The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

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pages: 423 words: 149,033

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid by C. K. Prahalad

"World Economic Forum" Davos, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, call centre, cashless society, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, do well by doing good, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, information asymmetry, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, microcredit, new economy, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, shareholder value, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, time value of money, transaction costs, vertical integration, wealth creators, working poor

What is needed is a better approach to help the poor, an approach that involves partnering with them to innovate and achieve sustainable win–win scenarios where the poor are actively engaged and, at the same time, the companies providing products 3 The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid 4 Purchasing power parity in U.S. dollars Population in millions > $20,000 Tier 1 75 – 100 $1,500 – $20,000 Tiers 2–3 1,500 – 1,750 $1,500 Tier 4 4,000 < $1,500 Tier 5 Figure 1.1 The economic pyramid. Source: C. K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart, 2002. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Strategy+ Business, Issue 26, 2002. Reprinted with permission from strategy + business, the award-winning management quarterly published by Booz Allen Hamilton. www.strategy-business.com.

Praise for The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid “C. K. Prahalad argues that companies must revolutionize how they do business in developing countries if both sides of that economic equation are to prosper. Drawing on a wealth of case studies, his compelling new book offers an intriguing blueprint for how to fight poverty with profitability.” Bill Gates Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft “The Bottom of the Pyramid belongs at the top of the reading list for business people, academics, and experts pursuing the elusive goal of sustainable growth in the developing world. C. K. Prahalad writes with uncommon insight about consumer needs in poor societies and opportunities for the private sector to serve important public purposes while enhancing its own bottom line.

Christopher Rodrigues CEO, Visa International “An important and insightful work showing persuasively how the private sector can be put at the center of development, not just as a rhetorical flourish but as a real engine of jobs and services for the poor.” Mark Malloch Brown Administrator United Nations Development Programme “Most people recognize that poverty is a major problem in the world, yet they throw up their hands and say, ‘What to do?’ Not so C. K. Prahalad. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid gives us hope and strategies for eradicating poverty through profits that benefit all. Pass this book on to those who need to read it.” Ken Blanchard co-author of The One Minute Manager® and The Secret: What Great Leaders Know-And Do In the face of accelerating turbulence and change, business leaders and policy makers need new ways of thinking to sustain performance and growth.


Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World by Michael Edwards

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Bernie Madoff, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, different worldview, high net worth, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Shuttleworth, market bubble, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, subprime mortgage crisis, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

The lesson is very clear: Don’t sacrifice systems change for quick, material results. Invest in the capacity of countries and communities to manage and direct their own 40 small change health care and other aspects of their development so that they can cope with whatever problems come their way. microcredit and the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” The other high-profile success story of philanthrocapitalism is microcredit or microfinance — in some people’s minds, part of a broader claim that markets are the best way to eradicate global poverty. Although few rigorous evaluations of the impact of microfinance exist, it is clear that increasing poor people’s access to savings, credit, and other financial services is a very good thing, and in one or two countries it has already reached significant scale — 21 million clients and 105 million family members in Bangladesh alone.6 Microfinance increases people’s resilience, reduces their need to sell precious assets in times of trouble, and finances consumption, including spending on health and education that are vital for the future; but it doesn’t move them out of poverty on its own.

Pollin, “Micro-credit: False Hopes and Real Possibilities,” Foreign Policy in Focus, June 21, 2007. 7. E. Malkin, “Microfinance’s Success Sets Off a Debate in Mexico,” New York Times, April 5, 2008. 8. Hudson Institute, Index of Global Philanthropy (Washington, D.C.: Hudson Institute, 2007). 9. C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2006). 10. A. Karnani, “Micro-finance Misses Its Mark,” Stanford Social Innovation Review (Summer 2007): 34–40. 11. R. Tandon and J. Thekkudan, “Women’s Livelihood and Global Engagement in a Globalized World” (New Delhi: PRIA and Sussex: Institute for Development Studies, 2007). 12.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Good tools are important, but it’s even more important that architects and artisans use the right combination of tools in the right way for each decision-making task. Eradicating Poverty Through Profits? Another fashionable trend sees practitioners applying for-profit business approaches to social causes. The idea was put forth seductively by C. K. Prahalad, a professor of business at the University of Michigan. In his 2004 book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, he wrote that the 4 billion people in the world who live on less than $2 a day could be enriched if they were viewed as a business opportunity.20 Prahalad’s motto is captured in the book’s subtitle: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. According to Prahalad, governments and nonprofits have been going about things all wrong, especially when it comes to poverty.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 20th Anniversary Edition. Penguin. Pradan. (2014). PRADAN annual report 2013–2014, www.pradan.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=109&Itemid=88. ———. (n.d.). Mission, www.pradan.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=4. Prahalad, C. K. (2004). The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. Wharton School Publishing. Prensky, Marc. (2011). Digital natives, digital immigrants. In Marc Bauerlein, ed., The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking. Tarcher/Penguin. Pritchett, Lant. (1996).

