The Not So Noble Prize...

With the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize toMuhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, it appears that everyone has reason tocelebrate. There is wide agreement that Yunus is fully deserving of the highestrecognition: he launched the idea of 'microcredit', or the grant of very smallloans to the destitute who are incapable of offering any collateral. The GrameenBank that Yunus founded over three decades ago has so far given out 6.6 millionloans, averaging around $130 each, and it claims from its borrowers, who areoverwhelmingly women, an astounding repayment rate of more than 98percent. 

The Nobel Prize Citation states, in justification of its award to Yunus, that'economic growth and political democracy cannot achieve their full potentialunless the female half of humanity participates on an equal footing with themale', and evidently Yunus has done much more than most others to empower women.'There is, thus, a proud nation: this is the first Nobel award conferred on aBangladeshi, and for once Bangladesh has made the news—in the West, at least—forsome reason other than a cyclone, a bomb attack, or the increasingly perilousstate of its garment industry. Yunus will now be, in the terribly clichédlanguage of our times, a 'positive role model' for Bangladeshis. The word has itthat Bangladesh is jolting with festivity, a celebration almost akin to the oneexperienced not so long ago when Bangladeshi cricketers, who are relativenovices to the game, triumphed over the mighty Pakistani cricket team.

Apart from the recipients, who have every reason tofeel jubilant, humanists, the advocates of the poor, and human rightscampaigners must also feel satisfied at the outcome. The Swedish Academy ofScience which awards the prize has in recent years been taking a more expansiveview of what constitutes noble work on behalf of 'peace', and with the award ofthe prize to Yunus this year the Swedish Academy has belatedly come around tothe recognition that the attainment of peace is inextricably intertwined withthe elimination of poverty. In the citation accompanying the award, the prizecommittee noted that 'lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large populationgroups find ways in which to break out of poverty.' 

Among the constituencies that must feel elated, one must not forget theBengalis—not that they ever allow the rest of the world, and especially theirfellow South Asians, to forget their glorious attainments. The previousrecipients of the award from the Indian subcontinent have all been Bengalis,barring those—the scientists Hargobind Khorana, S. Chandrasekhar and AbdusSalam—who had long before moved overseas. Moreover, Mother Teresa, whose workamong the poor in Calcutta earned her the Nobel Peace Prize, has been placed inthe galaxy of honorary Bengalis. Muhammad Yunus's name will now, justifiably, beadded to those of Amartya Sen and Rabindranath Tagore.

Even economists, one might say, have reason to bepleased about the Swedish Academy's decision. That phrase, 'even economists',should not be taken lightly, and to register its complexity one must begin withthe observation that Muhammad Yunus is an economist by training and profession.He is also the first economist to be conferred the Peace Prize rather than thePrize, awarded by the Swedish Bank, in 'Economic Sciences'. Any dividend of thiskind must be a great boost to economists, who cannot be accused of anysignificant ethical, political, or professional investment in questions ofpeace, distributive justice, and equality. 

Let us recall that enduring description of economics as 'the dismal science'by Thomas Carlyle, scarcely a cheerful man himself. By having persuadedthemselves and everyone else that economics is comprised of universal truthswhich can be grasped, understood, and at least approximated by mathematicalmodels, economists distanced themselves from the problems of the poor and themarginalized, leaving those concerns to their poorer (and lesser-paid) cousinssuch as anthropologists, social and urban geographers, and (though economistsare loathe to be placed anywhere in their company) social workers. Indeed, toput the matter more strongly, economists have generally waged not a war onpoverty but on the poor. The tens of thousands of farmers who have committedsuicide around the world in recent years—20,000 in India alone— or themillions who have come under the tyranny of structural adjustment programs, orthe tens of millions who have been pushed into gigantic slums are all silentwitnesses to the raging war on the poor which has greatly intensified with theworldwide embrace of market economies. 

To be sure, there are the likes of Amartya Sen who evince the unlikely imageof the sensitive and caring economist, but no one should be mistaken intothinking that Sen is unorthodox as an economist, or that he works in anysignificant way outside the parameters of liberal thought, now inflecteddoubtless by multiculturalism and globalism.

