The irony of Grameen

There’s a delicious irony in the report in the Financial Times of 17 February that the Grameen Bank will soon start lending operations in the United States. The Grameen Bank is based in Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries. How could it be that a Bangladeshi bank has made inroads into the world’s richest country?

The story is interesting on several levels. First, Grameen is a micro-finance operation, started by the unassuming Muhammed Yunus, who in 2006 won the Nobel Prize for his work. The fact that a micro-finance bank can pick up business in the United States speaks more than a volume for the disparities in wealth in the home of capitalism. Second, the concept of micro-finance has come under attack recently, but mostly from people who cannot grasp the non-traditional motivations of the bank. In fact, there is nothing really new about the way micro-finance operates. What is new is that the concept is reappearing at a time when most people thought that the ‘traditional’ sources of credit were all that existed. Third, and for me the most interesting, is the link between micro-finance and ‘social capital’, the topic du jour for economists.

Micro-credit banks operate by advancing very small sums of money to people who either cannot obtain credit from banks, or, if credit is available, at usurious levels. Grameen itself started in 1976 when Mr Yunus loaned $27 to 42 women in Bangladesh. The women used the money to start new enterprises, and earned enough to repay the loans. Everyone benefited, not least Bangladesh.

One of the two interesting elements in micro-credit is the loan guarantee system, and this is what makes micro-credit so interesting from a sociological point of view. New borrowers have (usually) to be introduced by other existing borrowers. If a borrower defaults, the others share the bank’s loss. Naturally this makes everyone ultra-careful, and there is a great deal of social pressure on the borrower to make sure repayments are on time. In a very real sense, the bank has outsourced credit control to the community, but passed on the savings to its customers. The credit control is even better since Grameen stopped lending to men. Yunus found that men often squandered their loans on luxuries or drugs, and that women were the real agents of change in rural Bangladesh.

The other element is the ‘social business’ purpose for micro-credit, exemplified by Grameen. In essence, the bank depicts the emerging paradigm of profit replaced by sustainability. Grameen, and other micro-finance operations, were designed with a specific social purpose in mind, that is lending to borrowers marginalised by mainstream credit operations. The bottom line for micro-credit is therefore more than just profit, although that is necessary just to maintain and expand operations. The bottom line is now “people, profits and planet”.

Criticism of Grameen’s way of doing business is usually the basis of a misunderstanding of the role of micro-credit. The role is not charity, and lending money to the marginalised is not ‘the kindness of strangers’. The role is similar to the idea of giving someone a plough instead of a sack of wheat, and the whole point of the bank’s credit enforcement structure is that the other borrowers are not strangers.

For me, the most interesting part of the Grameen success story is the timing. Grameen is growing at a time when globalisation seems unstoppable, even if it might just possibly be a good thing to somehow ‘stop’ it. It’s entirely possible that Grameen could only grow as a result of the social gaps left by what Schumpeter called ‘the creative chaos’ of modern capitalism. Micro-credit might therefore be a workable indicator reflecting the social capital of a society. How much ‘glue’ there is, sticking the society together, is revealed by how ready the members of the society, or community, are to lend money to each other through micro-credit. Because micro-credit depends on knowing how far you can trust your neighbour, and as an extension, your willingness to bail out your neighbour if times are hard, micro-credit can only exist when social capital is strong. Grameen’s entry into the United States is fascinating not so much for the fact that such a wealthy country needs a small Bangladeshi bank, but from the apparent existence of high social capital groups that can and need to borrow small sums. Grameen’s new American borrowers are groups of immigrant women in New York’s borough of Queen’s. I wish them the very best of luck.

Hardy's Tree of Life

My brother Henry recently sent me (and my two sisters) a link to some information about Thomas Hardy. In his early years, Hardy worked as a trainee architect in London, and part of his job involved the movement of a graveyard. The bodies had to be carefully exhumed and moved to make way for a railway station. Even in their new location, the bodies were not left in peace. The photograph shows a tree forcing its way upwards through the headstones and brushing them aside.

