He's been working on his book for the past 10 years and tonight MichaelRrossberg will be releasing his life's work entitled "The power of greed: collective action in international development." He stopped by our studios to tell us what the book is about.
Mike Rossberg,
"People who were talking about development in Belize kept telling me their problems with Belizeans; they have a bad personality they said. They told me Belizeans are lazy and they told me Belizeans are backsliders, they told Belizeans are too hot for success, they are impatient. And it hit me one day that if Belizeans behave the way Belizeans do, maybe there is a good reason for it and maybe if Belizeans started to act in a different way, it would pay if you did, so then I began to think that if Belizeans are greedy, at least the ones that they are talking about are greedy, instead of trying to tell grownups how to behave, in the way that they have chosen to behave, maybe it'll make more sense to try to harness the power of greed and that's where the name of the book came from.
A lot of it is telling stories about things that I've encountered in Belize, to ask what am I seeing why does it make sense. It's a book about how do you do economic development, how do you do community development and how do you do it without telling other people what they ought to do and perhaps they know better than we. How do you come to people, if they are greedy, to try to do something about improving their lives. How do you come to them in such a way that they'll go after what they want but in doing that, they open new opportunities to other people.
I think the people that are going to read it are the people who work in the Ministries of National Development and Human Development, in the development banks like the Inter-American Development Bank, in the non-governmental organizations, people that are working in those kind of organizations and also the welfare groups are going to be especially concerned about it and also people who are the heads of community based organizations, they are going to be concerned about it and might want to take a look at the book.
I've had the chance to look at development and development problems from many sides and when you come across the literature that says we are failing at our development work, we're not getting results, not sufficient and not frequent enough, then I think its time to say okay what have the people teached me in all those years."
The book will be available at the launching tonight at the Princess between 7:30 and 9 tonight. It will be available in bookstores in the coming weeks.
