The Freedom Factory

Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work in alleviating global poverty. He is the pioneer of the micro-lending movement, which targets the world’s poorest people for small loans that can be used for launching personal businesses. Yunus’s theory is that the best way to bring people out of poverty is to enable them to do it themselves. Yunus’s Grameen Bank never gives away money. They do not forgive loans when borrowers fall on hard times, instead merely restructuring terms and offering more money to alleviate immediate hardships. In Banker to the Poor, Yunus describes the path he and his bank took to discovering a winning formula that has saved the lives of millions of the world’s most desperate people. Continue Reading

No one chooses to live at or below the poverty level right?  Well, I didn’t think so, but the Census data may prove otherwise.

As of 2000, there are 106 million households in the US.  I am first going to break the country into quintiles from lowest income to highest income (which means that the bottom 20% or 21 million households earn the least, and so on).

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