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Microfinance Is Mostly a Scam (2015)

• wodenokoto 6y ago
  I remember back when microfinance was winning Nobel prices and I had just started studying economics I considered investing in it. This was the true promise of capitalism - investing money will make everyone better off. However, the only microfinance organizations available would only take donations not investments. So I would have had to donate money to someone in order for them to lend it to a poor farmer for outlandish 30% and above interest rates! I’d rather donate it to an actual charity in that case.
  • lefstathiou 6y ago
    “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
  • lern_too_spel 6y ago
    A charity only gets to give part of the money away once and pay the rest to administrative overhead. A lender is incentivized to get the money back more than a charity and has to do more vetting and training of the people it lends to. In order to be self-sustaining, it needs to charge interest.
    • jm_l 6y ago
      GiveDirectly (https://www.givedirectly.org/ https://www.givedirectly.org/) gives 88% of the money straight to recipients and offers a nice baseline for charity work. There's also better metrics than "how much money does the charity take off the top" which you can learn about in Will McAskill's book "Doing Good Better," namely you can try to track things like "how much good are we doing for the amount of money we get." The main idea is that if a charity can use more of its donation money in order to have a better impact, then that's what it should do.
      • lern_too_spel 6y ago
        The point is that the money can be used only once, so your money gets 88% of its value. A lender uses the money more than once, so they can provide more value from a donation.
        • owowow 6y ago
          The money is used more than once as it stays in that community rather than being paid back with interest. Often money earned, lent or given to the least well to do has the highest velocity in changing hands, resulting in much more positive economic impact than if the money were given to people who were better off.
        • zozbot234 6y ago
          A costly loan provides only a tiny fraction of value, compared to an actual transfer. You can't sustainably "loan" money to people in extreme poverty, they can't possibly pay you back. And once these people have bought assets with their transfer they can even access traditional loans.
          • heavenlyblue 6y ago
            You can’t sustainably give money to people and not end up with a huge amount of fraud. Then the 40% of inefficiency may turn our to be not as bad.
            • zozbot234 6y ago
              We're talking about people in truly extreme poverty here, which is trivial to verify. Sure, you can and should make some effort to direct your aid to the very poorest, etc. but at this level, fraud just doesn't matter the way you think it does.
    • pfortuny 6y ago
      Depends greatly on the charity. Caritas has very little overhead because they work with voluntaries (mostly). But yes, there is always overhead.
  • rapind 6y ago
    There is no Nobel prize in economics.
    • nordsieck 6y ago
      > There is no Nobel prize in economics. There is a prize in economics in memory of Alfred Nobel, which everyone refers to as the "Nobel prize in economics". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom...
  • FabHK 6y ago
    Kiva.org has been taking loans since 2005 (and repaying them, by and large). They ask for a donation to cover their operating costs, but it's optional.
    • wodenokoto 6y ago
      That’s fine and all, but the promise of microfinance and micro loans was that it was win win. Something along the lines of “Investing in the poor is a business that makes the world better” But if investing in the poor means needing donations to cover your operating expenses, then I suppose kiva is at best a charity (if they also give reasonable interest rates and loan conditions) and not the investment originally promised. That is not to say that kiva is bad, but it is also not a great poster child for microfinance, imho
      • FabHK 6y ago
        Agreed. I'm not sure about Kiva (or micro-finance more generally) anymore as the best use for spare cash. I was just commenting on the original assertion that "the only microfinance organizations available would only take donations not investments" EDIT to add: Though, Kiva can't be considered an investment, either - best case (!) you get the original amount back. While the field partners take considerable interest from the loan recipient. So...
  • imtringued 6y ago
    Why would microfinance be better than a big company getting a big loan and setting up say a battery factory in Congo because there is lots of cobalt there? The reason why that factory doesn't exist has nothing to do with the type of loan by the way.
• waldito 6y ago
  No comments about the head proccessor who has a head grinder? WTF
  • detaro 6y ago
    If you don't have a factory-level meat industry doing it all-in-one, processing material that otherwise would be discarded is a niche for one-person businesses.
  • jdpigeon 6y ago
    I know. Author should have mentioned the unused body parts came from livestock because that is NOT the image that popped into my head at first.
