TY - JOUR
AU - Geismer,, Lily
AB - In February 1997, Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered the keynote address at the inaugural Microcredit Summit to more than 2,900 people from 137 countries gathered in Washington, D.C. “Although it is called ‘microcredit,’ this is a macro idea,” Clinton asserted. “Whether we are talking about a rural area in South Asia or an inner-city in the United States, microcredit is an invaluable tool in alleviating poverty, promoting self-sufficiency and stimulating economic activity.” And, more importantly, it had helped policy makers jettison “the conventional … thinking about the poor, about economic opportunity, about partnership between the public and private sector.” The concept of giving loans and credit to poor people to start very small businesses or “microenterprises” in the United States and around the world was central to the Clinton administration agenda.1 As Clinton explained in her speech, she and Bill Clinton had championed microenterprise since their time as the first couple of Arkansas more than a decade earlier. In the mid-1980s, the Clintons had invited Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the figure many credit with first formulating the concept of microenterprise, to Arkansas to help design a program to distribute small loans to low-income rural residents as a means to lessen welfare dependency and stimulate local economic growth. The experience launched what Bill Clinton would deem in 1997 “this obsession, almost, that we have with microenterprise” and convinced the Clintons to “go national with this micro idea in a very macro way,” which he did in his 1992 presidential campaign and after his election.2 These long-standing efforts by the Clintons and many of their New Democrat allies, especially those affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council (Dlc), offer a way to interrogate the complexity and spectrum of neoliberalism and free-market policy and the transformation of liberalism and the Democratic party since the 1970s. Such an analysis brings into sharp relief how microenterprise contributed to the retrenchment of welfare and other social services and the argument that the private sector, especially entrepreneurship, could solve the problems of poverty and create economic growth in the United States and the developing world. Microfinance has increasingly created a polarized debate among practitioners, policy makers, and scholars in other disciplines who celebrate or castigate its impact, suggesting that it hurts rather than helps the poor. Microfinance has received little attention from historians, however, and taking a historical approach allows a move away from these Manichean poles and instead facilitates an exploration of how the rise and evolution of microfinance embodies many of the major economic, social, and political transformations of the last fifty years.3 As much as history can complicate assumptions about microenterprise, looking to microenterprise can also complicate several historiographic trends. It points to the need to place the topics of international development and welfare reform in the same frame and to explore the transnational dimensions of poverty and efforts to alleviate it. It also brings issues of poverty and welfare more squarely into the study of American capitalism. Recent attention to the history of capitalism has created new ways to see the global dimensions of market relations and the central role of the state in strengthening markets, which are crucial to understanding the rise and dimensions of microenterprise. Yet the subfield's focus on finance and its ties to traditional schema of industrial labor relations have precluded an examination of poverty and poor people and the debates over welfare programs from most accounts. Scholarship on poverty and welfare have placed the categories of race and gender at their centers, provided important insights into the production of knowledge about the poor, and illuminated the ways collective action and resistance by poor people helped expand rights and the meaning of political action. Building on these insights provides an important new perspective on key issues of political economy and political realignment in the last decades of the twentieth century.4 Attention to microenterprise, in particular, expands understanding and definitions of neoliberalism to which scholars of twentieth-century American political economy have increasingly turned their attention. Building and drawing on the work of influential theorists such as David Harvey, these inquiries have been important to the broader effort to bring materialist forces back into the study of history, to reinvigorate the study of intellectual history, to periodize and interrogate post-1970s history, and to move beyond the binaristic paradigm of the fall of the New Deal order and the rise of conservatism that has for too long structured studies of twentieth-century politics. Many of these accounts, however, have depicted the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s as inextricably intertwined with conservative ascent and the Reagan revolution and situated the Clinton era as part of a larger story about the dominance of the free market and the retreat of government.5 This approach has tended to treat neoliberalism as monolithic and totalizing and has flattened and obscured the important ways that the Clintons and other New Democrats, some the first people to self-describe as neoliberals, had a view of the market and the role of government that was distinct from the views of Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and their followers. The development of microenterprise suggests that the roots of key articulations of neoliberalism emerged less from free-market conservatism and instead from the ideology, institutions, and social commitments of liberalism. One reason that microenterprise was so attractive for the Clintons and the Dlc was their sense that it updated and extended many of the core tenets of post–New Deal liberalism—especially the emphasis on technocratic expertise, individualist solutions to structural problems, growth over redistribution, and developing strong partnerships between public and private sectors, in particular nonprofits, businesses, and foundations. The Clintons’ and their allies’ adoption of microenterprise and market-based policies more broadly were, therefore, not solely a defensive reaction to the rise of Reagan and the Republican party nor simply a calculated electoral strategy. Rather, it was a clear effort to maintain key aspects of liberalism itself.6 The Democratic version of neoliberalism understood a distinct role for government as a catalyst connecting the public and private sectors, especially nonprofits and foundations, to stimulate market-oriented solutions to address social ills such as unemployment and poverty and that aimed not to eradicate the welfare state but to reformulate it. Bill Clinton's programs extended the importance of poverty alleviation, which had long been a benchmark of liberal policy, and shared many similarities with the basic ideas of the War on Poverty. In a clear divergence from previous liberal initiatives, however, this approach rested largely on the premise that the same techniques that created economic growth and prosperity of the new economy could also solve the structural problems such as disinvestment, uneven development of global capitalism, and racial and economic segregation in distressed rural and urban areas in the United States and around the world. In particular, this vision believed in the expansive power of the entrepreneurial economy.7 Open in new tabDownload slide In this February 1983 photo, a Grameen Bank borrower in Bangladesh receives her loan. Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, N.Y. Open in new tabDownload slide In this February 1983 photo, a Grameen Bank borrower in Bangladesh receives her loan. Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, N.Y. Ideas and policies of entrepreneurship traditionally drew on the theory of Joseph Schumpeter who had argued that the entrepreneur (envisioned as a white male) acted as an agent of change who upset and disorganized existing systems by creating a “new combination of the means of production,” which is essential to a productive and healthy economy. In the 1970s and 1980s, a range of figures from the black power movement and the counterculture to Jack Kemp also stressed how entrepreneurship could be a means of personal fulfillment and empowerment. Proponents of microenterprise, including the Clintons and Yunus, helped expand the category of entrepreneurship by applying these ideas to poor women of color. This argument countered stereotypes about poor African American single mothers popularized in the culture of poverty argument of the 1960s and in the underclass and welfare debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Champions of microenterprise eschewed images of the average welfare recipient as passive, lazy, or trying to cheat the system. Instead, they depicted the poor women in no less gender-laden terms as rational and hardworking entrepreneurs who possessed a natural urge to provide for their families and who served as “agents of change.” These celebrations suggested that microenterprise not only gave the poor power over their own lives to move out of poverty and off of welfare but also provided them the ability to contribute to economic development and drive macroeconomic change. This idea discarded many of the worst tropes of the culture of poverty discourse and bestowed a new power onto poor people. It also marked an important departure from the ideas of the War on Poverty. In fact, it reversed one of the central tenets of the War on Poverty by arguing not that the macroeconomic growth would address the problems of poverty but the reverse: the poor themselves might become the engine of economic growth. In validating entrepreneurship as a means of economic development and poverty alleviation, microenterprise elided both the structural origins of poverty and class differences and perpetuated rather than reduced socioeconomic inequity. Instead, it further embedded the concept of entrepreneurship into the political and social consciousness of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.8 The Roots of Microenterprise Despite the Clintons’ and other proponents’ depictions of microenterprise as a revolution and historically unprecedented, it actually has several historical precedents. Programs to provide loans and credit for farmers in developing countries date back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and as a part of U.S. international development aid in the mid-twentieth century. A long history of government credit and saving funds for marginalized groups within the United States also exists; the Freedman's Savings Bank, for example, was chartered in 1865 to make freed slaves “self-supporting and prosperous.” These projects were rarely deemed “revolutionary” nor did they engender the same type of attention afforded to microenterprise in the 1980s and 1990s. Microenterprise gained such heightened interest largely because of the ways it embodied many of the major issues of the late twentieth century, including the global restructuring of the economy and the labor market, feminism and the rising popularity of entrepreneurship, and debates over poverty and welfare reform.9 The late 1960s and 1970s witnessed a growing interest in and discovery of the informal sector and self-employment within development circles. The increasing shift in the global South toward export-oriented production and industrialization fueled by development policy that targeted large agro-business led to a decline in family-level subsistence farming and fueled a migration of many families into urban areas in search of employment opportunities. Most