Professor Yunus on "social business" and the conquest of poverty: a dissenting view

In his new book Professor Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank founder and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, proposes a novel strategy for the elimination of poverty worldwide. This strategy relies on the presumed effectiveness of what he calls “social business” in transforming the nature of the capitalist system, which thus (he supposes) will become capable of achieving all desired social improvements. We take the view however that the concept of “social business” is empty and irrelevant, and that Yunus’s thesis in fact implies the untenable proposition that (apparently) all social problems could be resolved by cost-covering interventions – thus denying the existence of a significant role for governmental or non- cost-covering charitable actions, which, in reality, are indispensable.