Hardy would have appreciated the image because of its depiction of blind impersonal forces at work, entirely unknowing and careless. One has only to read Tess to see how Hardy viewed mankind's relationship with the rest of the natural world. As humans, we dance around on the surface of a tiny, unimportant planet, entirely at the mercy of forces we don't even know about. It's enough to make you open that bottle of Chateau Palmer before it's too late.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer influenced Hardy, as well as Proust and other writers of Hardy's era, but their names remain far better known than that of Schopenhauer. It's true that the only photograph we have of the man shows a rather grim figure (he had all his teeth removed) and his philosophy can be depressing if you're not prepared to take risks. A major theme with Schopenhauer is that it would have been better not to have been born in the first place but, being here, we should make the best of it. At first reading this is not terribly uplifting, and it's a long way from religious ecstasy or incense sticks and humming. But Schopenhauer does ring true, particularly for older readers such as myself. In some ways, Schopenhauer was an early existentialist, and it is not surprising that his work was largely ignored until the horrors of the Second World War became known. The existential movement---Sartre, Camus and the rest---could (and should) trace its intellectual underpinning back to Schopenhauer.

In his book The Confessions of a Philosopher, Bryan Magee has described how he had never heard of Schopenhauer until he chanced on The World as Will and Idea in a second-hand bookshop. Magee recounts that he was so strongly taken by its originality that he spent several years studying Schopenhauer, producing his masterly The Philosophy of Schopenhauer in 1983. In his book, Magee notes the references to Schopenhauer in the work of creative writers such as Hardy (p408), and the depiction of scenes which reflect the philosopher's ideas. For example, 'the plight of being alive' is a recurrent theme with Hardy. Schopenhauer strongly believed in our 'propensity to give unconscious expression to our true feelings', and so Hardy describes Angel sleep-walking and revealing his true feelings for Tess while doing so.

This is not to say that Hardy just copied down Schopenhauer's ideas. Instead, I think that Hardy had some intuitive ideas of his own, but lacked the formal structure. When he read Schopenhauer, he found a framework that he agreed with, and so he clothed it with his imagination. The combination results in fiction that resonates with readers of no religious faith, and which must surely challenge others to think through their faith.

I don't like to end with such a downer. I remember as a teenager being totally captivated --- and for life --- watching Julie Christie in the film version of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. Now, would life be such a 'plight' if one could snuggle up with JC and the afore-mentioned Chateau Palmer?

Possibility of a picnic?

Vancouver is no means the chilliest part of Canada, but freezing nights are normal in the winter. About now, the nights are getting slightly less freezing and snowdrops are beginning their daring early-spring show. This report from the natural world is confirmed for me by my garage-door opener. As in practically every other household in the land, my garage door rolls up and down thanks to an electric motor and an arthritic system of tracks and chains. In winter, the grease on the tracks becomes a little sticky and the underpowered motor can't quite do the job. It fights valiantly of course, and then collapses into an asthmatic humming. I have to push to help the door on its upward journey. About now, the weather is warm enough for the motor to perform its task unaided. So, perhaps spring is here?

If that is the case, the opportunity to save a little money and give Marcel yet more childhood memories is at hand. I'm talking of course about the chance to have picnics. And not the messy habit of eating in the car, but a full-blown picnic, done with style. For me, there's nothing quite like it. The planning, the preparation, the wicker baskets, the anticipation…and the weather.

My childhood memories are littered with picnics, most of which didn't quite turn out as planned, despite the valiant efforts of my parents. It's hard to keep four boisterous kids under control on a horse-blanket in the corner of some damp field. The ones we had on beaches were more successful, although even for those the chief memory is of gritty tea. There's a poem, Trebetherick, by John Betjeman which exactly captures the post-war picnic:

Sand in the sandwiches
Wasps in the tea
Sun in our bathing dresses heavy with the wet
Squelch of the bladder-wrack waiting for the sea
Fleas around the tamarisk
An early cigarette.

