAN MICROFINANCE COLLAPSE: One can pile up important similaritie?

By Glenn Reynolds

FROM KEN ANDERSON MORE ON THE INDIAN MICROFINANCE COLLAPSE:

One can pile up important similarities, but one that is perhaps less noticed is something that, as someone who works out in the gym in Fannie Mae?s basement, I heard a lot over the past dozen years: a tendency to play a self-deceptive bait and switch between doing good and doing well. I.e., the many conversations with Fannie Mae senior staff who, when things were going well, thought (what they thought of as) their mixed social-profit model must be great, and as things weren?t going so well, took comfort in the idea that they were doing good and this was merely a cost of doing ?good? business. Something like that seems to have been present here ? which hardly surprises me because I confess to having been tempted to it many times, working in or advising organizations with similarly mixed motives.

The invitation to self-deception is high, in other words. Bertolt Brecht wrote a play ? famous in its day, and one of his writings that deserves to live on ? The Good Person of Szechuan, in which a young woman of tender and generous heart inherits a tiny shop, but discovers that she cannot keep it afloat because she cannot say no to all the need around her. So she goes on a journey and then her cousin comes to run the shop ? ruthlessly and with an iron hand to make it profitable again. And so it goes several times round. Brecht thought of this as a condemnation of capitalism; it is perhaps rather more instructive of the virtues of not mixing motives.

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Full post as published by Instapundit.com on November 21, 2010 (boomark / email).