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A number of years ago in a Cairo taxi, the legendary scientist and inventor Harold Edgerton of MIT, in answer to my question as to how he had been so successful and had accomplished so much said, “Look for the leverage points; everything else is just friction.” His words in the close hot space of that dusty summer afternoon changed my point of view. I saw in them a statement of social acupuncture, expressed with an engineer’s clarity. A guide to an economy of intention, like a martial arts movement or a ballerina’s gesture. When we think about how poverty might really be ameliorated, independent of ideology, political affiliation, or bias, where are such leverage points to be found? There are so many options. Any day’s mail brings several. How does one select something that will make one’s intention a reality?
One clearly successful leverage point is the microloan—the development of personal loan programs, such as the Grameen Bank—for sums that, in America, are often no more than a golf round or a family’s weekly church donation. Larry Dossey, MD, in the “Explorations” section of this issue, eloquently describes the bank, whose founder, Professor Muhammad Yunus, has just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his microlending effort. But his is only one such program.
Publication History: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
September 2007 (Vol. 3, Issue 5, Pages 453-455)
