David Roodman's Microfinance Open Book Blog

 

Posts in: 7. Development as Freedom

 

Seven of Nine

April 2nd, 2011

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Heck of a week.

Last Saturday night, I learned that Mark Pitt had released a “response to Roodman and Morduch” that “seeks to correct the substantial damage that their claims have caused to the reputation of microfinance as a means of alleviating poverty.” It was a little distracting.

On Monday I spoke to faculty and then students at the Harvard Kennedy School’s MPA/ID program. And I dined with undergraduates at Dunster House, where I lived for three years. I also strolled around, seeing places I haven’t laid eyes on since I graduated 21 years ago. Boy was that powerful. Several times I came around a corner, slammed into a memory, and stopped to stare at things that weren’t there. Turns out my memories are geocoded. And most of the memories were happy, having nothing to do with getting educated and everything to do with the woman who is now my wife.

Trouble was, yesterday is the day I agreed with Nancy Birdsall as my target for readying all nine chapters for the copy editor. It was obvious by last weekend that I would miss that deadline, but I had mentally recalibrated to aim for seven of nine chapters by April 1.

I just posted chapter 7, which appraised microfinance from the viewpoint of development as freedom (.docx and .pdf). It is a challenging chapter because the concepts all have fuzzy boundaries (usury, transparency, etc.) and the evidence is fragmentary. It is also the longest. In the conclusion, I backed off trying to firmly evaluate microfinance from this perspective. Here’s the revised peroration. Comments welcome as always:
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Confronting the Evidence on Microcredit and Freedom

October 7th, 2009

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Chapter 7 of my book analyzes the impacts microfinance through Amartya Sen’s definition of “development as freedom.” It focuses on credit, the financial service whose impacts on freedom are most ambiguous. Perusing the thoughtful commentary on the blog post for the chapter draft, I was struck by how most of it deals in concepts. Rich Rosenberg points to the paradox of people exercising their freedom in order to limit it, by taking loans that oblige them to future repayments. Milford Bateman says that “The global rationale for this movement is…very clearly to disempower women (and men) by making them – more fully than virtually ever before – subject to the whims of brute market forces.”

None of the comments directly confront the evidence at the end of the chapter draft, which consists mostly of summaries of and quotes from studies done by qualitative researchers who spent weeks or months among microborrowers. That’s probably my fault. I too spend a lot of pages wrangling concepts, and put evidence at the end. You are probably too busy to read through this long draft. The post only contains the draft conclusion, in its sweeping abstractness. But on reflection, I realize that the evidence needs to be exposed. I think it founds my conclusions. It, for example, is why I came away from the chapter most doubtful about classic solidarity group lending made famous by the Grameen Bank. (Also see Why I’m Afraid to Fund Group Microcredit, the post from which this section grew.)

So here is a slightly condensed version. The draft has footnotes that link to the References.
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Chapter 7! Microfinance through “Development as Freedom” Lens

September 16th, 2009

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It’s been almost four months since I posted a chapter draft (chapter 4). Now I’m posting chapter 7 (in Word format pdf). [Update: added quotes from CARE studies in Bangladesh.] So I have some explaining to do.

I actually have drafts of 5 and 6, but I need to do more on them. I want to add some discussion of VSLAs to chapter 5 and move some of the material on insurance from 4 to 5. As for 6, all the new impact evaluations I have blogged have made the draft obsolete. I hope to have 5 and 6 for you by the end of the month. If you can’t stand the wait, you can read Microfinance as Business, on which chapter 5 is based, and peruse my posts on evaluations, which reveal the conclusions of chapter 6.

Chapter 7 is one of the hardest things I’ve ever written. Maybe my struggle is obvious in the text, which is quite long. There are a lot of contradictory ideas—credit frees by giving people more control over their finances, credit entraps—and the evidence is fragmentary. The major last section goes through studies one by one, rather than themes one by one, which is much more my wont. I gave up on a comprehensive conceptual organization.

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) will recognize past posts in the draft.

Please tell me what you think.

By way of introduction, here is the Conclusion:
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