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

by Muhammad Yunus

Overview

From Nobel Prize winner and bestselling author of Banker to the Poor, a vision of an emerging new economic system that can save humankind and the planet

Muhammad Yunus is one of the modern world’s most trenchant social critics. In A World of Three Zeros, he declare it’s time to admit that the capitalist engine has failed most people – that in its current form it inevitably leads to rampant inequality, widespread unemployment, and environmental destruction. Instead, we need a new economic system that unleashes altruism as a creative force just as powerful as self-interest.
 
Here, Yunus describes the ingenious new financial tools now funding social businesses and sketches the legal and regulatory changes needed to jump-start the next wave of socially driven innovations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541742390
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	09/11/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Muhammad Yunus, a native of Bangladesh, 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. He is currently serving as Chief Adviser to the interim government of Bangladesh.

Table of Contents

Part 1 The Challenge

1 The Failures of Capitalism 3

2 Creating a New Civilization: The Counter economics of Social Business 17

Part 2 The Three Zeros

3 Zero Poverty: Bringing an End to Income Inequality 35

4 Zero UN employment: We Are Not Job Seekers, We Are Job Creators 67

5 Zero Net Carbon: Creating an Economics of Sustainability 95

6 A Road Map to a Better Future 118

Part 3 Megapowers for Transforming the World

7 Youth: Energizing and Empowering the Young People of the World 146

8 Technology: Unleashing the Power of Technology to Liberate All People 173

9 Good Governance and Human Rights: Keys to Building a Society That Works for All 199

Part 4 Stepping Stones to the Future

10 The Legal and Financial Infrastructure We Need 229

11 Redesigning the World of Tomorrow 259

Notes 267

Index 273

Editorial Reviews

"Muhammad Yunus was just trying to help a village, but somehow managed to change the world." —President Barack Obama

"Muhammad Yunus has shown himself to be a leader who has managed to translate visions into p0ractical action for the benefit of millions of people, not only in Bangladesh, but also in many other countries." —Norwegian Nobel Committee

"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

"A book to make Wall Street quake."—Kirkus Reviews

"Yunus offers sound recommendations to distribute global wealth more equitably through individual and systemic support for small-scale entrepreneurship.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

The author won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. To explain his formula for solving the problems of global wealth disparity and climate degradation, this audiobook needs the confidence and idealism that come across in Dan Woren’s narration. His tonal and phrasing palette works well as Yunus, an activist Bangladeshi banker and economist, addresses global poverty through microlending and other forms of social capitalism. The author says the purely monetary goals of traditional capitalism should expand to include helping the poor become entrepreneurs so they can enjoy dignified work and have sustainable incomes. Though implementing these initiatives and the author’s other plans for improving the planet are a heavy lift in today's political climate, his alarming data and predictions make this a call to action that we ignore at our peril. T.W. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile

The author won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. To explain his formula for solving the problems of global wealth disparity and climate degradation, this audiobook needs the confidence and idealism that come across in Dan Woren’s narration. His tonal and phrasing palette works well as Yunus, an activist Bangladeshi banker and economist, addresses global poverty through microlending and other forms of social capitalism. The author says the purely monetary goals of traditional capitalism should expand to include helping the poor become entrepreneurs so they can enjoy dignified work and have sustainable incomes. Though implementing these initiatives and the author’s other plans for improving the planet are a heavy lift in today's political climate, his alarming data and predictions make this a call to action that we ignore at our peril. T.W. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile

2017-07-17
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. The author's humane proposal for economic reform, far from impractical, makes for provocative reading for development specialists.

Kirkus Reviews