a world of three zeros book review

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A WORLD OF THREE ZEROS

The new economics of zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero net carbon emissions.

by Muhammad Yunus with Karl Weber ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 2017

The author’s humane proposal for economic reform, far from impractical, makes for provocative reading for development...

A book to make Wall Street quake—if Wall Street paid attention to the developing world.

The classic description of capitalism, writes Bangladeshi economist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Yunus ( Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity's Most Pressing Needs , 2010, etc.), assumes that the free market imposes curbs on economic inequality. In fact, it does not work that way, and inequality is growing markedly across the world, requiring a rethinking of the tenets of not only free-market capitalism, but also the marketplace. Such a rethinking, by the author’s account in this hortatory but accessible text, makes room for a hybrid “social business” that is not quite for-profit and not quite nonprofit but something that partakes of both while leveraging the human propensity for selflessness. In this regard, Yunus’ experiments in microfinance and microcredit, loaning small sums of money to businesspeople actual and aspiring, are cases in point. At the same time, he adds, a re-envisioned economics will recognize that humans are naturally entrepreneurs, best served not by jobs as such but by opportunities to make their own ventures in the marketplace. Again, his microfinancial work “introduced a new program of offering new-entrepreneur loans from Grameen Bank to support…efforts to create businesses” on the part of young Bangladeshis. Entrepreneurship catering to the mass market, Yunus argues, will prove more sustainable in the end than “trying to sell a few more luxury goods to a handful of wealthy people who already have more things than they will ever need.” A third plank of a revised economics includes sustainable, clean energy, which Yunus believes developing nations are better positioned to adapt than many advanced economies, precisely because they are more of a blank slate. While antithetical to the prevailing capitalism, the author’s reforms, he insists, will yield an economic system that more closely corresponds to who humans really are: partners and not predators.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-61039-757-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | ECONOMICS | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

Notes on the first 150 years in america.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates ( The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood , 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions

• By Muhammad Yunus
• PublicAffairs
• Reviewed by Linda Nemec
• February 13, 2018

A Nobel laureate offers practical advice for re-imagining the concept of capitalism.

Muhammad Yunus wants us to know that capitalism is doing just what it is meant to do: create and concentrate wealth. But in his book A World of Three Zeros , Yunus advocates rethinking the basic tenets of capitalism, given that poverty and unemployment demean so many, and that climate change threatens so much.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner, known for his creative solutions to alleviating poverty, questions Adam Smith’s assumption that a “human being is basically a personal-gain-seeking being” and asks us to consider the social dimension to the decisions and investments we make. He lays out a new framework, supported by his own successful economic experiments, for better tapping human capital to solve the world’s problems.

The author’s basic premise is that “people are both selfish and selfless, and that both motivations can be applied to economic activity.” He notes:

“The central problem with capitalism as it is now practiced is that the system recognizes only one goal — the selfish pursuit of individual profit. As a result, only businesses designed around this goal are recognized and supported. Yet millions of people around the world are eager to pursue other goals, including elimination of poverty, unemployment, and environmental degradation. All three can be dramatically reduced if we simply begin designing businesses with these goals in mind. And that is where social business plays a crucial role.”

A social business, as defined by Yunus, is “a non-dividend company dedicated to solving human problems.” Investors who provide the capital to launch these businesses receive back their initial investments only. After the investment amount is paid back, profits from these companies are plowed back in and used to expand their services or products so more people can benefit. Unlike nonprofit organizations, there is no need to constantly apply for grants or fundraise because social businesses are “designed to create revenues and thereby become self-sustaining.”

Yunus makes clear with many examples that solutions are available and ready to be applied and expanded in both developing and developed countries. “For too long, we’ve tolerated the persistence of poverty, unemployment, and environmental destruction, as if these are natural calamities completely out of human control, or, at best, unavoidable costs of economic growth. They are not. They are failures of our economic system.”

His efforts to address unemployment center on entrepreneurship. He asks us to consider what would happen if we directed young people from the hunting for jobs, in which too many are unsuccessful, to creating jobs for themselves and others. And what if we made it much easier to do so through institutions designed to provide equity financing based on business ideas and not on the typical requirements that the poor or youth can’t meet?

He criticizes the messages we send to our children:

“No job, no life — this message is sent loud and clear from every direction: home, school, media…When you become an adult, you offer yourself to the scrutiny of the job market. A job is your destiny. If you miss it, you show up in the bread line. Nobody tells young people that they are nature-built to become entrepreneurs rather than waiting in line to get hired.”

