A village finance leader draws a calendar of member cash demand, Cambodia.
The modern view of time is neatly summed up by Max Weber in the The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber quotes Benjamin Franklin, the sage of American capitalism, on the logic that built the American economy.
“Remember, time is money.”
“He that spends a groat a day idly, spends idly above six pounds a year, which is the price of the use of one hundred pounds.
He that wastes idly a groat’s worth of his time per day, one day after another, wastes the privilege of using one hundred pounds each day.”
Weber argues that successful enterprises at the dawn of modern capitalism were driven by a cultural shift: a Calvinist ethic that drove business people to manage their hours, minutes and seconds to maximum effect. But these units of time — which unlike days or months or years, have no natural analogue — appear abstract and irrelevant (or as Lawino puts it, ‘stupid’) in the oral village.
Today, we judge the integrity of those we meet in terms of their attitude to personal time management, including abstract units of time. We do not teach personal time management, because we see this as a matter of personal ethics, and know it is pointless to teach ethics. And we don’t lever the time management practices of oral cultures – even those that reflect deep personal integrity.
Microfinance should embrace its natural role: to guide oral villagers graciously into the world of modern time.
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