David Roodman was quoted in a Mother Jones article on Muhammed Yunus
From the Article
David Roodman, a leading micro-finance academic, has been cautious in his response to Micro Debt, which he was interviewed for. In his Microfinance blog, he complains that:
Tom seems to have made pretty much the most negative movie he could. As I show just below, the film sensationalizes matters that have more to do with making Muhammad Yunus look bad than whether microcredit is good for the poor; exaggerates the Grameen Bank's interest rates despite my explanations in e-mail to Tom and on this blog; and heavily favors negative voices, depriving viewers of the opportunity to glimpse the complexities of the real world and think for themselves.
While Roodman asserts personally that Heinemann tweaked interest rates to suit the film’s purposes, there are other examples as well. Two MIT economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, write that in the rural Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, two-thirds of the poor have loans on which they pay an average 57% in interest. This number makes Yunus’s 17 to 24 percent interest (Roodman’s calculations) seem much more reasonable.
Read the Article