His framework is thought-provoking and has real potential to make a difference, but his strong political views and anti-capitalism rhetoric are likely to turn off some readers. For example, “The top 1 percent will find they have fewer people at their service. All the micro-entrepreneurs who are busy running their own businesses will no longer be available to work for the 1 percent as mercenaries.”

The book is inspirational, but it becomes repetitive if you’re reading for recommendations, and I wanted to learn about what institutional framework would be needed to implement the author’s models. Chapter 10, “The Legal and Financial Infrastructure We Need,” provided those recommendations. And I was surprised (and somewhat relieved) to read that what Yunus proposes, with changes to laws and regulations, could easily sit next to existing systems in most countries — developed and developing.

The topic and the engaging stories of success should interest all types of readers. I would make it required reading for high school and college students; they are at a good age to question systems that are not serving us as well as they should be.

A system wherein just eight people (Oxfam’s announcement in January 2017) own combined wealth exceeding that of the bottom half of the world’s population is due for a tune-up, if not an overhaul.

Linda Nemec, who once chatted with Dr. Yunus on a flight from Tashkent to Almaty, is an economic-development practitioner, analyst, and observer. She is vice president of Nathan Associates, an economic consulting firm established in the 1940s by Robert Nathan, an economist at the U.S. Department of Commerce involved in the creation of the concept of GDP.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

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Review: A World of Three Zeroes by Muhammad Yunus

In his optimistic a world of three zeroes, nobel prize winner, muhammad yunus presents a case for reinventing mainstream economics to create a world with zero unemployment, zero poverty and zero net carbon emissions.

At an address in Prague in August 1996, Lech Walesa said that while the transition from capitalism to communism was easy, the transition from communism to capitalism wasn’t. “It is easy to make fish soup from the aquarium with living gold-fish, but just imagine what a challenge it is to try to make the aquarium with living goldfish out of the fish-soup,” he said, adding that this was what was being attempted in his native Poland.

Walesa’s fellow Nobel prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, has now drawn up a proposal to make soup out of an aquarium. Riding on the contested success of the micro credit movement, he presents a case for reinventing mainstream economics in A World of Three Zeroes. The proposal for the new economics aims to create a world with zero unemployment and zero poverty in an eco-friendly world that will have zero net carbon emissions.

In a realm where money begets money, Adam Smith’s invisible hand hasn’t served the poor which led economist Thomas Piketty to argue that progressive taxation alone can remedy growing income imbalance. Yunus’ contention is that neither of the two (progressive taxation or the invisible hand) will change the picture. He believes the solution rests on unleashing the entrepreneurial skills of the bottom billions in creating a mass base for building models of ‘social business’. The world needs a new economic system that unleashes altruism as a creative force by assuming that human beings are born entrepreneurs and not mere job seekers. In his hortatory writing, the author calls for a hybrid business model that is neither quite for-profit nor quite non-profit but one that partakes virtues of both in leveraging the innate human desire to be selfless.

Drawing inspiration from several of his social business models currently operative across the world, including Golden Bees in Uganda and the Human Harbor Corporation in Japan, Yunus is convinced that the old ways of addressing poverty and unemployment through charitable efforts and government programmes cannot generate the desired 40 million jobs every year. The idea seems to have merit, and is the reason leading global companies like Renault, McCain, Danone and Essilor have contributed funds to run social businesses for providing multiple services to the needy in poor suburbs in both developed and developing countries. The bottom line, the author argues, is to give people the resources and knowhow such that they can grow and become part of the economic mainstream.

The proposition is promising but, like the micro-credit model, the idea of the social business smacks of overt optimism. That both are borne out of the capitalist economy can in itself be their undoing. Since the idea of social business is but an extended version of the micro credit model of entrepreneurship, its performance has a direct corollary on the future of social business. Despite claims, the short-term gains from micro loans have not translated into the creation of long-term assets. This has trapped a large number of poor recipients into a debt cycle. Barring a few exceptions, the majority of microfinance institutions have been on a profit-making spree at the cost of poor lenders. This is why it has remained a low-hanging fruit of the capitalist economy. Under the circumstances, will social business be any different?

Yunus’ intentions are noble and his approach is balanced and practical. The case for social business has been persuasively made but the precondition of a near ideal sociopolitical ecosystem to nurture it seems preposterous. Left on its own without a regulatory framework, there is a risk that unscrupulous capitalists will exploit the opportunity to colour their profit-making business as a ‘social business’. While no society is driven by greed alone it is also true that economics has remained the science of self-interest. It seems unreal to expect economic man and capitalist market to turn away from profit maximization.

