Economics is life line subject

 It all started twenty-five years ago. I was teaching Economics at a university in Bangladesh. The country was in the middle of a famine. I felt terrible. Here I was teaching the elegant theories of Economics in the classroom with all the enthusiasm of a brand-new Ph.D. from the United States. But I would walk out of the classroom and see skeleton all around me, people waiting to die.

I felt that whatever I had learnt, whatever I was teaching, was all make-believe stories, with no meaning for people's lives. So I started trying to find out how people lived in the village next door to the university campus. I wanted to find out whether there was anything I could do as a human being to delay or stop the death, even for one single person. I abandoned the bird's-eye view that lets you see everything from above, from the sky. I assumed a worm's-eye view, trying to find whatever comes right in front of you --- Smell it, touch it, see if you can do something about it.

One particular incident took me in a new direction. I met a woman who was making bamboo stools. After a long discussion, I found out that she made only two U.S. pennies each day. I couldn't believe anybody could work so hard and make such beautiful bamboo stools, and yet make such a tiny amount of profit. She explained to me that because she didn't have the money to buy the bamboo to make the stools. She had to borrow from the trader-- and the trader imposed the condition she had to sell the product to him alone, at a price that he decided.

And that explains the two pennies ___ She was virtually in bonded labour to this person. And how much did the bamboo cost? She said, "Oh, about twenty 20 cents. For a very good one twenty-five cents." I thought, "People suffer for twenty cents and there is nothing anyone can do about it ?" I debated whether I should give her twenty cents, but then I came up with another idea__ let me make a list of people who needed that kind of money. I took a student of mine and we went around the village for several days and came up with a list of forty-two such people. When I added up the total amount they needed, I got the biggest shock of my life: It added up to twenty-seven dollars! I felt ashamed of myself for being a part of a society which could not provide even twenty-seven dollars to forty-two hard working, skilled human beings.

To escape that shame, I took the money out of my pocket and gave it to my student. I said, "you take this money and give it to those forty-two people that we met and tell them this is a loan, but they can pay me back whenever they are able to." In the meantime, they can sell their products wherever they can get a good price. After receiving the money, they were very excited.

_courtesy _Ravikant Arya