See also Social media Fairlie, Robert, 12, 31 Family connections, 148, 250(n11), 257(n52) Farmer, Paul, 254(n25) Farmer Field Schools, 207 The fear of missing out (FOMO), 41, 234(n7) Feudal systems, 237(n20) Financial crisis (2007–2008), 61, 97 Finland: student achievement, 13 First Law of Robotics, Asimov’s, 217, 276–277(n16) The Flickering Mind (Oppenheimer), 10, 228(n17) Florida, Richard, 186–187. See also Creative class Food insecurity, 22, 230(n7) Ford Foundation, 86 Foreign aid, 72, 198. See also International development Foreign direct investment, 183–185 The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Prahalad), 82–84 Foundation and Earth (Asimov), 277(n16) Foundation for International Community Assistance, 71 France: compassionate class, 190 Franklin, Benjamin, 276(n8) Franzen, Jonathan, 86 Freedom, 93. See also Democracy Free will, illusion of, 264(n45), 265(n3) Free-PC, 48 Freud, Sigmund, 161, 260(n18) Fukuyama, Francis, 276(n15) Gaddafi, Muammar, 33 Games, computerized.


pages: 498 words: 145,708

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

See the OECD website www.oecd.org/dataoecd/40/3/353879786.pdf. Complete data are available at the Sustainable Development website: www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/UsAid.asp. 41. C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Wharton School Publishing, 2004), pp. xi–xii. The publication of two articles, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” in Strategy + Business (January 2002), with Stuart L. Hart, and “Serve the World’s Poor, Profitably” in the Harvard Business Review (September 2002) with Allen Hammond, signaled Prahalad’s success in breaking through into the business community with his ideas. 42.

Although each, as I will show, finally depends, like almost every reform we have examined here, on some form of government intervention, they remind us of the dynamism of capitalism when it is liberated from a dominant cultural ethos to which it has become tethered, and allowed to serve a system that by addressing real need can accommodate justice as well as prosperity. In his popular text with the self-explanatory title The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C. K. Prahalad, an economist at the University of Michigan, seeks to reattach the heavy load of poverty reduction to the engine of what he calls an “inclusive capitalism” by treating the poor as a capitalist “growth opportunity” in which their own collaborative contribution is critical.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Perkins, Dwight H., Steven Radelet, and David L. Lindauer. Economics of Development. 6th ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006. Pogge, Thomas W. World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002. Prahalad, C. K. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. Philadelphia: Wharton School Publishing, 2006. Pritchett, Lant. Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on International Labor Mobility. Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development, 2006. Rangan, V. Kasturai, ed. Business Solutions for the Global Poor: Creating Social and Economic Value.


pages: 304 words: 85,291

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Richard Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), 149, that each infantryman got two drachmas, “one for himself and another for his servant,” though we can only speculate the extent to which the infantrymen truly split their earnings fifty-fifty with those who assisted them. the work of marketing experts: Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske, Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods—and How Companies Create Them, with John Butman, rev. ed. (New York: Portfolio, 2005). other economists have called BOP: C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Wharton School Publishing, 2005). the authors call “rocketing”: Silverstein and Fiske, Trading Up, 6. In the ancient subcontinental cities: Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 143.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

King, Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians, and Publishers (Washington, DC: Special Libraries Association, 2000), 273. 109. Harold Varmus, E-Biomed: A Proposal for Electronic Publications in the Biomedical Sciences (Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, 1999). 110. C. K. Prahald, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School of Publishing, 2005), 319-357, Section 4, "The ITC e-Choupal Story." 111. For the sources of numbers for the software industry, see chapter 2 in this volume. IBM numbers, in particular, are identified in figure 2.1. 112.

King, Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians, and Publishers (Washington, DC: Special Libraries Association, 2000), 273. 109. Harold Varmus, E-Biomed: A Proposal for Electronic Publications in the Biomedical Sciences (Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, 1999). 110. C. K. Prahald, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School of Publishing, 2005), 319-357, Section 4, "The ITC e-Choupal Story." 111. For the sources of numbers for the software industry, see chapter 2 in this volume. IBM numbers, in particular, are identified in figure 2.1. 112.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Doing better with less Frugal innovation is not just about “doing more with less” but about “doing better with less”, and finding ways to reduce complexity in all aspects of the business. But when done right, companies will find that they are better placed to do the following. Capture underserved markets at the bottom of the pyramid In his book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C.K. Prahalad, a management guru, argued that low-income people in developing economies such as India, Africa and Brazil collectively represent a huge, untapped market. But a bottom of the pyramid exists in developed economies too, and is not negligible. According to Accenture, a multinational management consulting and services company, low-income Europeans represent a €220 billion ($280 billion) untapped market.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

It was at work every time one bought a pair of cloth shoes and took comfort in knowing that another pair of shoes would soon be slipped onto a poor person’s feet. It could be detected in a poster on a college campus: “Research shows that giving makes you happier. Be selfish & give.” It could be seen in the buzzy idea of the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid,” promoted by the late management scholar C. K. Prahalad, who promised big business “a win-win situation: not only do corporations tap into a vibrant market, but by treating the poor as consumers they are no longer treated with indignity; they become empowered customers.” It could be, for a World Bank adviser on refugee issues, a vital selling point for what once might have been advocated purely on compassionate grounds: “Getting Syrians back to work—a win-win for host countries and the refugees.”


pages: 296 words: 87,299

Portfolios of the poor: how the world's poor live on $2 a day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford

behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, clean water, failed state, financial innovation, financial intermediation, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, M-Pesa, mental accounting, microcredit, moral hazard, profit motive, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, transaction costs

Quarterly Journal of Economics 114 (3): 769–817. Patole, Meenal, and Orlanda Ruthven. 2001. “Metro moneylenders: Microcredit providers for Delhi’s poor.” Small Enterprise Development 13 (2): 36–45. Pauly, Mark. 1968. “The economics of moral hazard: Comment.” American Economic Review 58 (3): 531–37. Prahalad, C. K. 2005. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing. Reille, Xavier, and Sarah Forester. 2008. “Foreign capital investment in microfinance.” Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, CGAP Focus Note 43. Rosenberg, Richard. 2007. “CGAP reflections on the Compartamos initial public offering: A case study on microfinance interest rates and profits.”


pages: 335 words: 96,002

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

Done right, an entry into these markets brings increased choice, opportunity, competition, and a chance to increase quality of life in those communities. Business-based solutions are more sustainable and empowering than aid or a handout, which is finite and can create dependency. Hidden market prospects exist globally. In his landmark book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, business professor C.K. Prahalad laid out the money-making opportunities that come with appealing to the world's four billion poorest people. The world's poorest socioeconomic group is also the largest, and the most neglected by the market. The Emerging Markets11 The Future is Here In 2014, the OECD estimated that the population in emerging markets made up 85 percent of the world's population.


pages: 370 words: 112,602

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cass Sunstein, charter city, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, experimental subject, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, land tenure, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, microcredit, moral hazard, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, tontine, urban planning

