Kiva is a site for making peer-to-peer microloans. It doesn’t get more new school than that. Check out the video time-series map.
Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva Microfunds on Vimeo.
Economically, what gets me about this is that the funds appear to be going in the theoretically correct direction, based on marginal product: a loan can make the most difference in a place where someone is capital poor.Yet, one of the big development problems of the last several decades has been the extent to which larger investments tend to move in the other direction: America is a sink, sucking in funds that could better be loaned elsewhere.
Via Marginal Revolution.