There's something about the relaxed atmosphere of a picnic---the lounging about, the open air---that leads, at least in my mind, to the hope of romance.

In my late teens I took the then girl of my life out for a picnic, on a field near a river. A perfect bucolic setting. A bottle of wine cooling in the water, shade under a fine chestnut tree, carefully chosen food. All was going well until we heard heavy breathing behind us. It seemed like every cow in Bedfordshire had gathered for the show, and they seemed unhappy with the performance. I shouted and waved my hands, danced around, but they were not impressed, and edged even closer. Fortunately we had brought, in the best English tradition, a big black umbrella. Opening and closing an umbrella seemed to be the only thing that repelled them. We pushed everything into the basket and fled. But I forgot the wine, left cooling among the rushes at the water's edge. When I went back two days later it had gone.

I like to think of the person who found that bottle, and his or her theory of how it might have got there. I also think about the girl who was with me, and whether she ever casts her mind back to a picnic which came a little too close to nature. I hope that the bottle-finder enjoyed the wine, and the girl still laughs at the ridiculous sight of a young man fighting off cows with an umbrella.

Does risk of death cause happiness?

Two university professors have just completed a truly huge survey of two million people from various countries. The question: how does happiness change through your life? The result is a graph shaped a bit like a bath-tub. The youngest are very happy, but as the toddlers start to age, they become less happy. The nadir for women is about 40 years of age, and about 50 for men. The graph moves optimistically upwards after that, at least until the grim reaper unsportingly interrupts the survey process. Naturally, any individual’s own experience might well differ markedly from this, but the fact remains that on average these perceptions of happiness are what most people experience.

When I read the paper, I thought about some work I’d done in survival analysis. SA is a statistical technique often used in medical statistics to work out probability of infection or recovery, given what’s known about a particular patient. The probabilities are based on a large number of previously recorded cases so that a comparison can be made. Drawing a graph for the probability (or risk) of death shows, yes, a bath-tub effect. The neo-natals are at higher risk of death than toddlers, and so on. The graph slopes downwards, but then goes upwards again as we age. And of course there is the inevitable snipping of the thin-spun life. The end of the line.

Putting the two bath-tub graphs side by side I was interested in the similarity of their shape. Is there anything to the similarity? I don’t have the data used in the happiness survey, but maybe I’ll ask for a copy of it. It would be interesting to match an individual’s perception of his or her happiness at any point in time with the risk of death that that individual was facing.

Less formally, I’d like to advance some ideas for why the two graphs look the same. For a start, kids should be happy, being pretty much ignorant of any of the nastier things in life. Life for them is literally boundless, and every day brings exciting new knowledge. Some of the excitement might have worn off a bit by the early thirties, ground down by the sheer dailiness of life, the struggle to keep things going. At the same time, those in their thirties still think they’ll live for ever, and risk of death is, it’s true, low in relative terms. Perhaps their confidence in the continuation of life means taking life for granted, and so there isn’t the desire to experience the moment. It’s hard to be all transcendental when the mortgage payments are late.

So far, so obvious. But why does the happiness curve start going upwards along with risk of death? Being someone who is beginning to feel a chill wind on my shoulder, I am particularly interested in this point. Anthony Storr’s Solitude: A Return to the Self has some answers. His book is primarily about creative people and their need to be alone to do their best work, but he does some interesting remarks about happiness and aging. He points out that emotional dependence begins to decline with age, and as one ages inter-personal relationships don’t matter as much. Emotional dependence is replaced by an interest in one’s own internal concerns. Storr suggests that this is why grandparents and grandchildren often get on better than parents and children: they expect less of each other.

Getting older also seems to allow the individual to swim along with life, rather than trying to fight against the flow. There is a well-known letter from a former patient to CJ Jung which captures this very well:

‘So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought.’