migrants found job prospects scarce and turned to self-employment such as street vending, furniture making, laundry, and sewing for survival. By the mid-1970s, it was estimated that the informal sector was 30 percent to 70 percent of the labor force in developing countries and 80 to 90 percent of the activity in many poor villages and barrios. The imposition of structural adjustment austerity policies contributed to this surge. The attention to self-employment and small-scale industries by international organizations dovetailed with the opposition and critiques by development experts of top-down and state-controlled initiatives, which also made it an attractive area of exploration.10 The issue of the informal sector became an increasing point of interest for the U.S. Agency for International Development (Usaid)—the U.S. federal government's main aid organization—and several major philanthropic foundations. Usaid, which was undergoing its own transition in the early 1970s, had started placing a new emphasis on the “poor majority” and “basic human needs” such as food and nutrition, health, population planning, education, and human resources development. In addition, the agency needed to address Congress's 1973 mandate that aid projects make women's issues a priority in funding decisions and program design. Usaid also increased focus on channeling more of its development projects through private voluntary organizations and fostering economic growth by stimulating market forces and the private sector. All of these factors made microenterprise attractive. Microenterprise also aligned with the shifting priorities of large-scale philanthropic institutions, which increasingly sought more flexible models for building financial capital in both the developing world and the United States while maintaining a long-standing commitment to ideas of individual and community control and determination. The Ford Foundation, in fact, became one of the earliest underwriters of microlending programs.11 The growing embrace of entrepreneurship and political economy converged with and undoubtedly influenced this growing interest. Entrepreneurs received little attention from major economic theorists for much of the twentieth century, aside from Schumpeter as a notable exception. The shift from macroeconomics to microeconomics in the 1970s created a new space for entrepreneurial economics within the academy. Several economists began to study the traits and behavior of entrepreneurs more seriously and understand the importance of entrepreneurship to economic growth. The search for authenticity and self-fulfillment by the counterculture and during the so-called Me Decade created new ideas about work within much of the college-educated, white upper-middle class. It made entrepreneurship and small businesses ownership increasingly attractive outside the academy and ushered in a “new age of entrepreneurialism.” Business schools responded to the rising interest in entrepreneurship and adapted their curriculums accordingly. In 1970 only sixteen business schools around the country offered courses on independent business ventures and entrepreneurship; less than one decade later, 137 did. A bumper crop of articles and books emerged to explain the psychology and traits of entrepreneurs focusing primarily on white men, and the press became filled with stories of figures ranging from Steve Jobs and the founders of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream to Donald J. Trump. Journalists and politicians—especially Reagan—quickly began to revise the narrative of U.S. history to insert the entrepreneur at the center.12 The public and political discourse often conflated entrepreneurship with self-employment, which was experiencing a spike not just in the developing world but also in industrialized countries, including the United States. Beginning in 1970 and continuing throughout the next decades the number of people self-employed in the United States increased substantially, growing 50 percent between 1970 and 1985. Some observers saw self-employment as connected to the self-help and self-realization movements and celebrated these statistics as a mass liberation from stifling wage work. The rapid increase in the number of self-employed women confirmed to some that self-employment had achieved the feminist objectives of personal liberation and fulfillment. Advocates celebrated how self-employment, especially home-based businesses, provided women a way to balance the demands of work and family, feel more fulfilled, and achieve more self-esteem.13 Others interpreted the statistics in less effusive terms and saw the spike as symptomatic of how deindustrialization, the drop in unionization, and corporate downsizing created a sharp decline in stable wage work and the single-breadwinner model. The rise of self-employment, in the minds of several labor experts, particularly when coupled with growth of entrepreneurs (many technically self-employed) and consultants, appeared to be less a marker of empowerment and equity and more a symbol and engine of increased economic stratification and labor market inequality. The use of the terms entrepreneurship and self-employment interchangeably in public and political discourse further obscured many of these structural distinctions and inequities. The increased attention to entrepreneurs and self-employment, nevertheless, played a pivotal role in generating interest in the international and domestic potential of microenterprise.14 The evolution of the iconic Grameen Bank in Bangladesh illuminates how and why microenterprise gained such heightened interest from Usaid, and other agencies and politicians as well. While the Grameen Bank's was one of several credit programs to emerge around the developing world, its founder, Muhammad Yunus, ushered in a new discourse about the power of entrepreneurship and the problems of government aid, which made the concept especially appealing in the United States. While teaching economics at Chittagong University, the Vanderbilt University–trained Yunus began to observe the conditions of “the poorest of the poor” in the village of Jobra adjacent to the university. He decided to create a small-scale loan program, which he named Grameen, the Bengali word for “village,” to help villagers obtain loans to purchase items such as cows and rice-hulling machines in order to sell items such as milk, stools, and bamboo.15 Yunus developed a solidarity-group loan repayment model with the idea that peer pressure would be a form of collateral. He recognized that this tool would not just create a support system but would also reduce administrative costs since it shifted responsibility for evaluating and monitoring loans to the group and thereby made the individual borrower “more reliable in the process.” Grameen required that borrowers make weekly payments and charged an interest rate of 20 percent, which was higher than most commercial rates in the United States but lower than the average loan shark's rate in rural Bangladesh. Grameen experienced a 98 percent on-time repayment rate, outstripping many commercial banks with far wealthier customers. Yunus celebrated these statistics as evidence of his conviction of the creditworthiness and reliability of the poor, especially poor women. The program caught the immediate attention of the Ford Foundation, which provided Yunus a portion of the funds to expand Grameen from a short-term side project to a formal bank with 226 branches serving 3,600 villages by the mid-1980s.16 As the project expanded, Yunus increasingly refined his philosophy of poverty alleviation, development, and social change. Reconceptualizing many of the traditional assumptions of development, he argued that offering credit to the poor would not only provide a means to build the dignity of the individual borrower but would also improve the economies of Bangladesh and other developing countries. His ideas about the potential of poor entrepreneurs to fuel economic development would parallel the influential ideas of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. Like de Soto, Yunus was a staunch critic of traditional forms of international development aid, which he believed fostered dependency. He also opposed any form of charity or government support, including unemployment benefits, welfare payments, health care, and education. He instead advocated that poor people should be given the means to earn an income to pay for such services suggesting that the “dole only increases their misery; it robs them of initiative and, more importantly, of self-respect.” He would frequently stress that microenterprise was not a handout but a way to help individuals help themselves. This idea fused the War on Poverty maxim of hand up, conservative ideas of self-help, and black power ideas of self-determination and also offered a model that contrasted traditional welfare programs.17 The vision of poor women embedded in Grameen's lending model also created a contrast to stereotypes about those on welfare. While the Grameen experiment initially included both male and female borrowers, the bank increasingly came to concentrate primarily on women participants. Yunus came to believe that women were by nature more responsible borrowers than men and lending to them had a greater multiplier effect. “When a destitute father starts making extra income, he starts paying attention to himself,” Yunus frequently explained, “when a destitute mother starts earning an income her dreams of success invariably center around her children.” Yunus's ideology rested on essentialist ideas of women's character that reinforced traditional gender norms. In promoting this vision of women, nevertheless, he countered many long-standing theories about and stereotypes of the poor. Grounded in his training as an economist, Yunus envisioned a poor woman as a natural entrepreneur and a rational economic actor who operated in the best interest of herself and her family and who, through access to credit, was rewarded by the market. This idealistic view of both individuals and markets minimized much of the larger social context and range of particular circumstances that shaped the lives of Grameen's borrowers. The bank's meritocratic model also excluded poor people who might not possess the qualities of hard work, resilience, and a natural urge to provide for their families. The bank thereby revised rather than abandoned older tropes of the deserving and underserving poor.18 Yunus's concept of entrepreneurship drew on his reading of Schumpeter from his graduate school days. However, whereas Schumpeter articulated the traits of entrepreneurship to be held by only a select few, Yunus adopted a definition that was far more democratic and universalizing and echoed not just Ludwig von Mises but also Werner Erhard and the human potential movement. He would frequently declare, “If we imagine a world where every human being is a potential entrepreneur, we'll build a system to give everybody a chance to materialize his or her potential.” Yunus's vision of the transformative power of entrepreneurship and the need to design approaches to poverty that turned the poor into entrepreneurs led many people—including an ambitious governor in Arkansas—to question if microenterprise might work to address poverty and economic development in the United States.19 I Loved It The physical landscape of rural Arkansas looks quite different than that of Bangladesh—then-governor Clinton nevertheless shared Yunus's faith in finding new solutions to address the problems of economic development and welfare dependency. Arkansas had long experienced economic difficulty, but with the increase of globalization in the 1980s, the state's rural economy was in crisis. In the 1950s and 1960s, Arkansas had implemented the standard model of economic development using public subsidies and the promises of a low-wage work