From the standpoint of the economists, then, the conferral of the Peace Prizeupon Muhammad Yunus is unambiguously a good thing. It gives economists a veneerof humanity and allows them the satisfaction of feeling that they can no longerbe viewed as indifferent to the plight of the poor. Secondly, thoughcapitalism's most strident advocates remain supremely confident that no betteralternative has ever been placed before humankind, and that the free marketeconomy is the cornerstone of everything that is good in life, they have alwayssought to mitigate the representation of capitalism as little better thanunchecked greed and rapacious behavior by pointing to capitalism's philanthropicmanifestations. 

Lately, 'social capitalism' has received a fresh breath of life, with suchluminaries as Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Ted Turner, and Bono appearing assupposed friends of the poor. Though Yunus has little in common with theseimmensely influential and wealthy paragons of society, he has shared publicplatforms with them, and can, in the West, be summoned as an illustration of howpoor countries can be made partners in conversations about the elimination ofdestitution, disease, and hunger. As the professional economist in the West seesit, Yunus shows much better than Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez how economics canwork for the poor without alienating the rich. Though economists find words like'revolution', 'poor', and 'bottom' grating, even they recognize that 'revolutionfrom the bottom'—and it is the bottom segments of society that Yunus hastouched with microcredit—has a nice-sounding feel about it.

Above all, however, economists have every reason to applaud the SwedishAcademy's recognition of Yunus as an eminently sagacious act of statesmanlikebehavior since the Academy has preserved the absolute inviolability of theEconomics Prize. As an economist who has, in the words of the Nobel PrizeCommittee, 'shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring abouttheir own development', one would have thought that Yunus is deserving of theEconomics Prize. Yunus himself, when asked why he had been awarded the PeacePrize rather than the Economics Prize, thought it sufficient that his work hadbeen honored and that, through him, the poor have been recognized. But this isthe charitable response of a cultured man, rather than a political readingcognizant of the oppressiveness of modern knowledge systems.

Since its inception in 1969, the 'Economics Prize' hasbeen, with an exception or two, the exclusive preserve of white males. Not onewoman is included among the 85 economists named to this honor, though women havepreviously won the prize in physics and chemistry, and more frequently prizes inmedicine, literature, and peace. The Swedish Academy of Science and itssupporters will doubtless argue that the Economics Prize, like all the others,goes to the most deserving person, and that the Academy is oblivious toquestions of gender as much as race, religion, or ethnicity. But theself-representation of economics as a masculinist enterprise, a hard sciencewhich is subject to the tests of verifiability, cannot be overlooked if one isto understand the borders that modern knowledge systems place around eachdiscipline and between disciplines. 

Peace is all very well and good, economists are prone to think, and it isfitting that women should number frequently among those honored for theircontributions to peace. When the economist must think about love and peace,which is not very often, he thinks of how he might accommodate these knottysubjects within an enumerative framework. As a budding young student in a Ph.D.program in economics at a leading American research university once told me at apolitical economy workshop, 'the economist can successfully model love'. Yunusmay be an economist by training, but as an economist he, in the language of theeconomist, has gone 'soft'. Thus, his discussion of development and empowerment,poverty and poor, even finance and banking, are something of an embarrassment tothe economist. Unlike the physicist or natural scientist, who need not flaunthis scientific credentials, and who might even be open to negotiations aboutwhat constitutes scientific work, the economist will tolerate nothing that mightappear to place a dent in the hard armor of the 'economic sciences'.

Muhammad Yunus must, to reiterate, be applauded for his work. There areserious critiques of microcredit, but this is not the place to address them. Hisidea of microcredit is already being hijacked by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz,who has been waxing silly about microcredit's power to lift the millions ofAndhra Pradesh into the ranks of the consuming middle class, as well as HillaryRodham Clinton, who in a column on 5 April 2000 (Talking It Over)described herself as inspired after a visit to Bangladesh 'by the power of theseloans to enable even the poorest of women to start businesses, lifting theirfamilies—and their communities—out of poverty.' Before Yunus knows it, hewill be swept off his feet by the West's microcredit juggernaut and blitzkrieg.Such is the graciousness of the man that he will put it down as a mark of hissuccess. But what Yunus should know is that the day a peace activist wins theNobel Prize in Economics, a true revolution in the affairs of the world mightperhaps have been launched.

Dr Vinay Lal is Associate Professor of Historyand Asian American Studies, UCLA.