Creating a World Without Poverty: How Social Business Can Transform Our Lives

Over the last few decades, free markets have swept the globe and brought positive change. Nevertheless, traditional capitalism cannot solve problems of inequality and poverty because of its view of people as one-dimensional beings concerned only with profit. In fact, human beings have many other drives and passions, including spiritual, social, and altruistic. Welcome to the world of social business, where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today's most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, and protecting the planet. Creating a World without Poverty tells the stories of some of the earliest examples of social businesses, including Yunus' own Grameen Bank. It reveals the next phase in an economic and social revolution that is already underway and in the worldwide effort to eliminate poverty by unleashing the productive energy of every human being.

About the Author :
Muhammad Yunus, a native of Bangladesh, was educated at Dhaka University and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University. In 1972 he became head of the economics department at Chittagong University. He is the founder and managing director of Grameen Bank, a pioneer of microcredit, which an economic movement that has helped lift millions of families around the world out of poverty. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. He also received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2009 and was named one of Fortune's 12 Greatest Entrepreneurs of Our Time in 2012. Karl Weber, president of Karl Weber Literary, is a writer, editor, and book developer with over twenty-five years of experience in the book publishing industry. Weber has coauthored and edited a number of books, including the New York Times bestseller Creating a World without Poverty, coauthored with Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize; the #1 New York Times bestseller What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception by Scott McClellan, which Weber edited; and two bestselling companion books to acclaimed documentary films, Food Inc. and Waiting for Superman, both of which Weber edited. Before founding his company, Weber served as managing director of the Times Business imprint at Random House and as senior editor and publisher in the trade book division of John Wiley & Sons. He also spent time as an editor at McGraw-Hill and AMACOM, the book-publishing division of the American Management Association. Weber lives in Irvington, New York, with his wife. Patrick Lawlor, an award-winning narrator, is also an accomplished stage actor, director, and combat choreographer. He has worked extensively off Broadway and has been an actor and stuntman in both film and television. He has been an Audie Award finalist multiple times and has garnered several AudioFile Earphones Awards, a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, and many starred audio reviews from Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews.

Review :
"In this excellent work of popular economics, he tells the story of how he came to the idea and the impressive results it has generated." -- "Winnipeg Free Press" "Infused with entrepreneurial spirit and the excitement of a worthy challenge, this book is the opposite of pessimistic recitals of intractable poverty's horrors." -- "Publishers Weekly" "Muhammad Yunus argues convincingly that social business is an achievable way of exploiting capitalism to help the poor. Yunus moves the debate beyond the tired argument that the rich should simply donate to those less privileged, and demonstrates that the free market can in fact be used to the advantage of the less well off...This book is a must-read for policymakers or philanthropists, and its conversational style and straightforward logic also make it appealing to the layperson." -- "Scotland on Sunday" "The influential economist and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize outlines his vision for a new business model that combines the power of free markets with the quest for a more humane world." -- "Bookseller (UK)"