"There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences"
About this Quote
Yunus is calling out a bad habit disguised as sophistication: treating “culture” as the master key for explaining why places struggle, and then using that explanation to stop thinking. By opening with “everywhere,” he punctures the lazy geography of cultural critique, the idea that culture is a problem other people have. Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa get named because those are the usual suspects in development talk, where “cultural issues” can become a polite synonym for backwardness or inevitability.
The bite of the quote sits in “somehow.” It’s a small word that implies an entire ecosystem of incentives. Aid agencies need diagnostic stories, consultants need frameworks, policymakers need reasons outcomes aren’t their fault, and outsiders often want difference to feel legible and dramatic. Magnifying cultural differences turns messy structural realities - colonial legacies, debt regimes, labor extraction, weak public institutions, unequal trade rules - into a narrative of identity. It’s comforting: if the issue is “their culture,” the solution can be either moralizing or superficial, and accountability stays comfortably elsewhere.
Coming from Yunus, the subtext is also strategic. Microcredit and social business were sold as innovations that work because they meet people where they are, not because they “fix” them. He’s defending a universalist premise - human aspirations travel well - while warning against the exotification that development discourse can produce. The line argues for humility without surrendering to relativism: cultural context matters, but turning it into a billboard-sized difference is often an excuse to ignore the parts we could actually change.
The bite of the quote sits in “somehow.” It’s a small word that implies an entire ecosystem of incentives. Aid agencies need diagnostic stories, consultants need frameworks, policymakers need reasons outcomes aren’t their fault, and outsiders often want difference to feel legible and dramatic. Magnifying cultural differences turns messy structural realities - colonial legacies, debt regimes, labor extraction, weak public institutions, unequal trade rules - into a narrative of identity. It’s comforting: if the issue is “their culture,” the solution can be either moralizing or superficial, and accountability stays comfortably elsewhere.
Coming from Yunus, the subtext is also strategic. Microcredit and social business were sold as innovations that work because they meet people where they are, not because they “fix” them. He’s defending a universalist premise - human aspirations travel well - while warning against the exotification that development discourse can produce. The line argues for humility without surrendering to relativism: cultural context matters, but turning it into a billboard-sized difference is often an excuse to ignore the parts we could actually change.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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