The capitalist economy continues to build its social image through charities. But the trouble with a charity dollar is that it can be used only once while a social business investment dollar is recycled indefinitely. Yunus is convinced that a dollar invested in social business can contribute significantly to transforming local and national economies. Clearly, there is a need to rethink the tenets of free-market capitalism and the marketplace itself. Add to this the question of the coexistence of social business within the dominant world of the capitalist economy, and the risk of the former being usurped by the latter.

Read more: Run small finance banks like a social business: Grameen Bank’s Muhammad Yunus

While it is true that only re-envisioned economics will recognize humans as natural entrepreneurs, best served not by jobs but by opportunities to make their own ventures in the marketplace, the challenge of re-imagining mainstream economics can only be seen as a work in progress. Yunus generates excitement about the potential of turning things around but there are more questions than answers in his vision. Though the humane proposal for economic reform is far from practical, A World of Three Zeroes does provide provocations for a wider engagement with development economists and specialists.

Sudhirendar Sharma is an independent writer, researcher and academic.

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A World of Three Zeros

The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions

Muhammad Yunus | 4.10 | 1,051 ratings and reviews

Ranked #65 in Business Ethics

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A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions Paperback – September 26, 2017

Purchase options and add-ons

• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher PublicAffairs
• Publication date September 26, 2017
• Dimensions 6 x 1 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1541767926
• ISBN-13 978-1541767928
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ PublicAffairs (September 26, 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1541767926
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1541767928
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9.25 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #5,573,850 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

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A World of Three Zeros book review: The new economics of zero poverty, unemployment and net carbon

The solutions to many of the world’s pressing problems, including hunger, poverty and disease, are within reach. these excerpts explain how these solutions could be accelerated through the creation of a new economic order..

With the world’s population approaching 8 billion people, it is more crucial than ever that we reevaluate the concept of capitalism. Will we continue to sacrifice the environment, our health, and our children’s future in the relentless pursuit of money and power? Or will we take the destiny of the planet into our hands by reimagining a world where we put the needs of all people at the center, and where our creativity, wealth, and other resources become a means to achieve those needs? Rethinking and remaking our economic system is not simply a nice idea. There really is no viable alternative if we hope to enjoy a future on this planet. While short-term trends may appear to benefit a few of us at the expense of many others, in the long run only policies that will allow all the people of the world to share the progress are truly sustainable. The fate of high-net-worth investors served by bankers on Wall Street and that of poor women working in a garment factory in Bangladesh are linked together. The fate of a sorghum farmer in Uganda, a maize farmer in Mexico, and a soybean farmer in Iowa are all intertwined.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen our world lurch from one crisis to another: financial disasters, famines, energy shortages, environmental catastrophes, military conflicts, floods of refugees, rising political instability. Populist leaders are calling for walls to be built between countries; they are calling for nations to suddenly abandon international unions built over decades of dedicated diplomacy and high hopes for shared peace and prosperity. This is the time to bring the world together to face this series of crises in a well-planned, well-managed way—to seize the moment as our best opportunity to design and put in place a new economic and financial architecture so that these types of crises will never occur again, long-standing global problems will be addressed decisively, and the incoherence and deficiencies of the current economic and social order will finally be repaired.

The most important feature of this new global economic architecture will be to bring the half-built theoretical framework of capitalism to completion by incorporating the second type of business, social business, and by reworking the theory to recognize that all human beings are entrepreneurs, not merely providers of labor as present theory assumes. Once these changes are included in the framework, they can play an important role in solving the financial crisis, the food crisis, the energy crisis, and the environmental crisis. The new economic structure will provide the most effective institutional mechanism for addressing the unresolved problems of poverty and disease. Social business can address all the problems that are left behind by the profit-making businesses while correcting their excesses.

The Highest Form of Human Creativity Social business isn’t just an essential tool for resolving the crises that humankind faces. It also represents a wonderful expression of human creativity—perhaps the highest form of creativity that humans are capable of. We know that the objective of a social business is to meet human needs. But when we are creating a social business, the needs to be met must be defined precisely, because the entire business will be designed according to this objective. This is not a problem in conventional business, because, in a fundamental sense, the objective of every conventional business is the same—to achieve the highest return on investment. Not so in social business. The concrete objective varies from business to business. That’s why defining that objective clearly is so important.

