Education Quote by Muhammad Yunus

The sharpest sting in Yunus's recollection is the mismatch between credentialed expertise and human catastrophe. He isn’t describing famine as an abstract “development problem”; he’s describing the humiliating moment when the tidy logic of the classroom meets bodies in the street. The line about “one of the universities” quietly indicts insulation: the lecture hall as a bubble where models stay elegant because reality is kept at a safe distance. When that distance collapses, the economist’s authority starts to look like theater.

His phrasing is deliberately plain, almost embarrassed. “I felt very helpless” is a radical admission in a profession built on confident prescriptions. The subtext is that conventional economics, at least as it was taught and practiced then, prized explanation over intervention. “No tool in my tool box” isn’t just a personal lament; it’s a critique of a discipline that can measure hunger, forecast it, even write papers about it, yet offers little to someone who needs food today. The metaphor reduces academic prestige to a craftsman’s kit-and reveals it’s missing the most basic instrument.

Context does the rest of the work. Yunus is speaking from the Bangladesh of recurring crisis, where famine exposed the fatal lag between policy and survival. That gap becomes his origin story: the emotional and moral pressure that leads toward microcredit and institution-building outside the state and outside the seminar room. The quote works because it refuses heroic hindsight; it starts with impotence, then implies a new job description for economists: less oracle, more mechanic.