force to recruit manufacturers to the South. This “smokestack chasing” lured many textile and metalworking plants to Arkansas for the cheap labor and subsidies, creating a surge in “one-company towns” across the rural parts of the state. Beginning in the late 1970s, these same companies found even cheaper labor and operational costs outside the United States, especially in Asia, which might have benefited Walmart, the state's largest company, but devastated many of its communities. Capital flight also substantially increased the rate of unemployment and the state's welfare rolls, especially among African Americans, women, and unskilled workers. These issues were compounded by the decline in the state's agricultural sector, which had served as another source of jobs and economic sufficiency in rural Arkansas.20 These factors troubled Clinton, who was part of the new generation of Democrats who believed that the solutions lay not in trying to lure manufacturers back to the state but in forging an alternative vision of economic growth. Responding to the economic problems and political realities of the late twentieth century, this group—often referred to as Watergate babies, Atari Democrats, neoliberals, or New Democrats—had begun shifting away from the party's traditional emphasis on industrial manufacturing and labor unions in the 1970s and 1980s. Figures such as Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Tim Wirth, and Al Gore abided by the maxim “the solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties” and touted new economy sectors such as finance, technology, market-based policies, and global trade as the means to create economic growth, individual opportunity, and individual rights. These politicians and their policy wonk allies looked to the models of high-tech bastions such as Silicon Valley and Route 128 and believed in the importance of small start-ups and entrepreneurship in generating job growth. In his 1982 essay “A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto,” which aimed to lay out the core principles of this group, the Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters declared, “Our hero is the risk-taking entrepreneur who creates new jobs and better products.” For many Democrats that entrepreneur also embodied the qualities of individualism, creativity, and meritocracy that members valued, and celebrations of entrepreneurship became key to their speeches, policy statements, and platforms.21 Clinton's search for novel and stable ways to forge and fund this style of growth in low-income areas and new approaches to the problems of poverty had drawn him and his staff to a program in Chicago called ShoreBank. Launched in 1973 in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago by Ron Grzywinski and Mary Houghton, ShoreBank pioneered a model of economic development that created a holding company anchored by a local commercial bank to grant small loans for residents to purchase and rehabilitate housing units and to start local businesses. By the 1980s, this idea had gained national attention and placed the founders at the forefront of discussions surrounding novel approaches to economic development. The Ford Foundation, a core funder and champion of ShoreBank, enlisted Grzywinski and Houghton to serve as outside experts to consult Grameen Bank in 1983 on how to computerize and manage functions such as cash-flow projections. “We thought they were out of their minds to suggest we go to Bangladesh,” Houghton later recalled. But they agreed to the assignment. The ShoreBank officials became captivated with the model and Yunus, with whom they quickly developed a close friendship and collaboration. When Clinton invited them to consult about the problems of Arkansas, Grzywinski and Houghton suggested that Grameen also might be applicable.22 Grzywinski and Houghton orchestrated a 1986 meeting in Washington between Yunus and the Clintons, who were immediately drawn to Yunus's story, philosophy of poverty alleviation, and model of microenterprise. “It was obvious what the parallels were,” Bill later explained, “He made enterprise work. He promoted independence, not dependence.” In typical Clintonian enthusiasm, he declared, “I mean, I just loved it. I loved it.” But Yunus recalled that Hillary was even more “gung ho” during the meeting than her husband. She asked him a series of detailed questions and then declared, “We want it. Can we have it in Arkansas?” Yunus accepted the Clintons’ invitation to visit the state to examine how to use his model to stimulate the local economies of its most impoverished communities.23 The week after the meeting, Grzywinski and Houghton joined Yunus on a tour of Arkansas, where they met with welfare recipients and other potential low-income borrowers. The tour included a stop in the Delta city of Pine Bluff, which had once served as the headquarters of the Cotton Belt Railway. By the mid-1980s, it featured all the symbols of capital flight, including high rates of unemployment, residential segregation, and a downtown filled with boarded up storefronts. Yunus asked the Pine Bluff residents he met what they would do with a small loan. One woman, who had lost her job at a textile factory that had moved its business to Taiwan, told him she would borrow a few hundred dollars to buy a sewing machine to “make clothes and sell them to my neighbors.” Another woman said she wanted a loan to buy a pushcart to sell her “famous” homemade tamales. Yunus later stated these responses proved to him that “the aspirations of the really poor Americans that I had met had a lot in common with the poor in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Togo.” Yunus frequently critiqued modernization. But his tendency to draw parallels between countries with vastly different local conditions and histories echoed many of modernization's proponents and therefore perpetuated some of its problems.24 By focusing on the resilience and determination of the poor women he encountered during his quick tour of the region, Yunus did not identify the larger structural forces and institutions affecting the Arkansas Delta distinct from those in Bangladesh and how they produced different kinds of barriers to starting small businesses and peer-lending programs. Although Bangladesh and Arkansas were both rural, Bangladesh boasted one of the largest population densities in the world, with 814 people per kilometer. In contrast, the Arkansas counties surrounding Pine Bluff averaged about nine people per kilometer. In addition, much greater barriers of entry existed in the United States, including higher costs of supplies and the required inspections, permits, and licenses.25 The planners of the Arkansas microenterprise fund, which came to be called the Good Faith Fund (Gff), relied heavily on the design and philosophy of Grameen and the advice of Yunus, which made planners overlook these and other issues. Julia Vindasius, who served as Mary Houghton's assistant at ShoreBank, became the first director of the organization. Despite the fact that she had never been to Arkansas or anywhere in the South, her passion and interest in microenterprise impressed Yunus during one of his U.S. visits, and he recommended she lead the program. Before setting up shop, the twenty-eight-year-old traveled to Bangladesh to observe the practices of Grameen and brought to Arkansas much of what she learned. The organizers initially planned to call the program the Grameen Fund, but this name confused many people in Arkansas and they changed it based on the notion that the program distributed loans on “good faith.” “We look past bankruptcies and bad credit,” Angela Dooley, the Gff's first loan representative explained, “[We] see collateral in a person's character.”26 The Gff received $500,000 in initial funding through loans and grants from the Ford Foundation and the Levi Strauss Foundation and officially began operations in June 1988. The planners decided to locate the headquarters of the Gff in Pine Bluff and extend its reach into the five surrounding counties, which were among the poorest in the nation, with per capita income ranging from $7,064 to $10,544, unemployment rates ranging from 6.1 to 11 percent, and a high percentage of welfare recipients, with payments from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (Afdc) or disability representing approximately 32 percent of total personal income. Like Grameen, the Gff used a peer-lending system comprising a small group of people who lived in the same community and were interested in starting or growing a small business. The loans would be repaid by the group on a weekly installment system at an 11 percent interest rate. Although lower than that of Grameen, this rate was still significantly higher than most conventional loans in the United States. In fact, it was the maximum allowed under Arkansas's usury laws. During the first year of operation, the Gff established nine borrowing groups with forty-five members and dispersed thirty-two loans. The inaugural borrowers were 85 percent African American and 55 percent women. The bulk of the initial borrowers were not “the poorest of the poor,” as the organizers had hoped, but operated at a state of relative poverty, falling below the national median income but above the national poverty line. The vast majority of borrowers proposed service-oriented businesses with the majority in the automobile sector, food and clothing production, cleaning, child care, or beauty and used the loans for equipment, capital, or special inventory purchases.27 The program received substantial media attention in its early years. The dynamics of the Gff were tailored to the human-interest stories popular in the press, and journalists and television producers tended to focus on the individual experiences of various borrowers. Dorothy Quarles of Pine Bluff became a frequent interview subject and the unofficial poster child of the Gff. The African American grandmother had worked for over forty years as a cook in private homes and wanted to start her own restaurant and catering business, but she had no savings or form of credit. She rented her home so she could not even use the collateral on her house. She used an initial loan of $1,500 from the Gff to purchase a commercial oven and a steam table to start a restaurant called DQ's, which specialized in casseroles and custard pies. Quarles eventually took out a second loan of $1,800, which she used to purchase a station wagon to expand her catering business. Despite the long hours, she declared to the Seattle Times, “I prefer this to working anywhere.” “I wanted to be my own boss,” she told Alex Chadwick on Npr's All Things Considered, “the Good Faith Fund was really a lifesaver.” The Chicago Tribune described how she wore a T-shirt made by a member of her borrowing group with the words Make Your Own Job. The Gff enabled Quarles to do just that not only by providing loans and the support network of the peer group but also by teaching her bookkeeping and cash management.28 The success stories of women such as Quarles obscured the fact that the Gff struggled during its first years of operation. It experienced high default and delinquency rates and had difficulty attracting participants. The problems revealed that the Gff overestimated the interest in entrepreneurialism and small-business ownership in the Pine Bluff area and that the majority of residents still preferred wage work and their old factory jobs to self-employment. This trend demonstrated that despite celebrations of the nation's entrepreneurial spirit, the country had much stronger roots in formal-sector employment. The Gff had also failed to fully appreciate the differences between Bangladesh and Arkansas—especially the differences in density and clientele, which made building borrower networks and a customer base difficult. Even in rural parts of Arkansas, microentrepreneurs in the United States also had to compete with more national chains and deal with customers who were accustomed to buying products from the grocery store rather than from their neighbor. Many practitioners believed that a greater impediment was welfare laws, which limited income generation by recipients. Yunus played an important role in drawing attention to this issue and in connecting microenterprise to the politics of welfare reform.29 Prisoners of Poverty Concurrent with his travels to Arkansas, Yunus also helped ShoreBank Corporation's Mary Houghton establish a microenterprise program in Chicago called the Women's Self-Employment Project (Wsep), aimed at welfare recipients. The experience afforded him a chance to refine his recognition of similarities among the global poor and the problems of welfare dependency. Yunus later stated that in working with the Wsep he “saw in practice how welfare law in the United States created disincentives for the welfare recipients to pull themselves out of welfare. If you are on welfare … you are virtual prisoner not only of poverty but [of] those who would help you.” The critique would eventually make its way to Washington and help make the concept of microenterprise more intriguing to politicians frustrated by the welfare system.30 Open in new tabDownload slide Fanny Slater, a Good Faith Fund client, is shown here in her dress shop in Dumas, Arkansas, in August 1989. Photograph by Theodora Lurie. Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, N.Y. Open in new tabDownload slide Fanny Slater, a Good Faith Fund client, is shown here in her dress shop in Dumas, Arkansas, in August 1989. Photograph by Theodora Lurie. Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, N.Y. The Wsep's name and agenda drew on Yunus's promotion of self-employment as well as the increasing interest in entrepreneurship among middle-class white women in the 1980s. The founders of the Wsep contended that by turning hobbies into businesses, self-employment could offer many of the same benefits of self-determination and balance of work and familial responsibilities for women of color transitioning from welfare as for white middle-class women. The project hoped its participants would make $15,000 per year through self-employment, which would more than double what most earned through welfare or minimum-wage jobs. The Wsep discovered that many women were interested in participating in the lending program but that they worried about giving up their benefits to do so. The federal Afdc program and many states limited a recipient's assets to $1,000 to maintain eligibility. Most programs did not distinguish between personal and business assets, which meant that most of the equipment people needed to start and run a small business would exceed the ceiling.31 The Wsep and other organizations made their case for reforming the welfare rules and for microenterprise programs more broadly by emphasizing the entrepreneurial drive and desires for independence and self-reliance among their borrowers. These programs sought to offset images of the average welfare recipient as passive, lazy, or trying to cheat the system and challenged long-standing ideas about the undeserving and dependent poor. In promotional material, the Wsep touted many of the advantages of self-employment. “Children of these entrepreneurs become exposed to ownership and business. Exposure to role models then becomes a factor in breaking cycles of dependency.” Such tactics proved effective as the Illinois Department of Public Aid commissioned the Wsep to create a demonstration program “to show entrepreneurship as a viable means of transition from welfare.” The program was a part of a series of experiments conducted at the state and federal levels in the late 1980s.32 The possibility of providing more opportunities for microenterprise development for welfare recipients gained its most substantial traction after Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat from Arkansas and the head of the Senate Committee on Small Business, was driving and heard Npr's interview with Quarles. In the summer of 1991, he pushed Congress to approve a five-year demonstration program to “assist women, low-income and minority entrepreneurs, business owners, and other individuals possessing the capability to operate successful business concerns.” It was the first legislation to target funding for microenterprise programs domestically, and it provided an important endorsement of microenterprise as a form of poverty alleviation and welfare reform.33 The House Select Committee on Hunger played an even more important role in shaping the political discussion of microenterprise and the welfare system. The committee's interest in how microenterprise could help raise the standard of living across much of the global South dated back to the mid-1980s. In the early 1990s, members of the committee began to look more at issues of domestic poverty and to explore the links between microenterprise development and welfare reform. Democrat and House Select Committee chair Tony Hall critiqued the fact that “we subsidize microenterprise programs overseas, but we actually block them here in America.” Other members of the committee relied on the personal stories of borrowers to show “how our current policies discourage rather than encourage them to try to stand on their own feet.”34 For politicians affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council (Dlc), emphasizing the problems of the welfare system constituted more than a means to help women start businesses; it also provided a way to improve the fortunes of the Democratic party. Launched in the mid-1980s to “reinvent the Democrats,” the group by 1990 had declared that the party's “fundamental mission is to expand economic opportunity not government” and called for a “welfare system that will help people climb out of poverty, not keep them poor.” Around that time, the Dlc also founded a think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute (Ppi), to develop specific ideas and policies that supported these larger principles. David Osborne, an early fellow at the Ppi, was especially influential in helping achieve and shape this mission. Osborne's research centered largely on the rise of public-private partnerships and third-sector institutions, such as nonprofits and other community organizations, which, he argued, more effectively provided social services and aided economic development than did traditional government bureaucracies. Along with his coauthor Ted Gaebler, Osborne expanded on this argument in Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Reinventing the Public Sector (1992). The book's model of entrepreneurial government advocated for efficiency techniques to make government more results-oriented and less costly and suggested ways to decentralize authority and shift more responsibility and control to the community. The book represented the shift from government to what Mark Purcell has referred to as “governance,” whereby the traditional functions of the state become transferred to nonprofits, the private sector, and community groups. Gaebler and Osborne explicitly suggested that governments should serve not as a service provider but as a “catalyst” in connecting the public and private sectors. Clinton emerged as the most influential advocate of the ideas in Reinventing Government, praising it as “blueprint” to “revitalize government.” Throughout his 1992 campaign, he built directly on its main premises promising “a new approach to government” that “offers more empowerment and less entitlement … that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy.”35 This focus on community, responsibility, and empowerment were key facets of the Democratic version of neoliberalism and represented a fusion of liberal ideas and conservative precedents and also a departure from them. It echoed the community- and empowerment-based ethos of the War on Poverty and its ideas of working through nonprofit and community-organization channels. It extended the call for reducing bureaucracy and the market-based ideas of conservatives as well as the rhetoric of individual responsibility and lessening welfare dependency. The Dlc and Clinton, in fact, took many of the core critiques lodged against the welfare system by conservatives at face value, even if they demonstrated a far more serious and genuine commitment to helping recipients. This set of priorities fell in line with the New Democrats’ larger faith in individualist and market-based solutions to create opportunity and economic growth. As both an ideology and a political strategy, this approach promised to appeal to postindustrial workers who had become a core constituency of the party and who favored individualist and meritocratic solutions.36 The Dlc increasingly recognized how microenterprise embodied the ideals of its emerging model of Democratic neoliberalism while maintaining traditional liberal commitments to using government as a catalyst to help the poor. In 1991 the Ppi issued “Microenterprise: Human Reconstruction in America's Inner Cities,” a study written by the law professor and institute fellow Lewis Solomon. Solomon's investigation connected microenterprise with the Dlc's emphasis on personal responsibility and individual empowerment. Drawing primarily on the examples of Grameen and the Wsep, he praised microenterprise as an approach that “focuses on the capacities of the poor, not their deficiencies” and deemed it “truly an empowering strategy.” Solomon also linked microenterprises to the Dlc's efforts to reduce government bureaucracy and stimulate economic growth and opportunity. He stressed how existing policies impeded “creating an entrepreneurial culture in America's inner cities.” Solomon celebrated the wider benefits, contending that “micro entrepreneurs also help to generate legal economic activity in low-income neighborhoods, fostering community pride and cohesion and a general sense of betterment.” Solomon's emphasis on “legal economic activity” set up the microentrepreneur not just in contrast to the image of the lazy and passive welfare dependent but also against underground economy “entrepreneurs” such as drug dealers, gang members, and hustlers, who were other main archetypes in discussions of the underclass. Proving how microenterprise fell in line with many of the Dlc's ideals and objectives, Solomon concluded, “this inexpensive, market-oriented, entrepreneurial solution can help alleviate poverty and promote economic development.”37 This research bolstered Dlc members’ recognition of the political possibilities of promoting microenterprise as a means of welfare reform, particularly as the nation approached a presidential election. Mike Espy, a Democrat from Mississippi and member of the Dlc, publicly stressed to his fellow Democratic members of the House Select Committee on Hunger, “we need to push this really hard because it is a good time to seize upon the entire issue of welfare as we move into a presidential race. There are a lot of advantages for Democrats.” He suggested that microenterprise should become a central part of “the Democratic national platform, because it has got all the elements that we want to push, as a national party.” Espy's friend Bill Clinton agreed about the political advantages of the topic in the 1992 election.38 Throughout his presidential campaign, Clinton championed microenterprise. In the “New Covenant” speech, where he famously pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” he outlined the role of microenterprise in doing so. During a Rolling Stone interview after he secured the Democratic nomination, Clinton declared, “We need to create a small-business entrepreneurial economy in every underclass urban area and rural area in the country.” He made explicit reference to Yunus, whom, he presciently remarked “should be