    • tuckerp 6y ago
      My thought was "wow, well that's certainly a dark comedic way to illustrate the author's point" No clue it was on animals
  • csomar 6y ago
    I assume it's animal's head processing.
  • imtringued 6y ago
    Although it made me scratch my head a bit. I was mostly wondering how they avoid diseases associated with eating brains. Mad cow disease spreads from animal to human mostly by eating brains.
    • redis_mlc 6y ago
      Yeah, in Bali, the dogcatcher sells the dogs caught to people as food. But there's rabies (and more) in the dog population there, so ...
• api 6y ago
  I long ago developed the opinion that most "innovations" in money and finance are scams whether intentional or not. Money and finance are like power and water. They belong to a class of things that should be unbelievably boring, things you forget exist when they are working properly. A related idea I developed from watching the cryptocurrency world is that it is really hard to have a financial system that is anything but gambling, Ponzis, and fraud. These are the paths of least resistance in finance, the things money seems to "want" to do. The vast maze of regulations in conventional finance are the outcome of a multi hundred year evolutionary battle to maintain at least some level of actual productive activity in the financial world. The reason money "wants" to gamble and play Ponzi games is likely related to how human dopamine reward loops work. We get dopamine hits from gambling and are very prone to it, while productive investment is often too slow to deliver regularly spaced Skinner box rewards.
  • tuckerp 6y ago
    Financial instruments are always created to benefit one side more than the other. That in itself is fine. The problem becomes when the side that disproportionately benefits also has an imbalance of power to pull the rug out from the other side. They are incentivized to be less than transparent. It's almost always due to a misrepresentation of risk, which people seem to be keen on if they can pass that risk downstream, and the least informed end up holding the bag.
  • FabHK 6y ago
    Paul Volcker (Fed chairman before Alan Greenspan, just died Dec 2019) famously quipped in the aftermath of the financial crisis that "the most important financial innovation that I have seen the past 20 years is the automatic teller machine"... https://nypost.com/2009/12/13/the-only-thing-useful-banks-have-invented-in-20-years-is-the-atm/ https://nypost.com/2009/12/13/the-only-thing-useful-banks-ha...
  • Paperweight 6y ago
    Finance is always gambling, ponzis, and fraud. But hey, that's not a bad thing. Gamblers add liquidity, which is better for society than them hiding in a basement playing cards. Stocks are essentially ponzi scheme financing. They have all the hallmarks. Then often literally use the cash from sales of stock to pay dividends. Most companies will never pay dividends, though, so the idea for a purchaser is to hold on and cash out while it's big before everyone else does. Fraud is the worst when people have an expectation of trust, assuming they're protected by regulators. They never are. Madoff. Bre-X. Enron. Even highly regulated markets are always riddled with fraud. People should expect the market to be riddled with fraud and act accordingly - it keeps the populace wise. Regulations are an attempt to get something for nothing which always just ends up with a bunch of friction, corruption, barriers to entry, and lawyers.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  I genuinely want to believe in it, but as others have already mentioned, charities seem to have a better track record in what they are trying to accomplish ( my favorite example being a goat gift ).
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    That's a pretty bad example tbh. Gifting the cash equivalent to what the goat would be worth is a way better deal than gifting a goat, because then the recipient can buy some other asset instead.
    • imtringued 6y ago
      If you give people cash they might stop farming and import food instead. Once the handouts are over people won't be able to feed themselves because their country is not exporting enough to import food. There is nothing wrong with importing food but it would have to be conditional with a guarantee that e.g. USA is importing goods from Kenya for every dollar Kenya spends on importing goods from USA. The trade imbalance would have to be in favor of Kenya.
    • sukilot 6y ago
      Not necessarily. One goat gifts go to people who already want goats, while cash has a risk of being wasted on short term benefit.
• nordsieck 6y ago
  I think "Microfinance is a scam" oversells the claim. The truth is much closer to "Microfinance is payday loans". To the extent that you believe payday loans can help the poor in the developed world, microfinance can also help the poor in the developing world.
  • ritchiea 6y ago
    Many if not most people believe payday loans are predatory practices that prey on people without access to capital and/or financial literacy.
    • nordsieck 6y ago
      > Many if not most people believe payday loans are predatory practices that prey on people without access to capital and/or financial literacy. Sure. And I think the same logic also clearly applies to microfinance.
