So are there really a billion barefoot entrepreneurs, as the leaders of MFIs and the socially minded business gurus seem to believe? Or is this just an illusion, stemming from a confusion about what we call an “entrepreneur”? There are more than a billion people who run their own farm or business, but most of them do this because they have no other options. Most of them manage to do this well enough to survive, but without the talent, the skills, or the appetite for risk needed to turn these small businesses into really successful enterprises.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor economics: A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty, New York, 2011, p. 246