Rationally Speaking #136 - David Roodman on Why Microfinance Won't Cure Global Poverty

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2015

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can we pull the world's poor out of poverty by giving them access to financial services? This episode features a conversation with economist David Roodman, formerly a fellow at the Center for Global Development and senior advisor to the Gates Foundation, currently senior advisor to the Open Philanthropy Project, and the author of Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance. Roodman casts a critical eye on the hype about microfinance as a panacea for global poverty. He and Julia explore why it's hard to design a good study, even a randomized one; three different conceptions of "development,"; and why Goodman doesn't think we should give up on microfinance altogether.

Transcript

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0:11.0	Also, just a note about this episode.
0:13.5	We had some recording difficulties, so the audio for our guest is unfortunately lower quality than usual.
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1:04.7	I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with us today is our guest, David Rudman.
1:10.1	David is an economist. He has been a fellow at the
1:13.7	Center for Global Development, a senior economic advisor at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
1:19.2	and currently serves as senior economic advisor to the Open Philanthropy Project. David is also
1:25.3	the author of the book, Due Diligence, an impertinent inquiry into
1:28.6	microfinance. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. David, welcome to the show.
1:33.7	Great to be here. So microfinance has been one of the approaches to helping poor people in
1:41.3	developing countries that the international community of economists and philanthropists
1:46.1	has probably been most excited about over the last few decades. David, can you just give us the
1:52.9	background for those listeners who haven't heard of it? What is microfinance and why were people
1:57.6	so excited about it? Gosh, okay.
2:02.3	Microfinance. Two sentences or less.
2:05.6	Microfinance is about providing financial services, be it loans or savings accounts or insurance
	...

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