given the Nobel Prize.” He recalled his initial encounter with Yunus several years earlier and how they shared a belief that “whenever the power of the government can be used to create market forces that work, it's so much better than creating a bureaucracy to hire a bunch of full-time people to give somebody a check.” In stump speeches throughout the late summer and fall of 1992, he promised to create one thousand new microenterprise organizations.39 Once in office, Clinton connected these programs to his larger agenda—especially his effort to reinvent poverty policy, the welfare system, and the role of government. The ideas of the Dlc and Reinventing Government came to inform a range of Clinton's policies from empowerment zones, a system of community-development banks modeled after ShoreBank, and his bold agenda to transform the public housing initiatives through programs such HOPE VI and Moving To Opportunity. Several of the programs did not rely solely on ideas from Dlc policy papers but built upon the earlier efforts of Republican Jack Kemp during his tenure as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Kemp tried to launch a “conservative war on poverty,” pushing for enterprise zones and especially public housing reforms that would empower tenants by making them able to manage their buildings themselves and purchase their units. Kemp argued that such an approach would not just privatize the public housing system but would also foster the entrepreneurial ideology of low-income residents. These proposals made Kemp an outlier in the Republican party, and he found himself ostracized in the George H. W. Bush administration. During the campaign Clinton had criticized Bush for not taking Kemp's ideas about tenant management more seriously and thereby deepened the wedge between the two Republicans and exposed a difference in their respective ideas about uses of the market. Clinton repurposed several of Kemp's ideas but gave them a more liberal and Democratic spin. Clinton advisers stressed that Kemp's model was coercive, while they took a more voluntary and flexible approach that did not demand complete privatization.40 The Clinton administration's efforts to make microenterprise a component of their welfare reform agenda highlight how Clinton sought not to eradicate, but to reformulate, the welfare system. Clinton's 1994 welfare proposal acknowledged that “one way for some people to leave welfare and become self-sufficient is to turn a hobby such as providing child care, making jewelry or styling hair into a business” and promised to take “steps to assist people on welfare who are trying to become independent by starting their own business.” The Clinton proposal stalled after the 1994 midterm elections ushered in a major shift to the right in Congress. In the aftermath, the administration revised its plan and eventually created a compromise reform bill that passed in August 1996. Known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (Prowra), it eradicated the Afdc and instead imposed a work-based program to be administered at the state level. Prowra enabled states to include microenterprise as one of the work options available and allowed welfare recipients the opportunity to retain their benefits for a set period while starting their own businesses. Even though microenterprise did not play as central role in the eventual policy as many had advocated, the discussions and debate surrounding it solidified the connection between microenterprise programs and welfare and helped diffuse the idea of personal empowerment and individual responsibility and made that language and framework increasingly palatable to liberals.41 Open in new tabDownload slide Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton are shown here on April 3, 1995, with Grameen Bank borrowers in the village of Moshihati in Bangladesh. Courtesy Getty Images. Open in new tabDownload slide Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton are shown here on April 3, 1995, with Grameen Bank borrowers in the village of Moshihati in Bangladesh. Courtesy Getty Images. These links would become especially important in the 1990s post-Afdc era and as microenterprise became more integral to the administration's efforts to promote economic development and women's rights across the world. Clinton initially did not make microenterprise as central to his foreign policy agenda as to his domestic platform. Usaid, nevertheless, sought to expand its microenterprise program in the early 1990s, which his administration fully supported. In June 1994 Usaid launched the Microenterprise Initiative, establishing an “enduring commitment to microenterprise by the agency,” pledging to make it “a central component of an approach to economic growth that stresses the increasing the economic participation of the poor.” By the middle of the decade, Usaid was the world's largest funder of international microenterprise programs, supporting 150 institutions in fifty countries. However, the U.S. government began focusing its energies on lessening the dependence of microenterprise groups on international donors, instead encouraging self-reliance through commercialization. Usaid officials argued that the only way microfinance could truly make a difference was if it became part of the private financial system. “We are out ahead of the revolution that's occurring around the world,” Usaid administrator Brian Atwood proudly declared. It turned out that the World Bank was not that far behind. In the mid-1990s the World Bank showed a new interest in microenterprise bolstered in part by Clinton's decision to appoint his old friend and former ShoreBank official Jan Piercy to serve as U.S. administrator at the World Bank. Piercy shared Clinton's belief that “access to credit unleashes entrepreneurial initiatives that enable the borrower to go from dependence to self-reliance.” Through the urging of Piercy and others, the World Bank established the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest, which not only provided microenterprise organizations more funding but also validated it as a major feature of international development.42 “Like a Caged Bird Set Free” Microenterprise earned further importance and legitimacy as a means of economic growth, a welfare tool, and a form of personal empowerment as Hillary Clinton made it increasingly central to her policy agenda as First Lady. The issue enabled her to carve out a role and voice within the policy landscape, and she used her bully pulpit to raise attention to the issue and demanded it become a more central part of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Increasing her travel schedule, she sought out opportunities to visit microenterprise organizations both in the United States and throughout the world. In late January 1997, she hosted her first extended meeting with the press in more than two years to promote the concept of microcredit. Clinton's remarks brought into sharp relief how she understood microenterprise as part of her own philosophy and that of her husband—particularly about the relationship between the federal government and the private sector. Building on one of the central ideas of the Dlc and her husband's view of the proper role of government, she suggested, “It's kind of like the Internet. I mean, that was a government project. It was nurtured by the government. It was subsidized by the government. Then it was spun off into the private market.” She celebrated microenterprise as a “market driven model” that “will equip more people to be … full participants in the mainstream economy.”43 Clinton elaborated on these ideas in her keynote speech at the Microcredit Summit, which occurred just a few days later, but added a more humanizing dimension by including anecdotes and descriptions of the borrowers she met in Bangladesh, Denver, Managua, Santiago, and La Paz to help illustrate her points. The sharing of an inspiring success story of a constituent or a hardworking person such as Dorothy Quarles became de rigueur in politicians’ speeches about microenterprise by the 1990s, and Clinton's speeches were no exception. In her remarks at the summit, she provided carefully chosen anecdotes that she had used several times over the previous few years. They included a borrower she spoke to at a Denver organization that helped Latina welfare recipients translate their skills into income. The woman, who wanted to start a bakery, told the First Lady of the challenges of gaining start-up funds and loans without collateral and wistfully stated a line that often received applause in Clinton's speeches: “too many great ideas die in the parking lots of local banks.” Clinton also included another favorite story of a seamstress she met in Santiago whose new sewing machine, purchased through a loan from a local microenterprise organization, made her feel “like a caged bird set free.”44 Like similar stories used by Yunus and the Gff, Clinton's descriptions contributed to shifting the discussion and stereotypes of low-income women of color from lazy dependents to hardworking entrepreneurs. She observed, “Most people who are eligible for microcredit around the world work hard as they know how, from sunup to sundown, and sometimes for many hours before and beyond.” While this statement served as an important counterpoint to negative ideas about the poor, by valorizing the hard work of the borrowers it maintained a focus on poverty as an individual problem that could be solved through a combination of credit lines and personal initiative. Her descriptions and the images she used to illustrate them also flattened the particular circumstances and context of each place and the clear differences in the conditions of poverty in Bangladesh, Denver, and Santiago that all required their own solutions.45 In making bold claims about the transformative power of microenterprise, Clinton frequently mentioned that her commitment dated back to her days in Arkansas. Yet she rarely discussed and never visited the Gff in her proselytizing for microenterprise. This exclusion was partly because the program did not contain the ready-made-success stories that had become a central part of her speeches. The evolution of the Gff during the Clinton era does offer a more complex picture of the ability of microenterprise to live up to the hype afforded it by many high-profile officials and especially about its capacity to solve the problems of welfare dependency, poverty, and capital disinvestment in underserved communities. The Gff continued to struggle to find borrowers, and it experienced high default and attrition rates. In the early 1990s, the staff realized that the large percentage of welfare recipients they encountered in their outreach efforts had the “courage and determination” to start a business but lacked formal skills, reliable means of transportation, and child care. In response, the Gff created a welfare transition program in 1991 called New Opportunities for Venture Alternatives to work more closely with Afdc recipients and help them transition to self-employment. The vast majority of people who completed the program found employment, yet only a handful started their own businesses. These results convinced the staff that what most welfare recipients needed was a structured and stable means of employment. Thus, the Gff gradually transitioned toward employment training.46 The passage of the Prwora intensified this effort as thousands of people in the Pine Bluff area would lose their benefits. Looking for ways “to match two sometimes opposing forces: the workforce skills of low-income people and the shifting labor force needs of the rural economy,” the Gff launched a new program called Careers in Health Care (Chc) in 1997. Chc provided certified nurse assistance training and career path development to individuals leaving the state and federal welfare rolls. By the end of 1999, Chc