next billion, 10 May 2017
There is nothing so convenient as arguing against a straw man. You dress it up in whatever way you want, then tear it down, feeling great about the accomplishment.
That’s what Milford Bateman does in his recent NextBillion article, “Don’t Fear the Rate Cap: Why Cambodia’s Microcredit Regulations Aren’t Such a Bad Thing.” He starts with the rather startling – and entirely unsupported – assertion that the rate cap announced in Cambodia is an effort to “to avert an otherwise inevitable and destructive meltdown.” He then proceeds to raise an entire army of strawmen in the form of arguments I apparently made in my article in the Phnom Penh Post, none of which are there.
Did I “steer blame away from those responsible for the current crisis in Cambodia”? Where did I write that “the supply of microcredit will completely dry up as a result of government intervention”? Did I write “if the microcredit sector is constrained in some way or its growth halted, the poor will flock to the local money-lender to satisfy their huge thirst for microcredit”?
It may work in today’s political environment, but for a credentialed academic, such license with truth and facts is simply not acceptable. The trouble is that this approach pervades the entire article.
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