Then comes the design of the business. This has to be appropriate to achieve the objective. And because the concrete objectives of social businesses vary so widely, social business design calls forth enormous creative power. In most cases, a social business designer is envisioning something that has never existed before. The task demands a lot of creativity, and that’s why it is so exciting. My own experiences have shown me that once you are successful as a social business designer, you don’t want to quit. Once you are bitten by the social business bug, you find yourself wanting to design another business even more powerful than the one you designed before . . . and then another, and another.

Social business is a powerful avenue for self-discovery, self-exploration, and self-definition. Best of all, seeing the social benefits created by the business—the hungry children fed, the homeless families given shelter, the diseased people cured—offers a profound inner satisfaction that no other creative endeavor can match. Believe me, nothing in life is more rewarding than fulfilling the creative passion through the act of imagining a social business and then translating it into reality.

Let every young person grow up knowing that he or she can enter the working world as a creative entrepreneur. Let them get ready every day, thinking about what they will do as adults that will let them take care of their families and make a big difference in the world at the same time. Many boys and girls will fall in love and build a life with their partner because they have the same purpose for their lives and believe in the same goals for the world. They can go on to develop a social business together, creating a family life filled with satisfaction and joy at the same time as they bring greater happiness to the whole world.

*** We are fortunate enough to have been born in an age of great possibilities—an age of amazing technologies, of great wealth, and of limitless human potential. Now the solutions to many of our world’s pressing problems—including problems like hunger, poverty, and disease that have plagued humankind since before the dawn of history—are within reach. Most of these solutions could be accelerated through the creation of a new economic order that includes the powerful tool of social business.

In a world that seems to be creating more and more depressing news every day, we can create an outburst of hope, demonstrating that the indomitable human spirit need never yield to frustration and despair. The purpose of human life on this planet is not merely to survive but to live on it with grace, beauty, and happiness. It is up to us to make it happen. We can create a new civilization based not on greed but on the full range of human values. Let’s begin today.

Pages 263-266 Excerpted with permission from A World of Three Zeros: Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus (Hachette India ) that is out now in bookstores.

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A World of Three Zeros

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Yunus Cntre Press Release 02nd November 2017

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• 02nd November 2017

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Book Review: A World of Three Zeros

Samir Shukla

By Samir Shukla

A World of Three Zeros The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions Author: Dr. Muhammad Yunus (Public Affairs Books) Dr. Yunus is the inventor of microcredit, first launched in his native Bangladesh with his innovative Grameen Bank in 1976. The Nobel Peace Prize winner has spent four decades working to improve the plight of the poor and has written several books. His latest book, A World of Three Zeros, hones in on a concept that reconceptualizes capitalism from its current form into something more altruistic, which he calls social business. He writes about ways to take capitalism to its more honorable level where singular profit seeking is not the prime motive, but rather businesses can work to create better societies and help humanity and the planet along the way. He is not talking about socialism. He posits that capitalism is not a bad system, but its engine is broken. In its contemporary form it leads to inequality, unemployment, and environmental degradation. He writes about unleashing new models of social businesses and enterprises that unleash altruism as a force to match the powerful self-interests that currently guide capitalism. In essence, social businesses are designed to serve human needs rather than accumulate wealth, while not forsaking profits or returns on investment. He writes, “The trend toward ever-increasing wealth concentration is dangerous because it threatens human progress, social cohesion, human rights, and democracy. A world in which wealth is concentrated in a few hands is also a world in which political power is controlled by a few and used by them for their own benefit.” In essence, social business models can help remove hurdles to help the unbanked and low income people into participating as entrepreneurs and small business owners. He also makes cogent points about reducing regulations and simplifying laws, while using technology, to help the poor and low income people to become entrepreneurs. His ideas and philosophy are compelling and will take time but, as he argues, involving young people is crucial in this endeavor. He also makes a case for working to achieve net zero carbon emissions, as climate change affects poor people more. Yunus makes intriguing points and gives examples of the slowly burgeoning social business models. He cites that global companies like McCain, Renault, Essilor, and Danone have gotten involved with this new economic model through their own social action groups. These models are helping poor people, especially women, to start businesses from Bangladesh to France as well United States. His succinctly writes about the shortcomings of traditional banking systems that deny services to those who need them most—the world’s poorest people. This fact is made worse by the other related dilemmas: “lack of institutional services, lack of clean drinking water and sanitary facilities, lack of health care, inadequate education, substandard housing, no access to energy, and neglect in old age.” The downsides of capitalism don’t just affect developing nations. “In my global travels, I’ve found that low-income people in the world’s richest nations are suffering from many of the same problems.” Yunus says he is a proponent of free markets and that capitalism is not an enemy, but it has to be reformed in order to bring opportunities to all. “Capitalism has indeed stimulated innovation and economic growth. But in a world of skyrocketing inequality, more and more people are asking, ‘Does the invisible hand produce its benefits for everybody in the society?’ The answer seems obvious. Somehow the invisible hand must be heavily biased toward the richest—otherwise, how could today’s enormous wealth concentration continue to grow?” He adds, “I don’t think rich people became rich because they are bad people. Many of them are good people who simply made use of the existing economic system to reach the top of the ladder. And many of them share the widespread feeling of uneasiness over living in a world that is sharply divided between rich and poor.” He notes, “One piece of evidence is the large sums of money that people donate to charitable causes, either in the form of individual gifts to nonprofit organizations or through philanthropic foundations. People give away hundreds of billions of dollars to charities every year. Even most corporations, while their leaders may pay allegiance to the doctrine that profit maximization is the only valid function of business, siphon off a percentage of their profits to community service projects and charitable gifts in the name of ‘social responsibility’.” He concludes, “Charity and welfare programs are well-intended efforts to lessen the damage done by the capitalist system. But a real solution requires a change in the system itself. A new way of thinking is needed, a redesigned economic engine.” Yunus’ redesigned economic engine has three basic elements. “First, we need to embrace the concept of social business—a new form of enterprise based on the human virtue of selflessness. Second, we need to replace the assumption that human beings are job seekers with the new assumption that human beings are entrepreneurs. Third, we need to redesign the entire financial system to make it work efficiently for the people at the bottom of the economic ladder.” Of course, achieving zero  anything  (as the subtitle of the book offers) is a tall order, but his intertwined ideas are succinct and can be small steps toward betterment of people. For more details on Yunus’ work visit,   muhammadyunus.org/