had 142 graduates; almost all found placements as paraprofessionals at area hospitals, home health agencies, nursing homes or had enrolled in college-level nursing courses. These results made it the most successful of the Gff's programs. The Gff did not abandon the microenterprise components of its agenda but substantially modified them. By 1996, Gff leaders acknowledged that “there was no easy way to fit the Grameen model and its cultural ‘props’ to Arkansas.” Thus, the Gff decided to focus on attracting borrowers with a “more decisive degree of business-readiness,” “sufficient talent, adequate capacity and tenacity to succeed,” and “clear evidence of entrepreneurial spirit.” The Gff also altered the types of credit it offered, shifting away from small loans and peer lending and toward distributing larger loans to individual borrowers. This shift changed the typical Gff borrower from someone such as Quarles to a white married couple who wanted to buy the popular restaurant where the wife worked but who lacked enough collateral to receive a conventional commercial loan. The Gff's problems and modifications were not unique and were representative of issues that many microenterprise organizations confronted with the passage of Prwora.47 Welfare reform brought an increased enthusiasm for microenterprise and the growth of new programs. The Aspen Institute reported that the number of microenterprise training and development programs in the United States grew from 108 in 1992 to 427 in 2002. As with the Gff, most programs expanded the training components of their services after 1996 but limited the number of loan offers to focus on “safer investments.” Even women who were able to secure a loan from a microenterprise organization confronted barriers to achieving true self-sufficiency. Programs often encouraged women into gender-specific work and home businesses that built on held skills or hobbies and required little additional training. Borrowers received a list of potential enterprises to pursue, such as cleaning, day care, cooking, sewing, and selling women's products. Although such endeavors had low barriers to entry, they were labor-intensive, had little potential to generate substantial profits, and were predominantly low wage, dead end, contingent, and unstable. In a 1998 study the anthropologists Tracy Ehlers and Karen Main concluded that microenterprise programs were “exacerbating women's marginalized status in the labor market.” Elhers and Main were part of a chorus of scholars and activists beginning to critique microenterprise as a tool of poverty alleviation in the United States and the developing world. They suggested that, at best, the impact of the programs had been overstated and, at worst, microfinance harmed the poor.48 In the late 1990s, politicians remained largely impervious to such criticisms and continued to contend that both the economic and psychic real value of the programs lie in their ability to promote “self-esteem.” In a speech celebrating the impact of microenterprise, Bill Clinton suggested “a shortage of confidence … is just as debilitating as a shortage of cash.” Touting microenterprise's transformative value, he declared: What does it mean to a single mom's life when she goes to the mailbox in the morning and sees a bank statement instead of a welfare check? What does it mean to a child when he or she can go to school and say, when they ask, “What does your mother do for a living?” She owns a beauty shop. Clinton's depiction discarded some of the most problematic aspects of the culture-of-poverty discourse, but perpetuated the idea of poverty as a psychological and individual problem. By focusing on issues of character and attitude, he directed blame for poverty away from the forces of capitalist restructuring and the policies of his administration. The emphasis on hypothetical and real success stories also created a distorted view of the effectiveness of the microenterprise programs. By ignoring or underplaying the realities of the programs and microentrepreneurs who struggled to stay out of the red, microenterprise provided a means to stigmatize further the thousands of people who had tried and failed to create a sustainable business or never had the resources to do so.49 This vision of work-based success created a distinction between traditional welfare and microenterprise, even after the passage of Prwora. In the late 1990s, Hillary Clinton declared that microenterprise had “the power to transform welfare checks to paychecks, poverty to economic growth and income, despair to hope.” This set of binaries did not eradicate but, rather, shifted the line between the undeserving poor and the deserving poor and acceptable and unacceptable forms of assistance and poverty in the post–welfare reform era. In doing so, this framing circumscribed a larger discussion of the variety of factors that kept many people from entering the labor market. This focus enabled Democratic politicians such as the Clintons to continue to demonstrate a commitment to the problems of inequality and the plight of poor people of color in the United States and the developing world while continuing not to fight for more comprehensive and redistributive policies to address them. Such a focus also moved issues of the political economy of poverty even further from public or political attention. Thus, the celebration of microenterprise by its many advocates left hundreds of thousands of people in an even more economically precarious position as they confronted the twenty-first century.50 Conclusion: From Microenterprise to the Gig Economy In a speech at a microenterprise event in 1999, Bill Clinton declared, “this whole country is basically built by entrepreneurs, whether they're in Silicon Valley or young investment bankers in Manhattan or people running the street-vending operations out here for the tourists in Washington. The genius of actually being able to have an idea and act on it … it's the whole secret of America.” This expansive vision of entrepreneurship has only grown since Clinton's time in office with the rise of the Internet and the “sharing” or “gig” economy. Web sites such as Etsy and eBay have offered new opportunities for self-employment and for people to turn their so-called hobbies into careers. The 2008 economic recession and its aftermath intensified this trend, leading many Americans to drive for Uber, deliver goods via Task Rabbit, or rent a room on Airbnb as a means of securing employment. By 2015, more than 53 million Americans (one in three American workers) identified as freelancers. Champions of the gig economy have updated many of the claims about the liberating dimensions of self-employment and celebrated participants as entrepreneurs who demonstrate resourcefulness, resilience, and creativity. Dubbing both the founder of Uber and a typical Uber driver as entrepreneurs, however, obscures the material and class differences between these two types of business operators just as Clinton did when he linked the founder of a Silicon Valley start-up to a Washington, D.C., street vendor. Such comparisons ignore the multitude of hardships confronting the average self-employed person who struggles to make a living wage and who might have a more flexible schedule but enjoys none of the protections or security of stable employment. In fact, celebrating their drivers as “entrepreneurs” allowed Uber to claim that they should not provide them basic benefits. The gig economy, therefore, does not offer a means toward equitability any more than microenterprise could but has promoted the idea that entrepreneurship can solve the problems of systemic inequality.51 Since leaving the White House, Bill Clinton has, through the Clinton Foundation, continued to promote entrepreneurship as a means of addressing problems of inequity both in the United States and around the world. The foundation expanded his long-standing efforts to “woo the world's most powerful interests to help the powerless.” It has focused on creating partnerships between private companies and donors, nongovernmental organizations, community organizations, and underserved communities as well as implementing market-based tools to solve social problems. In its first three years alone, the Clinton Global Initiative funded over 270 microfinance institutions and assisted an estimated 3 million microentrepreneurs.52 It remains questionable if the Clinton administration “reinvented government,” but the Democratic version of neoliberalism forged in the Clinton era through programs such as microenterprise clearly has had an enduring influence and helps clarify key continuities and changes within liberalism and poverty and welfare policy. Programs such as microenterprise have benefited individual recipients. Yet, they have also perpetuated and strengthened the Democratic party and its allies’ commitment to individualist solutions and focus on economic growth through mechanisms of entrepreneurship and nonprofits rather than redistribution as the main way to help the poor. By touting the individual beneficiaries of these programs as “agents of change,” politicians, policy makers and private corporations have continued to demonstrate concern for the plight of poor while entrenching critiques of state support as a form of dependency. This emphasis has pushed comprehensive social welfare programs and allocation of services further from the conversation and intensified the financial hardship of many poor people and their communities. Nowhere are these developments clearer than in Pine Bluff, the site of the Good Faith Fund, which currently tops the lists of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the United States. Pine Bluff is a powerful reminder that what low-income people need most is not to become entrepreneurs and that the best way to solve the vexing problems of poverty, inequality, and economic underdevelopment is not by providing microsolutions. Rather, macroproblems need macrosolutions.53 Notes She wishes to thank the participants of the Charles Warren Center Workshop at Harvard University and the Approaches to Capitalism Workshop at Stanford University for their very helpful and incisive comments on earlier versions of this article. The questions and assistance of the JAH readers, editors, and staff sharpened the article, and the Charles Warren Center, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Dean of Faculty at Claremont McKenna College offered generous support. Finally, she owes gratitude to Brent Cebul, Clayton Howard, Matthew Lassiter, Rebecca Marchiel, Katherine Marino, Joanne Meyerowitz, and Michael Kaufman for their invaluable feedback and encouragement. Footnotes 1 “About the Microcredit Summit Campaign Project,” Microcredit Summit Campaign, https://www.microcreditsummit.org/about-the-summits.html. “Remarks by the First Lady at the Microcredit Summit,” Feb. 3, 1997, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/8654. Microfinance refers to a range of financial services and instruments for the poor, such as credit, savings, and insurance, and has replaced the more specific terms of microenterprise, microloans, and microcredit used in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This replacement has important ramifications, but this article focuses primarily on the development of the field, so microfinance is rarely used; instead, I primarily use the terms microenterprise and microcredit. 2 William J. Clinton, “Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Microenterprise Development,” Jan. 30, 1997, American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/224221. 