Seeing the Positive

...in the Bangladesh bombings.

Austin Bay and Glenn Reynolds suggest that the bombings were meant as a message to the Bangladesh government condemning the work of the Grameen Bank. The bank is a micro-development lender encouraging entrepreneurial behavior (often among women) in small, extremely underdeveloped parts of Bangladesh.

Here's where the positive comes in for me: my senior year in college, I wrote a paper for my Economics of Developing Countries class on the failures of the Grameen Bank system. As my professor pointed out, it was really a sociology paper (though I got a B+ anyway), addressing the fact that the money loaned to women by the Grameen bank was regularly hijacked by their husbands and other male family members. And that the availability of those funds actually put women in a dangerous position, as the men around them demanded that they find a way to get more money all the time. The programs targeting women had the exact opposite effect of what was desired.

But here's the thing: I can't think of much that would make crazy jihadists more angry than the financial empowerment of Muslim women in rural Bangladesh. So what these bombs say to me is that in the nearly ten (!) years since I wrote that paper, some of the system's sociological glitches must have worked themselves out.

And that is good news.