Microcredit, ahoy: Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, one of the most successful microcredit institutions in the world, is the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Usually you can tell a lot about people by the company they keep, but Mr. Yunus is too fine a person to be lumped in with people like Jimmy Carter and Yasir Arafat. We'll chalk this one up to "even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes."

I read of the Grameen Bank and its success years ago in (here we go again) P.J. O'Rourke's All The Trouble In The World, which is still one of the best , most fun romps through "global issues" I've ever come across. He features Mohammad Yunus in his chapter on overpopulation, which I believe is called "Just Enough Of Me, Way Too Many Of You."

Not to pick nits, but why does this fall under a Peace Prize category, and not Economics. I get all the root causes blather, but is the Nobel committee afraid to make such a bold statement about free market economics? Maybe I'm just looking for negative spin out of reflex, but it seems weird. I don't remember reading about a civil war in Bangladesh, although there are probably many gripes and feuds I'm not aware of. And I know that his work has a greater impact than just in one country, but isn't its greatest impact on our understanding of market economics and how it rewards postive behaviors and penalizes negative ones?

Oh well, congrats anyway to Mr. Yunus. Hopefully many more will follow in yor path.

Via Viking Pundit.