3 For a brief sampling of representative works in this extensive and multidisciplinary literature, see Milford Bateman, Why Doesn't Microfinance Work: The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism (New York, 2010); Beatriz Armendáriz and Jonathan Morduch, The Economics of Microfinance (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: Ngos, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo (Durham, N.C., 2005); Nancy C. Jurik, Bootstrap Dreams: U.S. Microenterprise Development in an Era of Welfare Reform (Ithaca, 2005); Lamia Karim, Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh (Minneapolis, 2011); and Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (New York, 2010). 4 Long-standing traditions of linking domestic and international notions of poverty have drawn increased attention. See, for example, Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, Mass., 2015); and Alyosha Goldstein, Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (Durham, N.C., 2012). For recent attention to the history of capitalism, see Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia, 2011), 314–36; and Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2015), xv–xvii. For an important exception to the subfield's inattention to poverty and welfare, see Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009). For examples of scholarship on poverty and welfare, see Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, (New York, 2013); Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia, 2007); Alice O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, 2001); Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, eds., The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980 (Athens, Ga., 2011); and Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston, 2006). 5 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York, 2005). For a discussion of historians’ uses of neoliberalism, see Daniel Rodgers, “The Uses and Abuses of ‘Neoliberalism,’” Dissent Magazine, 65 (Winter 2018), 78–87. For responses to Daniel Rodgers by Julia Ott, Mike Konczal, N. D. B. Connolly, and Timothy Shenk, see “Debating the Uses and Abuses of ‘Neoliberalism’: Forum,” Dissent Magazine, Jan. 22, 2018, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/debating-uses-abuses-neoliberalism-forum. For examples of works that depict neoliberalism as intertwined with the conservative ascent, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, Mass., 2012); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, 2012); Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, 2016); and Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York, 2012). 6 On post–New Deal liberalism, see Lily Geismer, Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, 2015); Brent Cebul, The American Way of Growth: Business Poverty and Development in the American Century (Philadelphia, forthcoming); and Claire Dunning, “Outsourcing Government: Boston and the Rise of Public-Private Partnerships, 1950–2000” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2016). 7 On the core tenets and limitations of the War on Poverty, see Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence, 1996); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2016); O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge; and Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill, 1997). 8 Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), 74. Emphasis in original. On the relationship between black power and entrepreneurialism, see Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig, eds., The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America (Rochester, 2012). On the relationship between the counterculture's ideals of individual freedom and antistatism, see Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 41–42. On Jack Kemp's relationship to neoliberalism and poverty, see Jones, Masters of the Universe, 304–21. On these stereotypical depictions of the poor, especially African American mothers as lazy and trying to cheat the system, see Katz, Undeserving Poor, 9–29, 168–87, 205–20. 9 For more on programs for farmers in developing countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Dale W. Adams and J. D. Von Pischke, “Microenterprise Credit Programs: Déja Vu,” World Development, 20 (no. 10, 1992), 1463–70, esp. 1463. Carl R. Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedman's Savings Bank (Urbana, 1976), 9. 10 Jurik, Bootstrap Dreams, 21. For estimates on the informal sector, see U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Hunger, Banking for the Poor: Alleviating Poverty through Credit Assistance to the Poorest Micro-Entrepreneurs in Developing Countries, 99 Cong., 3 sess., May 1986, p. 2. On austerity policies and informal self-employment, see Judith Tendler, What Ever Happened to Poverty Alleviation? (New York, 1987). 11 Curt Tarnoff, Congressional Research Services, “U.S. Agency for International Development (Usaid): Background, Operations, and Issues,” July 21, 2015, http://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R44117.pdf, p. 6; U.S. Agency for International Development, “Women in Development,” Oct. 1982, p. 5, Usaid, https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1865/womendev.pdf. On the transition of the U.S. Agency for International Development (Usaid), see Jamey Essex, Development, Security, and Aid: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics at the U.S. Agency for International Development (Athens, Ga., 2013), 53–54. On Usaid's prioritization of women's issues, see Winifred Poster and Zakia Salime, “The Limits of Microcredit: Transnational Feminism and Usaid Activities in the United States and Morocco,” in Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics, ed. Nancy A. Naples and Manisha Desai (New York, 2002), 185–215, esp. 194. On the factors that made microenterprise attractive, see Essex, Development, Security, and Aid, 71–78; and Elizabeth Rhyne, “The Pisces Project: Helping Small Enterprises Swim Upstream,” May 1, 2014, Usaid, http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PBAAD561.pdf. On the Ford Foundation's evolution, see Karen Ferguson, Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (Philadelphia, 2013). 12 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1942). On the shift from macroeconomics to microeconomics, see Daniel T. Rodgers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), 41–76. For studies of entrepreneurs and economic growth, see, for example, William J. Baumol, “Entrepreneurship in Economic Theory,” American Economic Review, 58 (no. 2, 1968), 64–71; Israel M. Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship (Chicago, 1973); and Harvey Leibenstein, General X-Efficiency Theory and Economic Development (New York, 1978). On “the new age of entrepreneurialism,” see Sandra Salmans, “Their Own Thing,” New York Times, Jan. 31, 1971, p. F3. On the changes in business schools, see Leslie Wayne, “A Pioneer Spirit Sweeps Business,” New York Times, March 25, 1984, p. F1; Deborah Rankin, “Entrepreneurship U.,” ibid., April 22, 1979, p. EDUC26; and Katya Goncharoff, “Courses on Entrepreneurship,” ibid., Aug. 27, 1985, p. C1. On the psychology of entrepreneurs, see, for example, Daniel Goleman, “The Psyche of the Entrepreneur,” ibid., Feb. 2, 1986, p. SM30. 13 For the increase in self-employment between 1970 and 1985, see Helen Scheuer Cohen, “How Far Can Credit Travel? A Comparative Study of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the Women's Self-Employment Project in Chicago” (Master's thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989), 39. For examples of self-employment as liberation from wage work, see Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow (New York, 1980); and “More Join ‘Own Boss’ Category,” New York Times, March 15, 1981, p. F18. On women and self-employment, see Bill Hieronymous, “For Some Feminists, Owning a Business Is Real Liberation,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 1974, p. 22; and Nancy Rubin, “Women Who Mean Business,” New York Times, Oct. 12, 1980, p. NES14. 14 On the connection of self-employment to economic stratification, see Richard Arum, “Entrepreneurs and Laborers: Two Sides of Self-Employment Activity in the United States,” in The Reemergence of Self-Employment: A Comparative Study of Self-Employment Dynamics and Social Inequality, ed. Richard Arum and Walter Müller (Princeton, 2004), 170–202. 15 Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle against World Poverty (New York, 1999), 40. For Muhammad Yunus's story, see ibid.; David Bornstein, The Price of a Dream: The Story of Grameen Bank and the Idea That Is Helping the Poor to Change Their Lives (Chicago, 1996); and Alex Counts, Give Us Credit (New York, 1996). Yunus has also provided similar accounts in countless articles and speeches. 16 Yunus, Banker to the Poor, 62, 57–58. On interest rates, see Bornstein, Price of a Dream, 293. On repayment rates, see Yunus, Banker to the Poor, 58. On expansion, see Ford Foundation, United States and International Affairs Program, “Program Related Investments: Program Review,” June 1984, report 009095, box 378, Catalogued Reports, Ford Foundation Records (Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.). 17 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York, 2000). Yunus, Banker to the Poor, 205, 190. 18 Yunus, Banker to the Poor, 88–89. The idea of women as rational economic actors builds on the work of Michael Katz about market-based approaches to poverty. See Michael B. Katz, Why Don't American Cities Burn? (Philadelphia, 2011), 112–13. 19 On Yunus and Joseph Schumpeter, see Bornstein, Price of a Dream, 23. For the “potential entrepreneur” quotation, see Counts, Give Us Credit, 310. 20 Southern Development Bancorporation, Arkansas Development Bank Holding Company Model, supplemental report, Sept. 1, 1986, folder 489, box 62, ShoreBank Corporation Records (Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago). 21 For more on Bill Clinton and the southern wing of the New Democrats, see Cebul, American Way of Growth. Randall Rothenberg, The Neoliberals: Creating the New American Politics (New York, 1984), 27. David Birch, The Job Generation Process (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). Charlie Peters, “A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto,” Washington Post, Sept. 5, 1982, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1982/09/05/a-neo-liberals-manifesto/21cf41ca-e60e-404e-9a66-124592c9f70d/. 22 Joan Shapiro, “The Business of Development Banking,” paper delivered at the Financial Empowerment Conference, Evangelical Academy Loccum, Rehburg-Loccum, Germany, Feb. 4, 1993, folder 634, box 86, ShoreBank Corporation Records. Ford Foundation, United States and International Affairs Program, “Program Related Investments.” David Osborne, “Bootstrap Banking,” Inc. Magazine, Aug. 1, 1987, https://www.inc.com/magazine/19870801/8543.html. William Greider, “Credit Where Credit's Due,” Rolling Stone, Sept. 2, 1993, p. 34. 23 Jann S. Wenner and William Greider, “The Rolling Stone Interview: Bill Clinton,” Rolling Stone, Sept. 17, 1992, pp. 40–59. Counts, Give Us Credit, 96. Yunus, Banker to the Poor, 201–2. 24 On Pine Bluff, see Richard P. Taub, Doing Development in Rural Arkansas: Using Credit to Create Opportunity for Entrepreneurs outside the Mainstream (Fayetteville, 2004), 25–27. Counts, Give Us Credit, 94–96; Yunus, Banker to the Poor, 204–5. 25 Taub, Doing Development in Rural Arkansas, 91. Tendler, What Ever Happened to Poverty Alleviation? 26 Tom Leander, “Julia Vindasius,” American Banker, Jan. 23, 1992, p. 19A. Yunus, Banker to the Poor, 80–81. Kim Harper, “Banking on the Delta,” Arkansas Business, Feb. 10, 1992, p. 29. 27 Alexandra Brown, Jackie Khor, and David Stern, “The Good Faith Fund: Managing a Grass Roots Organization in Rural Arkansas,” 1991, folder 506, box 64, ShoreBank Corporation Records; Ruth Anne Tune, “The Good Faith Fund, First Annual Report,” 1990, ibid. On Arkansas law, see Taub, Doing Development in Rural Arkansas, 74–75. See also A. C. Moncrief, “Peer Approved Revolving Loans,” Economic Development Review, 10 (Spring 1992), 82–83. Mary Houghton and Ron Gryzwinski to the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation Board of Directors, Aug. 31, 1989, folder 493, box 62, ShoreBank Corporation Records. Tune, “Good Faith Fund, First Annual Report”; Taub, Doing Development in Rural Arkansas, 89. 