      • ritchiea 6y ago
        So you’re objecting to equating “predatory practice” with “scam”? A bit pedantic?
        • nordsieck 6y ago
          > So you’re objecting to equating “predatory practice” with “scam”? A bit pedantic? scam (n): a dishonest scheme; a fraud. A scam necessarily involves dishonesty of some kind. It may be that some payday loans are also scams, but the vast majority of them are above board and disclose their terms clearly.
      • sukilot 6y ago
        On a relative scale on the context of local economy, microfinance is more like a mortgage or SBA loan.
    • jfengel 6y ago
      That's certainly true in American cities, where they are made to desperate people devoid of options for a whole host of reasons (systemic racism, regulatory capture, supply-side economic, etc.) Those conditions don't necessarily apply to impoverished countries where microfinance organizations target. They've got other problems, so microfinance may or may not work, but they're really not comparable to payday loans in the US. Payday loans are also much shorter term. They're not intended as investments, even when they're not actively fraudulent. They're supposed to stave off literal starvation for people with unreliable income. Presenting them any other way is fraudulent, and people are often trapped in them by people who knew that they could not be paid back in time (and the compounding interest would claim everything they own). The US was working on regulation to limit fraud in payday lending while still trying to keep the aspect of trying to even out inconsistent income. That was in 2016, and I think the new administration killed that.
• bretpiatt 6y ago
  Good micro lending options do exist, Kiva has a great track record[1]. My perspective, the exploitive micro lending options exist due to lack of financial education in our K-12 primary schools globally. Teaching the average student the fundamentals of accounting and finance would be much more practical than trigonometry or pre-calculus. For base IRR, NPV, DPP, etc. algebra 1 is plenty of a mathematics foundation to complete. [1] https://www.kiva.org/about/impact https://www.kiva.org/about/impact
  • skybrian 6y ago
    The marketing says they are good, but the point of the article is that the marketing is often untrustworthy. What are Kiva's local partners hiding from them and does Kiva watch over them closely enough to find out when something is going wrong? It seems like we aren't in a position to know?
    • FabHK 6y ago
      Exactly. Kiva doesn't give out the loans itself, but uses partner organisations. And IIRC they have cut ties with several of these due to various scandals, though a quick search hasn't yielded any reputable source. Maybe that means that the due diligence process (ultimately) works...
    • gravitas 6y ago
      Kiva indicates I have been using them for 8 years (2012); 75 countries/territories, 15 sectors, 163 activities and 258 field partners (the company on the other side processing the loan in country is the field partner to which you're referring). My lend focus is primarily agriculture, infrastructure education and other back end type microloans as opposed to finished goods and services typically for front end selling (a long time ago there was another website just for education, they merged with Kiva many years ago). Stats as of today: Delinquency rate 29.40%, Defaulted rate 7.67%, Currency loss rate 0.04% - the webUI indicates my Delinquency rate is higher than average (20.70%), same with Default rate (1.76%) but Currency loss much lower than average (0.33%). Results from folks who lend in the sectors I do not may have wildly different results...
• pieno 6y ago
  > It’s a nice story, but of course it means, even in this best case, that the people around her who had previously done what she now does have been pushed out of business. They need to find a new job. This is the lump of labour fallacy[0]. There’s a whole body of economic theory but generally arguments against the fallacy are that lowering prices is likely to increase demand (so competitors could make the same investment and compete for the increased demand and be better off as a whole; productivity increases may lead to new ancillary or similar products that were previously not cost effective to produce, again increasing the pie; those increasing their income have to invest or spend it, so those put out of business could start a new business taking investment or spending from their previous competitor. Reality is obviously much more complex and definitely in the short term it can lead to real misery for those losing the competition and not having the time or savings to wait for a new job or for an investment to start paying off. But that doesn’t mean that we should just stop innovation and stop trying to become more productive. The rest of the arguments in the article against micro finance seem to be issues with underperforming legal and governmental institutions that fail to prevent and remedy fraud and abuse of people in precarious situations. In these systems/countries, there will always be fraud and abuse no matter how you try to help people (including charity, starting real companies and trying to give people real jobs with reasonable pay). That doesn’t mean you should stop these initiatives. Hopefully, improving conditions for individual people will help improve systemic conditions and vice versa. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
  • luckylion 6y ago
    > But that doesn’t mean that we should just stop innovation and stop trying to become more productive. But that's also not what he's saying, is it? It absolutely makes sense to innovate and automate anything if labor is costly because it's in short supply. But when it's not? Isn't that then similar to the Softbank Ventures that seem to follow "spend an insane amount of money, hope that nobody else tries to match it, get to monopoly status, extract insane amounts of profit"? Invest a lot, massively undercut the competition, drive competition out of the market, turn on the profits. But, unless that labor is needed, or at least can be used, somewhere else: what is won?
