Nobel laureate and founder of Grameena Bank, Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus, has emphasised the imperatives of attaining zero poverty, zero unemployment and zero net carbon emission, to resolve the crisis of unsustainable development plaguing the modern world.
Delivering the first of a series of Nobel laureate lectures to mark the centenary celebrations of the University of Mysore on Friday, Dr. Yunus said the present model of growth was highly unsustainable environmentally besides being unequal, in which 99 per cent of the world’s wealth was concentrated in 1 per cent of the population. “Human ingenuity should be unleashed to achieve the three zeros to create a better world,” he said.
In his lecture ‘Redesigning Economics to Redesign the World’, Dr. Yunus turned the conventional theory of economics upside down to a startled audience of professors and lecturers by stating that poverty was a creation of systems and was a denial of opportunity for people to grow. The economic framework was like a mould which had to be changed to create a new world, he pointed out.
The present education system with its emphasis on science, technology, medicine, business management does not kindle the spirit of entrepreneurship in students but renders them job seekers, said Dr. Yunus, while laying stress on tapping the spirit of entrepreneurship latent in every person to solve problems of poverty.
“Human beings are born free with a spirit of entrepreneurship but economics has created a distortion in which people have been reduced to cattle and are seen as mere numbers as labour, firm, etc.,” he added.
Dr. Yunus said economic theories are fine but devoid of solution, to people next door they are “fake”. He cited his own example when he lost faith in the subject he was teaching as it failed to deliver solution to redress the poverty in villages around the campus.