Net assets include all savings, capital, and household assets net of borrowing. 13 Dean Karlan and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Debt Cycles,” work in progress (2011). 14 Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Cynthia Kinnan, “The Miracle of Microfinance?,” MIT, manuscript (2010). Bruno Crépon, Florencia Devoto, Esther Duflo, and William Parienté, “Evaluation d’impact du microcrédit en zone rural: Enseignement d’une expérimentation randomisée au Maroc,” MIT, mimeo. Chapter 9 1 C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Philadelphia: Wharton School Publishing, 2004). 2 Tarun Khanna, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures—and Yours (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2007). 3 Suresh de Mel, David McKenzie, and Christopher Woodruff, “Returns to Capital in Microenterprises: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 123 (4) (2008): 1329—1372. 4 David McKenzie and Christopher Woodruff, “Experimental Evidence on Returns to Capital and Access to Finance in Mexico,” World Bank Economic Review 22 (3) (2008): 457–482. 5 Abhijit Banerjee, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo, and Jeremy Shapiro, “Targeting the Hard-Core Poor: An Impact Assessment,” MIT (2010), mimeo. 6 For a description of the Townsend data, see Krislert Samphantharak and Robert Townsend, “Households as Corporate Firms: Constructing Financial Statements from Integrated Household Surveys,” University of California at San Diego and University of Chicago (2006), mimeo. 7 The study in Peru is Dean Karlan and Martin Valdivia,“Teaching Entrepreneurship: Impact of Business Training on Microfinance Clients and Institutions,” Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming.


pages: 335 words: 104,850

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia, Bill George

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, income per capita, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Elkington, lone genius, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, six sigma, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Kramer, “Creating Shared Value: How to Reinvent Capitalism—and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2011, 2–17. 5. Bill Gates, “Making Capitalism More Creative,” Time, July 31, 2008, available at www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1828069,00.html. 6. The late C. K. Prahalad popularized this idea through his book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Philadelphia: Wharton School Publishing, 2004). 7. B Lab, “B Corps Redefine Success in Business,” annual report, 2012, www.bcorporation.net/. Appendix C 1. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959; first published in Austria in 1946 under the title Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager). 2.


pages: 403 words: 105,550

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

Most people in emerging markets were extremely poor but they were rapidly acquiring more purchasing power and economies were booming. A fashionable new business theory supported Arif’s pitch. Put simply, the new idea was that investing was a way to do good as well as to make money. The Indian academic C. K. Prahalad was a prophet of this theory. His 2004 book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, was a seminal articulation of the creed. Prahalad’s ideas percolated through universities and governments and were enthusiastically embraced by global business leaders including Paul Polman, a Dutchman who considered training to be a priest and a doctor but went on to become chief executive of Unilever, the consumer goods maker.


pages: 391 words: 117,984

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz

access to a mobile phone, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business process, business process outsourcing, clean water, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, Kibera, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, market design, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, tontine, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Le Guin (Creative Education) Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Anchor) Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (NYRB Classics) Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh (Mariner Books) Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell (Penguin Books) The Tempest by William Shakespeare Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Heinemann) Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh (Grove Press) BOOKS AND ARTICLES ON INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS TO POVERTY ALLEVIATION “A Behavioral-Economics View of Poverty” by Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir (American Economic Review 94, no. 2) The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier (Oxford University Press) Capitalism as if the World Matters by Jonathon Porritt and Amory B. Lovins (Earthscan Publications) Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (Anchor) The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Penguin Press) The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C.K. Prahalad (Wharton School Publishing) Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Norton) The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando de Soto (Basic Books) Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer (University of California Press) Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green (Bloomsbury Press) Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester R.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

AES was trustworthy, and its new customers were trustworthy, but President Hugo Chávez turned out not to be. After initially supporting the effort, he nationalized the system in 2007 and threw out AES. (The company took its lessons learned and its Caracas team to install a similar system in São Paulo.) AES, among many other corporations, was inspired by C. K. Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (2005). The book spells out how companies can reach the world’s 4 billion poor and deliver goods and services at the interface between the formal and informal economies. Prahalad writes that the poor shop after seven P.M.; they buy in tiny quantities; they welcome relief from the premium prices they often have to pay to slum (sometimes criminal) monopolies; and they are comfortable leapfrogging to new technologies.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Collected Papers on the Experimental Foundations of Economics and Political Science. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Praag, Bernard M. S. van, and Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell. 2004. Happiness Quantified: A Satisfaction Calculus Approach. New York: Oxford University Press. Pralahad, C. K. 2004. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits. Pittsburgh, PA: Wharton Business School. Putnam, Robert. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2000. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster. ———, ed. 2002. Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Embassy, http://nicaragua.usembassy.gov/property_disputes_in_nicaragua.html. There are an estimated thirty thousand properties in dispute. 4. Interview with Joyce Kim, June 12, 2015. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/04/15/massive-drop-in-number-of-unbanked-says-new-report; and C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Philadelphia: Wharton School Publishing, 2009). This figure is an estimate. 8. Interview with Joyce Kim, June 12, 2015. 9. www.ilo.org/global/topics/youth-employment/lang—en/index.htm. 10. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014). 11. www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2014/05/declining%20business%20dynamism%20litan/declining_business_dynamism_hathaway_litan.pdf. 12.