  • 6y ago
• oisino 6y ago
  10 years ago out of college I helped set up some microfinance banks in Coffee producing communities in Honduras. At first your taken aback that people are paying 40%+ annual interest rates on small loans for these banks. But when your in the communities talking to people you realize their opportunity costs are like 400%+. Example is in most coffee producing communities in Central America farmers have to sell their products before they even grow them for 4-10x bellow the market rates if they just waited and banded together as co-op. Their issue is no access to financial products and they are substance farmers with no option but sell to coyotes to get money for food. In this world micro finance is a game changer in their quality of lives for it creates options
  • trophycase 6y ago
    "micro fiancé" Sorry, hate to be reddit-esque here, but this auto correct was too funny.
    • dang 6y ago
      I've fixed the typo now.
    • StavrosK 6y ago
      Conversely, I hate to be whatever I'm being, but let's not disparage a community by referring to it in a pejorative manner.
  • hakfoo 6y ago
    In a way, the finance part is the easy part. The borrowers do the research for you, so all you need to do is gatekeep the applications and write cheques. More advanced change, like setting up co-ops, improving relationships with suppliers and buyers, or product diversification to tap into non-local demand, is likely to be much more abstract, require much more hands on intervention, and will by necessity look more like charity work or statecraft than a quantifiable business venture.
  • nelaboras 6y ago
    Three counterarguments: - if the opportunity costs are high, would it nonetheless not be better to have fair rates? - if you believe in the market, why are there not already offers with more acceptable rates? Is there just not enough capital (which seems wrong, if you believe in your own claim that it's so profitable to invest), or because the risk is so high? - most importantly, even if 40% was in fact an acceptable rate, what happens to those that can't repay? Say your crop is eaten by a bug or the local militia steals your harvest or you get injured and can't do the work - what happens to a poor person with a 40% loan? The answer is eternal, ever growing, unrepayable debt and suffering. No thanks. This is not a kind gesture, this is Russian roulette - two chambers: you get even, two chambers: you make an enormous and sustainable profit, two chambers: your family is in debt for generations.
• rectang 6y ago
  I agree with the author that under-regulated microfinance is prone to failure. But the conclusion that I draw from that is not "microfinance is prone to failure" but that all under-regulated finance is prone to failure.
  • valuearb 6y ago
    I took it to mean that excessive regulation reduces options, competition and costs.
    • sukilot 6y ago
      What does "excessive" mean then?
• addicted 6y ago
  The problem with micro finance is that it’s not scalable. It takes effort and energy to setup in a certain location, and then will take the same effort and energy to setup in another location (minus some minuscule efficiencies), because what’s key in micro finance is understanding the needs of each individual community and catering to that. If micro finance was scaleable, that would imply the same strategies would be broadly profitable across a range of communities. But at that point there is no need for micro finance. Regular banking entities could, and would, have stepped in and made money.
  • Someone 6y ago
    Not being scalable is much less of a problem when you want to make a living and help people than when you want to make lots and lots of money. Because of that and because labor is cheap in most places where micro-finance makes sense, I would think not being scalable isn’t a huge problem for micro-financing.
  • sukilot 6y ago
    Scalability isn't the issue. It's just not profitable. Microlending is a money loser overall. Dirt farming just isn't very profitable on the scale of a wealthy investor in a developed country. It only works because the lenders think of it as gifts that are partially refunded, not investments.
• wegs 6y ago
  I think one of the questions is whether microfinance works as a bank, to make a profit, or works in lieu of donations, where loans are subsidized and act as a force multiplier on donor money. If I had my druthers, I'd set up a VC firm in the developing world, which funded businesses on reasonable terms, knowing I'd lose money, but: 1) Generating a stream of occasional successful enterprises. 2) Even for failures, giving people an opportunity to go through the learning experience of launching a startup.