28 Testimony of Brian Kelley, U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Small Business, Microloan Programs for New and Growing Small Businesses, 102 Cong., 1 sess., May 6, 1991, pp. 11–14. Julie Stewart, “Little Bit of Help Goes a Long Way in Assisting the Poor,” Seattle Times, May 13, 1990, https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19900513&slug=1071431. “Good Faith Fund Makes Small Loans” (episode of Weekend Edition Saturday) (Npr, March 2, 1991). Karen M. Thomas, “Fund Gives Community a Bootstrap,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 22, 1991, p. 3. 29 Richard Taub, “South Arkansas Rural Development Study: First Annual Report,” 1990, folder 493, box 62, ShoreBank Corporation Records. Southern Development Bancorporation, “Lessons Learned about Economic Development in Rural Arkansas,” ca. 1992, folder 492, ibid. 30 Yunus, Banker to the Poor, 197. 31 Carol Kleiman, “Women Offered a New Alternative to Welfare: Working for Themselves,” Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1988, p. 6; Cohen, “How Far Can Credit Travel?”; Robert Friedman, The Safety Net as Ladder: Transfer Payments and Economic Development (Washington, 1988), 116. 32 For more on depictions of the poor, see Katz, Undeserving Poor, 9–29, 168–87, 205–20. Cheryl Rene Rodriguez, Women, Microenterprise, and the Politics of Self-Help (New York, 1995), 44. Women's Self-Employment Project, press release, Oct. 16, 1987, folder 1951, box 170, Women Employed Records (Special Collections and University Archives). 33 Kim Harper, “Supporting Small Business: Pine Bluff's Good Faith Fund Selected as Recipient of Sba Loan,” Arkansas Business, July 6, 1992, p. 23. Small Business Association, “Microloan Demonstration Project Fact Sheet,” ca. 1993, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/34258. 34 Opening Statement of Tony P. Hall, U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Hunger, New Strategies for Alleviating Poverty: Building Hope by Building Assets, 102 Cong., 1 sess., Oct. 9, 1991, pp. 1–3. Statement of Mike Espy, U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Hunger, New Perspectives on Urban Poverty and Microeconomic Development, 102 Cong., 1 sess., Oct. 9, 1991, pp. 3–5. 35 On the Democratic Leadership Council (Dlc), see Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence, 2000), 160. David Osborne, Laboratories of Democracy (Boston, 1988). David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector (Reading, 1992), 19. Mark Purcell, Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures (New York, 2008), 16. For Bill Clinton's praise for Reinventing Government, see Osborne and Gaebler, Reinventing Government, dust jacket. William J. Clinton, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in New York,” July 16, 1992, American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/220260. 36 For an example of echoes of the War on Poverty ethos, see Alice O'Connor, “Swimming against the Tide: A Brief History of Federal Policy in Poor Communities,” in Urban Problems and Community Development, ed. Ronald Ferguson and William Dickens (Washington, 1999), 77–138. For more on the priorities of this constituency, see Geismer, Don't Blame Us. See also Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics and the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006). 37 Lewis D. Solomon, “Microenterprise: Human Reconstruction in America's Inner Cities,” Progressive Policy Institute report no. 10, June 1991, pp. 1–27, reprinted in Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 15 (Winter 1992), 191–221. Katz, Why Don't Cities Burn?, 102–3. 38 Espy testimony, Select Committee on Hunger, New Perspectives on Urban Poverty and Microeconomic Development, 28. 39 Bill Clinton, “Responsibility and Rebuilding the American Community,” Oct. 23, 1991, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/34431. Wenner and Greider, “Rolling Stone Interview.” Carol Jouzaitis, “Clinton: Start Accounts for Poor,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 17, 1992, p. 4. 40 On the influence of the Dlc and Reinventing Government, see Bruce Reed and Gene Sperling to the President, April 19, 1993, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/5081. Bill Clinton also established a reinventing government commission chaired by Al Gore. David Osborne served as a main adviser. For more on Jack Kemp's vision, see, Jason DeParle, “How Jack Kemp Lost the War on Poverty,” New York Times, Feb. 28, 1993, pp. SM26, 47–48, 56–57. John Arena, Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization (Minneapolis, 2012). Preston H. Smith, “‘Self-Help,’ Black Conservatives, and the Reemergence of Black Privatism,” in Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat from Racial Equality, ed. Adolph Reed Jr. (Boulder, 1999), 257–58. For Bill Clinton's use of Kemp's ideas, see H. Jane Lehman, “Clinton Is Building Democratic Platform with a Broad Housing Plank,” Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1992, p. 10. 41 Jeremy Ben-Ami to Bruce Reed, Kathie Way, Paul Weinstein, and Sheryll Cashin, May 25, 1994, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/31609. On the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and microenterprise, see Lyn Hogan to Carolyn O'Brien, Nov. 12, 1996, ibid., https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/26320. 42 U.S. Agency for International Development, “Charter of the Usaid Microenterprise Initiative,” June 22, 1994, reprinted in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, hearing before the Committee on International Relations, “The Value of Microenterprise Development,” 104 Cong., 1 sess., June 27, 1995, pp. 35–36. Testimony of Mark L. Schneider, U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on International Economic Policy and Trade of the Committee on International Relations, Microcredit and Microenterprise: The Road to Self-Reliance, 105 Cong., 1 sess., July 23, 1997, pp. 12–16. “Remarks of the First Lady, Secretary of the Treasury Bob Rubin and Aid Administrator Brian Atwood in Press Briefing,” Jan. 30, 1997, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/8151. Mary McGrory, “A Banker without Pinstripes,” Washington Post, Feb. 2, 1995, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/02/02/a-banker-without-pinstripes/a9b567b9-d9e2-4afd-b81e-3b61321e0cf8/. On Jan Piercy and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest, see “Contributors,” in Global Public Policies and Programs: Implications for Financing and Evaluation: Proceedings from a World Bank Workshop, ed. Christopher D. Gerrard, Marco Ferroni, and Ashoka Mody (Washington, 2001), xx; and Jan Piercy, “The World Bank and Global Public Goods,” ibid., 1–6. 43 “Remarks of the First Lady, Secretary of Treasury Bob Rubin, and Aid Administrator Brian Atwood in Press Briefing.” 44 “Remarks by the First Lady at the Microcredit Summit,” 7, 8. 45 Ibid. Poster and Salime, “Limits of Microcredit,” 185–215. 46 For an instance of Hillary Clinton mentioning her Arkansas microenterprise commitment, see “Remarks by the First Lady at the Microcredit Summit,” 2. Britt Talent, “A New Way to Get Off Welfare,” Pine Bluff Commercial, Sept. 18, 1994. On the transition toward employment training, see Brian Kelley, Penny Pennrose, and Deborah Slayton to Board of Directors, Arkansas Enterprise Group, n.d., folder 492, box 62, ShoreBank Corporation Records; Southern Development Bancorporation, Board of Directors Report, May 14, 1997, ibid. 47 For the “two sometimes opposing forces” quotation, see Kelley, Pennrose, and Slayton to Board of Directors, May 5, 1997, folder 492, box 62, ShoreBank Corporation Records. For the Careers in Health Care graduate information and the “no easy way” quotation, see Southern Development Bancorporation, 1999 Annual Report, ibid. For the acknowledgement that the Grameen model did not fit Arkansas, see Mary Houghton and Ron Grzywinski to Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, June 1997, folder 493, ibid. For the “cultural props” quotation, see Good Faith Fund, Ms Foundation grant proposal, ca. June 1996, folder 506, box 64, ShoreBank Corporation Records. For the decision to focus on business-ready borrowers, see ibid. On the new typical borrower, see Houghton and Grzywinski to Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation Re: Talking Points, June 1997, folder 493, box 62, ibid. 48 Jurik, Bootstrap Dreams, 70, 175–76. On the longer history of home-based work and its exploitative dimensions, see Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1990); and Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (New York, 1994). Tracy Bachrach Ehlers and Karen Main, “Women and the False Promise of Microenterprise,” Gender and Society, 12 (Aug. 1998), 424–40, esp. 430, 426. For one of the sharpest critiques of microenterprise programs, see Bateman, Why Doesn't Microfinance Work. 49 Clinton, “Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Microenterprise Development.” 50 “Transcript of Remarks by the President and First Lady at Microenterprise Event,” Feb. 5, 1999, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/8400. Katz, Undeserving Poor, 201–2. Adolph Reed Jr., “Introduction: The New Liberal Orthodoxy on Race and Inequality,” in Without Justice for All, ed. Reed, 1–8. 51 Clinton, “Remarks on Presenting the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Microenterprise Development.” Sara Horowitz, “Freelancers in the U.S. Workforce,” Monthly Labor Review, Oct. 2015, http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/freelancers-in-the-us-workforce.htm. Jon Youshaei, “The Uberpreneur: How an Uber Driver Makes $252,000 a Year,” Forbes.com, Feb. 4, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonyoushaei/2015/02/04/the-uberpreneur-how-an-uber-driver-makes-252000-a-year/#65385b424e8e. For critiques of the gig economy, see Evgeny Morozov, “Don't Believe the Hype, the ‘Sharing Economy’ Masks a Failing Economy,” Guardian, Sept. 27, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/28/sharing-economy-internet-hype-benefits-overstated-evgeny-morozov. Cara Waters, “Uber Claims Drivers Are ‘Entrepreneurs’ Not Employees,” Smart Company, Sept. 15, 2015, https://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/uber-claims-drivers-are-entrepreneurs-not-employees/; “Uber Drivers to California: We're Entrepreneurs,” American Interest, June 23, 2015, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/06/23/uber-drivers-to-california-were-entrepreneurs/. 52 David A. Fahrenthold, Tom Hamburger, and Rosalind S. Helderman, “The Inside Story of How the Clintons Built a $2 Billion Global Empire,” Washington Post, June 2, 2015. “Press Release: President Clinton Announces Program for First Clinton Global Initiative Meeting outside United States,” Oct. 15, 2008, Clinton Foundation, https://www.clintonfoundation.org/main/news-and-media/press-releases-and-statements/press-release-president-clinton-announces-program-for-first-clinton-global-initi.html. 53 Nicholas Kristof, “3 Tvs and No Food: Growing Up Poor in America,” New York Times, Oct. 28, 2016, https://www.newyorktimes.com/2016/10/30/opinion/sunday/3-tvs-and-no-food-growing-up-poor-in-america.html. © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. 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TI - Agents of Change: Microenterprise, Welfare Reform, the Clintons, and Liberal Forms of Neoliberalism
JO - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaaa010
DA - 2020-06-01
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