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A World of Three Zeros Lib/E: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions Audio CD – Unabridged, Sept. 26 2017

A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and bestselling author of Banker to the Poor offers his vision of an emerging new economic system that can save humankind and the planet.

Muhammad Yunus, who created microcredit, invented social business, and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in alleviating poverty, is one of today's most trenchant social critics. Now he declares it's time to admit that the capitalist engine is broken-that in its current form it inevitably leads to rampant inequality, massive unemployment, and environmental destruction. We need a new economic system that unleashes altruism as a creative force just as powerful as self-interest.

Is this a pipe dream? Not at all. In the last decade, thousands of people and organizations have already embraced Yunus's vision of a new form of capitalism, launching innovative social businesses designed to serve human needs rather than accumulate wealth. They are bringing solar energy to millions of homes in Bangladesh; turning thousands of unemployed young people into entrepreneurs through equity investments; financing female-owned businesses in cities across the United States; bringing mobility, shelter, and other services to the rural poor in France; and creating a global support network to help young entrepreneurs launch their start-ups.

In A World of Three Zeros , Yunus describes the new civilization emerging from the economic experiments his work has helped to inspire. He explains how global companies like McCain, Renault, Essilor, and Danone got involved with this new economic model through their own social action groups, describes the ingenious new financial tools now funding social businesses, and sketches the legal and regulatory changes needed to jumpstart the next wave of socially driven innovations. And he invites young people, business and political leaders, and ordinary citizens to join the movement and help create the better world we all dream of.

• Language English
• Publisher Public Affairs
• Publication date Sept. 26 2017
• ISBN-10 1478991763
• ISBN-13 978-1478991762
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Public Affairs; Library ed. edition (Sept. 26 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1478991763
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1478991762
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 234 g

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A World of Three Zeros

The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions

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By Muhammad Yunus

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• Audiobook Download (Unabridged)
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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 11, 2018. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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• Social Science
• Poverty & Homelessness
• "A book to make Wall Street quake." Kirkus Reviews
• "With wealth disparity an ongoing global concern, Yunus's inspiring and hopeful message is a must-read for all readers with even a semblance of economic literacy." Library Journal, starred

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Muhammad Yunus

About the author.

Muhammad Yunus , a native of Bangladesh, was educated at Dhaka University and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University. In 1972 he became head of the economics department at Chittagong University. He is the founder and managing director of Grameen Bank, a pioneer of microcredit, an economic movement that has helped lift millions of families around the world out of poverty. Yunus and Grameen Bank are winners of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

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