  • sukilot 6y ago
    That sounds like GiveDirectly.org with extra steps for the donors ego. The US just gave $1200 to each of millions of Americans, all of whom have already income plus other govt benefits totalling high above median income in Nigeria. If you have money burning a hole in your pocket, why not give $1200 to a random Nigerian, average income $2500/yr? Or even $200?
    • wegs 6y ago
      Mostly, because all that would do is cause is random inflation and inequity. When donating money, you are reallocating resources. That can lead to improved economic growth, if for example you are allowing people to go to school, start businesses, or otherwise helping build such bridges. More times than not, donations cause long-term harm. Look at oil in Nigeria to see how a massive simple influx of cash was not good for the population. If you really want to help in Nigeria, you can help mentor a university student there. Your time will count for a lot more than your money. Or if you are willing to spend money too, hire a university student from there as an intern (likely remotely). That helps align a lot of incentives.
• mtgp1000 6y ago
  The intentions are there, but if you only look for the good in people you will be taken advantage of and swallowed by grifters. Some who are driven by selfishness, some who are driven by lust for disruption and/or destruction. The general trend in the west right now seems to be an overestimation of the good in all of us, and society is increasingly paying for it. I know that many are downtrodden for reasons outside of their control but that doesn't excuse the fact that a lot of poor people are poor because they are shitty, antisocial people, and no amount of mentoring or social programs will fix them. That's where redlining comes from. That's why poor people pay higher interest for loans, if they can even get them. It's not just blind classism or "systematic racism" without a cause. Social groups are an emergent phenomenon, not a deliberate invention.
  • heavenlyblue 6y ago
    People in the west forget how many governmental institutions exist in their countries to make sure that the good in people is efficiently enforced. That’s why the overestimate the goodness of people in other countries. Also don’t forget how many westerners happily go to these third-world countries to do business in the not-so-well-regulated economies.
• FabHK 6y ago
  Mods: (2015) Not sure much has changed, but the article is nearly 5 years old.
• jkraker 6y ago
  I personally think that this article is really just skimming the surface in the area some people broadly refer to as development work. Helping people toward sustainable, more independent situations is really difficult work, and there are a multitude of examples where even people with the best intentions did more harm than good, particularly when they blindly follow their own designs without paying specific attention to the people they're helping and the complex web of circumstances and history they live within. As the article detailed in the area of microfinance, there are unfortunately many people who shamefully further their own interests (money, reputation, etc.) in the guise of charity. I really do think that applied correctly, microfinance is one tool of many that can be effectively applied for real good if it is not abused. The reason I think that is that in contrast to just giving someone something, microfinance can be more empowering in certain circumstances. In some development work, empowerment is a key ingredient to moving toward lasting change. I absolutely agree that there is potential for and are many examples of microfinance being used in harmful ways, but I think the same is true for just about every tool of development work. Even simply giving a person cash can be bad in some circumstances. This comes from my personal struggles in working a bit in the area of development as part of an organization that attempts to help people in lasting ways by leveraging a very limited pool of resources. All that to say that I agree that microfinance is used to abuse people, but I don't think its use as such disqualifies it as a potential development tool.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    Is it your experience that, when giving cash money as a donation/gift to a person does not result in positive consequences, giving a microloan to that same person produces different outcomes? I assume that the people who use the (high interest) microloans for consumption would also use cash the same way, while those who use it to create a better future for themselves would do the same even when they don't have to pay it back. Basically: is it the way/circumstances you got the money that makes the difference, or is the loan instrument just filtering out more of those that would "waste" it, because paying interest isn't attractive to them (and it wouldn't be 90% consumption credits, but 99.x% if there was no credit check and no interest)?
    • 6y ago
• macawfish 6y ago
  Those interest rates are extortionate. I don't care what nuance or anecdotal hypothetical feel-good story you tell yourself. This stuff is exploitative and, even worse, exploitative in the name of "doing good".
  • anon102010 6y ago
    What a clueless comment. Inflation rates in Zimbabwe and Venezuela are FAR higher than these rates as a quick example to show context matters do real rates may be negative. And these rates are lower than payday and can unlock 3x returns for borrowers. The west takes access to capital for granted.
