In the making of money, as in all things human, fashions mysteriously come and go. Retail franchises, software start-ups, dot-coms ? all have had their day on the cutting edge of capitalism, only to drop off.
What, then, is the new black in entrepreneurship? Would you believe, poverty? The slums of the world apparently are the latest El Dorado. Free enterprise has finagled a way to extract wealth from wealth’s very antithesis, and the notion of making a profit while doing good has caught on among some of the world’s most avant-garde entrepreneurs, including Jack Ma, a Chinese e-commerce tycoon.
When asked in a recent television interview what idea excited him now, he offered this surprising answer: social service. Mr. Ma had already put his money where his mouth is.
In China a year ago, he helped fund a microfinancing Grameen Bank, which gives the poor millions of tiny loans and usually sees them punctiliously repaid, The Times reported.
It is the founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, who may take credit for the virtually alchemical discovery that profit and poverty can mix to the benefit of both. Although Mr. Yunus hails from a discipline that some claim may be as dubious as alchemy, there were no voodoo economics in microfinance, and he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
Mr. Ma said to his colleagues: “If you have money, but have not turned this money into an experience to elevate people’s level of happiness, then you may very well only possess a mountain of very colorful pieces of paper.” Mr. Ma thinks doing good with money can be good business, that more money can be made from it. A mountain of money, as Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun Microsystems, discovered.
Mr. Khosla’s investment in a lender to poor Indian women, The Times reported, is now worth about $117 million, about 37 times what he put into the firm in 2006 and 2007. And Mr. Khosla is plowing these wellgotten gains into other social enterprises that mean to profit from doing the right thing.
Alas, not all who have rushed to mine the profits of poverty are bent on altruism. In his book “Broke USA,” Gary Rivlin, a contributor to The New York Times, tells of an industry that arose not to aid but to exploit poor Americans, a conglomeration of check-cashers, pay-day lenders and rent-to-own stores that he dubbed Poverty Inc. Globally, Poverty Inc. might be said to include the phenomenon of poverty tourism in the favelas of Brazil and the slums of India. Many say this “poorism” is in the poorest taste.
But tour operators have insisted that they were trying to show that these ostensible slums were actually industrious nodes of the global economy - the alchemical forges in which the base metal of humanity was being turned into gold.
Indeed, that tourism should be attracted to such places could well be interpreted as encouraging, a sign that, thanks in part to Mr. Yunus and his friends, extreme poverty is an endangered species, one that you ought to see while you still can. It would certainly be pretty to think so.
CARLOS CUNHA
