The World’s Deadliest Infectious Disease. A Company Owned by 14 Million Rwandans | Michael Fairbanks

You know, I hear a lot of good intention under what you're saying.

You did mention a little while back, you know, African banker.

And I think a lot of people, you hear that, okay, white guy born in Pennsylvania becomes an African banker.

What made your approach different to maybe the stereotypes that I'm thinking about?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So most advisors to poor countries deal in the domain of macroeconomics.

So they focus on four things, stabilize the economy, privatize the industry, liberalize the trade, and democratize the decision-making.

And it's very top-down.

You know, here's the 12 things to do and you should be fine.

And if it doesn't work, it's because you're not smart or you don't have the courage to do the right thing.

That was the model.

My model, rather than top down, was bottom up.

Like, let's build the businesses.

and let's focus on exporting, and let's focus on high and rising wages for the average worker.

The macroeconomists might say, you know, keep wages low because that keeps the cost structure low and allows you to export.

Having been raised in the African villages and understanding the people at their level said, no, no, we need to export things where the wages go up.

We don't want to compete on how poor we can stay.

We want to compete and get richer because we're competing on you know, technology and focused market and segmentation, well, of course, that became irresistible to presidents in Latin America and in Africa.

Because I'd say, we're not going to lower the value of the currency and we're not going to underpay the people, which a macroeconomist back then would say.

Let's do the opposite.

You know, we'll have to focus on value-added industries and exports, where so much money comes back, we can raise the wages.

Now, with that new social contract, what that does is it says, we're going to make our society stronger, not compete on how poor you can keep the people until the society disintegrates.

I love that.

And you wrote a book about this, right?

I have to say, Michael, you're very humble and you speak very calmly about these names that both Tim and I are probably jumping out our receipts just