    • sukilot 6y ago
      (1) Zimbabwe and Venezuela are two extreme examples. (2) microfinance is not those currencies.
• rayiner 6y ago
  Micro finance is definitely not “mostly a scam.” My dad is in the international development field, and was an early fan of Mohammed Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who pioneered micro finance. The article doesn’t do a good job proving its case. Looking at interest rates in isolation is meaningless. Is there any evidence these micro finance banks are achieving above-normal ROIs by exploiting people who need loans? Grameen Bank, one of the original micro finance institutions in Bangladesh, has a return on invested capital of around 6.5%. That’s not very high at all, especially considering the risky nature of their portfolio. Well-meaning people worries about the notion of profiting from poor people are actually holding them back. Capital is what turns poor people into middle class people. Capital is what turned Korea from a poor country into a rich country. Foreign assistance, addressing healthcare, family planning, and education, helps catalyze the process. But all of that is pointless without capital. Foreign direct investment is one piece of that puzzle, and micro finance can be another piece of that puzzle.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • smt88 6y ago
    If you read and want to refute the article, how do you counter the accusation that most of these loans are used for daily necessities and not for starting a business? Why would a desperately poor person use a loan to start a business when they can't get enough for their children to eat? Just in theory, a loan is only useful for someone who is already stable enough to think about long-term investments like starting a business. It doesn't help the hundreds of millions of people who don't have daily necessities. > Looking at interest rates in isolation is meaningless. Untrue. No one claiming to benefit the poor should ever charge, for example, 50% interest. You might argue that the risk profile of these loans demands 75% interest, and 50% is a big discount by a nonprofit. That may be true, but it's still unbearable for people struggling to buy food and it still highlights the fact that loans are not a solution to systemic poverty in mismanaged countries. > Capital is what turns poor people into middle class people. Citation needed. Is capital fixing the poverty, or is capital arriving because something else has already started fixing the poverty? The US and India have waged wars on poverty with success. These may have been boosted by capital, but they were not initiated or driven by it. As in all cases where poverty is alleviated, they were driven by grants and social programs. In fact, the political interests of the holders of capital have reversed some of this progress.
• aaron695 6y ago
  Having volunteered for a few years overseas educating in this industry this is somewhat a true title but not a great write up. Microfinance does includes banking, remittance and insurance and other things microfinance. But most people think it's loans. So ok. The scam is it's fully self sufficient now anyway and kinda always has been. Doesn't need charity. Some Government oversight however helped I think. You can study the numbers on a few experiments governments preformed. I take issue with this bit "that the people around her who had previously done what she now does have been pushed out of business" This is exactly what you want. Innovation. What I saw however was people just exactly copying local business. Another market stall which just reduced everyone's wages. The author also doesn't seem to get TVs make a big difference to the poor both in happyness and reducing poverty. But perhaps microfinance doesn't help getting TVs. Lot more that could be said.
• asah 6y ago
  Um, this is just a random subset of the truism: "Capitalism is mostly a scam" (which is mathematically true but nonetheless it's the best system we got) P.s. I've lent to dozens of people on kiva and tracked their stories - really uplifting and highly recommended... but you have to be choosey...
• mleonhard 6y ago
  Many microfinance organizations [1] provide much more than loans. They provide business training. They set up peer groups to provide mentoring and accountability. They are essentially providing local versions of the US SBA [2] and Y-Combinator, critical infrastructure for society. These organizations have huge positive impact. [1] https://opportunity.org https://opportunity.org [2] https://www.sba.gov https://www.sba.gov
• datavirtue 6y ago
  I thought of microfinance as sourcing ng $1-2k from people in the first world (like myself) and distributing it to businesses in the third world with no real expectation they would ever see the money again. I didn't think it was about making a profit loaning money to these people. WTF!?
• apta 6y ago
  Any financing scheme that charges interest is a scam. We've known this for thousands of years, but people don't learn.
• FatDrunknStupid 6y ago
  No need for the 'Micro' in this title.
• simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  > It’s a nice story, but of course it means, even in this best case, that the people around her who had previously done what she now does have been pushed out of business. They need to find a new job. So, let's undo the industrial revolution and get back to weaving cotton by hand. Seriously?