pages: 505 words: 127,542

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy? by Raj Raghunathan

behavioural economics, Blue Ocean Strategy, Broken windows theory, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Phillip Zimbardo, placebo effect, science of happiness, Skype, sugar pill, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game, Zipcar

significant proportion of the world’s population: According to one article, as high a proportion as 60 percent of the world’s population does not have access to adequate water-related sanitation; see “60% of the World’s Population Still Don’t Have the Best Innovation in Human Health,” Slate, Feb. 22, 2013, accessed on Sept. 18, 2015, at www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/22/_60_percent_of_the_world_population_still_without_toilets.html. “bottom of the pyramid”: This is a term introduced by management professor C. K. Prahalad to refer to those below the poverty line; C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2005). have repeatedly shown: See Drive by Dan Pink for a reader-friendly review of this literature; D. H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Penguin, 2011). climate change: E.g., see T.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Commonly, a baby suffering from diarrhea-induced dehydration goes into shock and dies. Preparing food with unwashed hands spreads the bacteria and viruses that cause diarrhea. In 2005, C. K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan Business School professor, wrote a fascinating book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. He shows how private firms can sometimes find it in their own interest to help solve some of the problems of the poor that are traditionally addressed by aid agencies. The Searchers in a free market do much better than aid agencies in solving specific problems of the poor, although having a profit incentive to do so is not the typical case.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Prahalad and Muhammad Yunus (below) in Benjamin Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, New York: W. W. Norton, 2007, pp. 323–326. De Soto has acknowledged the issues and observed that a considerable number of those who have been supposed beneficiaries of legalizing capital have expressed a preference for going back to the old invisible system. 31. C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2004, pp. xi–xii. 32. For a useful, if dated, narrative depicting Grameen’s beginnings and its founding vision, see David Bornstein, The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank and the Idea That Is Helping the Poor to Change Their Lives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Stiglitz and A. Weiss, “Credit Rationing in Markets with Imperfect Information,” American Economic Review 71, no. 3 (June 1981): 393–410. In the United States beginning in 1980, federal laws increasingly preempted state laws that attempted to restrict usury. 27. See C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005). 28. The former governor of the Reserve Bank of India explicitly made the link between microcredit in India and America’s subprime lending: Y. V. Reddy “Microfinance in India Is like Subprime Lending,” Economic Times, November 23, 2010, available at http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-11-23/news/27602978_1_priority-sector-lending-sks-microfinance-microfinance-industry. 29.


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Pete Engardio, “Beyond the Green Corporation,” Businessweek, January 29, 2007, 51–64. 3.Countless books and articles published in recent years have advocated greater corporate social engagement and documented exemplary practices—particularly with regard to climate change, pollution, and working conditions in the developing world. See especially C. K. Prahalad and S. L. Hart, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” Strategy+Business, no. 26 (2002): 54–67; Andrew W. Savitz, The Triple Bottom Line: How Today’s Best-Run Companies Are Achieving Economic, Social and Environmental Success—and How You Can, Too (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006); E. Freya Williams, Green Giants: How Smart Companies Turn Sustainability into Billion-Dollar Businesses (New York: AMACOM, 2015); and John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2013).


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

London: Hurst, 2009 (English translation of original French volume). pp. 105-124. 9 Crombé, Xavier. “Building the Case for Emergency: MSF and the Malnutrition Factor.” A Not-So Natural Disaster: Niger 2005. London: Hurst, 2009 (English translation of original French volume). 10 Prahalad, C. K. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Upper Saddle River: Wharton School Publishing, 2006. 11 Rice, Andrew. “The Peanut Solution.” The New York Times Magazine. 2 Sept. 2010. ON HUNGER: ORIGINS 1 Cordón Bonet, Faustino. Cocinar hizo al hombre. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2002. 2 King James, Exodus 16:3, 16:4. 3 Russell, Sharman Apt.