The two university professors offer their suggestions for the upward slope. Their surmises are purely conjectures of course, because they lack the data to be able to test them. They suppose that by mid-life, individuals have come to hold a more realistic view of what they can and cannot do. This conjecture matches the patient who wrote to Jung. Their other conjectures are that more cheerful people live longer, so that the boring old misery-guts types have died out by their fifties’ leaving only us cheery old ‘uns to carry on. Unfortunately this is not empirically true, although one would certainly wish it was, at least for the aged whiner who bores me on the bus every day. Their third conjecture is more philosophical: they write “I have seen school-friends die and come to value my blessings during my remaining years”.

Naturally I am delighted by the thought that my life might get even happier, but I can’t help feeling that just being grateful to be alive misses something. Surely there is more than that? How about being more willing to take risks because you know you’re going to snuff it soon anyway? I’m planning on getting back to pipe-smoking and drinking absinthe. Catch me if you can!

Another madeleine?

One of my little famiy's little treats is to have lunch in Pastis Restaurant. It's good practice for a five year-old, and Marcel does well. As soon as he enters the restaurant he seems to sober up, in marked contrast to many of the clientele. Last week we noticed that on the dessert menu madeleines were available, and of course we immediately ordered the entire freshly-baked stock. Marcel got his name from his mother's partiality to the films of M. Pagnol, and his father's interest in M. Proust. So the lad was immediately bored rigid with tales from his dad about Proust's eating of madeleines, how they evoked childhood memories and the like.

The Pastis madeleines were really good, but a bit on the small side. I decided to try and bake some myself. I strode arrogantly into the local cookware shop, fully expecting them not to have any madeleine moulds, and to be able to mutter disparagingly under my breath about the lack thereof. I was somewhat abashed to find that they had a selection. I found a recipe (there are plenty) and got going. The second lot was better than the first, probably because I put in a few drops more of the orange flower water. Everyone kept tasting them, and got so full that there was no possibility of supper. Calories per serving? Don't even think about that question.

Now that the household was somnolent after gorging on madeleines, I thought some more about Proust. With his usual elegance he described a madeleine as a 'little shell of a cake, so generously sensual beneath the piety of its stern pleating'. But what about the memory part? Naively, I thought that probably not many people would have bothered their heads with this question. A quick Google showed how wrong I was. There is a veritable cottage industry of people either trying to reproduce the exact madeleine that Proust ate (had to be dry and crumbly) or spouting off about the relationship between Proust's consumption of a madeleine and his memory of his Auntie Leonie. My madeleines were so remarkably good that there was little point in bothering to reproduce Proust's. So I fixed on the second question.

The whole point of Proust is, to me at any rate, the separation between chronological time and experienced time. The only time that really matters is experienced time. In his book about Proust, Alain de Botton has it right when he chides tourists for rushing through France to Combray. It is 'idolatrous', he says, because we are not experiencing the places in between origin and destination. And, anyway, Combray is a very ordinary little town, notable only for its tenuous connection with Proust.

In later life, Proust famously ate a few bits of his madeleine (probably dunked into his tea---lime-blossom--- but the record is unclear) and was suddenly transported back to his Auntie Leonie's Sunday morning bedside in Combray, and experiences of his childhood are evoked. The scene is described by Jeannette Lowen like this:

Unusual experiences led Proust to "the truth of involuntary memory," the basis for his life's work. The famous incident of the petit madeleine revealed to him a past lying dormant within him, ready to be called back to consciousness. He was able to retrieve "a feeling of inexplicable happiness" when his mother offered him the little plump cake. He was illuminated by a childhood memory (of Combray), where his Aunt Leonie on Sunday mornings used to give him a madeleine, dipping it first in her own cup of tea. It "all sprang into being, town and garden alike, from my cup of tea!"

In short, the memory of a madeleine eaten as young lad had lain dormant in his subsconscious for decades, only to be suddenly evoked by another madeleine eaten in maturity. This very morning, my Marcel's first words were, "Can we have some more madeleines like last night?" Perhaps a subconscious memory is being laid down, and when he is older he will bite into another madeleine and a memory of his father will be evoked. I hope it's a warm one of a father who cares about his culinary culture.