by Professor Dennis Shaughnessy
Imagine a world in the near future in which there are no one is poor, hungry or sick, everyone has the opportunity for a quality education and dignified work, and the world is protected from further damage to the climate from carbon emissions.
Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and a 2009 Presidential Medal of
Freedom, has done just that. In his new book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of
Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment and Zero Net Carbon Emissions Yunus describes a future in
which everyone has access to a quality education, meaningful work, and the opportunity for self-sufficiency, on a planet protected from damage from accelerating climate change.
The arrival of Dr. Yunus’ latest book is timely, especially for university students and other young people about to begin their careers. In a Harvard University poll taken in 2016 of young adults, only 42% said they support capitalism, with 51% indicating that they do not (only 33% in the same poll, however, said that they support socialism instead.) Dr. Yunus’ thesis is that the world both needs and wants a different version of capitalism, one that encourages and rewards the basic human desire to unselfishly work to improve the lives of others.
Yunus’ first book, Banker to the Poor, has been read by thousands of students of social
entrepreneurship over the past nearly two decades. The memoir details his path from a working class family in Bangladesh to university economics professor to the founder of the world’s most revolutionary bank, Grameen. Banker to the Poor has inspired so many people to pursue work that makes a difference in the lives of others. His second and third books, Creating a World without Poverty and Building Social Business, explain his concept of “social business” in greater detail, focusing on the work of Grameen to build for-profit businesses that focus on sustainably solving social problems like extreme poverty rather than maximizing profit for shareholders.
This new book takes us further down Yunus’ visionary path, explaining just how social
businesses can grow and prosper alongside traditional businesses. For young people, having two options for careers in business is central to his vision for the future global economy. The first path is the traditional “selfish” business in which market opportunities are pursued in order to maximize financial return. The second path is a “selfless” path that allows people to pursue business solutions to social problems as their sole goal. Ending poverty, improving public health through access to affordable medicines, creating and building truly affordable housing and accessible transportation systems—these are some of the goals of “social businesses” that use profit as a means to financing the aggressive pursuit of much needed social change.
In advocating for social business, Yunus does not disparage traditional charity or government paths to social change. Rather, he sees social business as a strong complementary force that uniquely brings the capacity to use the world’s investment capital to solve critically important social goals– without being dependent on the generosity of philanthropists for capital. He writes about many successful social businesses and the investment funds behind their success, form Golden Bees in Uganda, to Haiti Forest to a Social Business Action Tank in Paris and and in the US.
Yunus also the first time addresses in detail the problem of inequality in the advanced
economies. He writes that the current “winner take all” model of capitalism in the US has led to an unsustainable allocation of the rewards and returns to the elite few at the expense of the many. At the same time, Yunus is not an advocate of socialism as an alternative to capitalism, but rather he suggests that a more balanced form of capitalism that includes businesses that pursue “selfless” business models is desperately needed to begin to reverse the negative economic trends we’re experiencing today.
I encourage you to read Yunus’ new book and consider “joining the movement to help create the better world we all dream of.”
