I’m appearing on CSPAN-2′s BookTV this Saturday, March 17 at 10 pm. The event was filmed at the Aspen Institute on Feb. 21, a roundtable luncheon that includes me and Iqbal Quadir, the driving force behind GrameenPhone in Bangladesh.

The show may also air on Sunday (check the BookTV schedule), and may then be viewable in the BookTV archives, but I don’t know for sure.

BookTV runs 48 hours every weekend, from Sat 8 am to Monday 8 am.

Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, is almost certain to enter politics within the month and step down from Grameen Bank, according the Dhaka’s Daily Star. He is expecting to run as an independent in Bangladesh’s upcoming elections. An editorial in the Daily Star, “We need local leaders not national personalities,” written by an ex-pat Bengali, takes a dim view of this prospect. Ironically, others within Bangladesh feel that Yunus more appeal more to Westerners and ex-pats than those living in the country. But, no one knows, least of all Yunus himself.

Asked what he would be like in a partisan role, he replied, “I do not know.”

Separately, Yunus this week announced he wants GrameenPhone to list on the Dhaka Stock Exchange and offer one share to each of Grameen Bank’s 6.9 million borrowers.

A very interesting opinion piece in the Jan. 29 Wall Street Journal notes that both the Nobel Prize winner in economics (Edmund Phelps) and peace (Muhammad Yunus) highlighted the impact of entrepreneurship in their Nobel addresses. “Phelp’s Prize” by Amar Bhide, a professor at Columbia University, and Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, picks at the open wound between plain-old entrepreneuers and social entrepreneurs. I basically agree with them, but I also beg to differ as I think they compare apples and oranges. (I don’t link to the article because I don’t have a subscription to wsj.com.)

Of the 35 winners in economics, 28 never mentioned the word “entrepreneur.” Phelps mentioned it 17 times–more than the total over the previous 19 years! Yunus mentions it 6 times. Twenty-three mentions in two Nobel speeches has to be a record. But it is almost as if the laureates had a different dictionary in front of them when choosing their words.

Phelps talks about a transformative entrepreneurship that is central to capitalism, by sparking growth of small businesses that become large commercial operations; Yunus talks about microloans that don’t involve economies of scale or lead to significant new enterprises. The writers ask, ” Can turning more beggars into basket weavers make Bangladesh less of a, well, basket case?”

Well, no–but. It’s a false dichotomy–and the writers know it. They note Bangladesh’s export-oriented garment industry as being “larger and more productive than individual craftsman,” which is true, as a way of saying that it is better to provide venture capital to growing businesses than seed capital to individuals. They also note that government reforms, such as those that are now propelling Vietnam to new heights, are more important than microloans. But because the Bangladesh government is intractably backward and corrupt and anti-private business, does that mean that Yunus’s loans are a bad thing? I think the writers are reacting to the hoopla rather than the reality.

I am not an unabashed proponent of microloans, because I agree with the writers that while they may lift individual families out of poverty, they do not scale an economy. But I do not think microloans are a bad thing–how could they be? Some, such as Alexander Cockburn in The Nation (“The Myth of Microloans”), paint microloans as the devil incarnate, due to farmer suicides in India.

To me, the issue is clear: Capital that helps people raise a cow and escape poverty is as good as capital that helps start an Apple Computer. Yes, there’s a difference of scale. But there’s also a difference of context. The two sources of capital are not comparable–one’s in America, one’s in Bangladesh. But that doesn’t mean they’re not both productive.

And what about microloans that help build a GrameenPhone, the largest and most successful business in Bangladesh? It would not have been built without microloans that allowed distribution into rural villages, because Grameen Bank would not have backed the project. Does that not count? The authors cannot take a potshot at Yunus’s track record without examining his full portfolio.Â

Straw-man arguments are not compelling. It’s not either-or. Let’s deal with the facts on the ground–and celebrate entrepreneurs and capital that builds businesses of all kinds.

From issue #39 of Ode magazine, which has done a great job of reporting on the Grameen empire over the years, a cover story on Muhammad Yunus, with some insight into what makes the Nobel laureate tick: 

In his phenomenal book The Tipping Point, journalist Malcolm Gladwell discusses how “social epidemics” come into being, whether the trend involves the miraculous comeback of outmoded shoes or a seemingly inexplicable increase in suicides among young adults in Micronesia. Gladwell distinguishes among three types of people, all of whom play a crucial role in helping bring an idea into the world: connectors (who have the right contacts), mavens (knowledgeable people with a strong need to help others make an informed choice) and salespeople (who influence people to buy certain things or behave a certain way).

Muhammad Yunus embodies at least two of these types, according to Iqbal Quadir, who took the initiative to establish a nationwide cellphone company in Bangladesh with the help of Grameen Bank, what later became known as GrameenPhone (see Ode, April 2005).

“Yunus is a super connector. He knows exactly what to say when he is with people like Bill Clinton, who helped Yunus be known around the world, or when he is talking to poor people in the villages in Bangladesh. He can connect with people easily.” And Yunus is a salesperson par excellence in a positive sense, says Quadir: “He can convince people easily.”

But there’s an even more important factor at play, according to Quadir, founder and director of the MIT Program in Developmental Entrepreneurship. Yunus is “a very practical man,” he says. In other words: Yunus gets things done.