Poverty and Peace

I have written before about my growing awareness of the poverty problem, and its link to violence. Today the Nobel Peace Prize committee has made that link explicit yet again, by awarding this most estimable of prizes to Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who pioneered microcredit.

I won't repeat my arguments about the crucial importance of poverty from July, except to add that nothing I've learned since then has changed my opinion--unless deepening that opinion constitutes a change. (And by the way, this is completely gratuitous, but Stephen Baldwin's idiotic rantings that efforts to end global poverty and violence are "stupid arrogance" just leave me breathless with stupefaction.)

I happened to catch the 60 Minutes report in 1989 about Dr. Yunus, and the self-evident brilliance--and inspired simplicity--of the microcredit idea were immediately impressive, even though at the time I had not yet had my "conversion" to the depth of the poverty problem. So I was just plain thrilled this morning when I heard the news--it was pretty much the first thing I heard when my radio/alarm came on--and of course it's no surprise at all that Dr. Yunus has already pledged to use the prize money for the furtherance of his work.

For years, it was the Literature prize that most caught my attention. But there's been a little change in my perspective lately, and now it's the Peace prize I'm most interested in. And this year's selection, with its implicit recognition of the links between poverty and violence, and how fighting the one fights the other, is dead right.