A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and bestselling author of Banker to the Poor offers his vision of an emerging new economic system that can save humankind and the planet

Muhammad Yunus, who created microcredit, invented social business, and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in alleviating poverty, is one of today’s most trenchant social critics. Now he declares it’s time to admit that the capitalist engine is broken — that in its current form it inevitably leads to rampant inequality, massive unemployment, and environmental destruction. We need a new economic system that unleashes altruism as a creative force just as powerful as self-interest.

Is this a pipe dream? Not at all. In the last decade, thousands of people and organizations have already embraced Yunus’s vision of a new form of capitalism, launching innovative social businesses designed to serve human needs rather than accumulate wealth. They are bringing solar energy to millions of homes in Bangladesh; turning thousands of unemployed young people into entrepreneurs through equity investments; financing female-owned businesses in cities across the United States; bringing mobility, shelter, and other services to the rural poor in France; and creating a global support network to help young entrepreneurs launch their start-ups.

In A World of Three Zeros, Yunus describes the new civilization emerging from the economic experiments his work has helped to inspire. He explains how global companies like McCain, Renault, Essilor, and Danone got involved with this new economic model through their own social action groups, describes the ingenious new financial tools now funding social businesses, and sketches the legal and regulatory changes needed to jumpstart the next wave of socially driven innovations. And he invites young people, business and political leaders, and ordinary citizens to join the movement and help create the better world we all dream of.

Muhammad Yunus, the practical visionary who pioneered microcredit and won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his world-changing efforts, here develops his revolutionary concept that promises to redeem the failed promise of free enterprise: social business. Designed to fill the gap between profit-making and human needs, social business applies entrepreneurial thinking to problems like poverty, hunger, pollution, and disease, creating self-supporting enterprises that create jobs and generate economic growth even as they make the world a better place. Partnering with some of the world’s greatest corporations, Yunus and his Grameen Bank have already launched several social businesses that are addressing challenges like malnutrition, lack of potable water, and endemic illness in Yunus’ homeland of Bangladesh, while other organizations around the world are developing their own experiments in social business. In this book, Yunus traces the development of the social business idea and explains its lessons for entrepreneurs, social activists, and policy makers, and offers practical guidance for those who want to create social businesses of their own.

Over the last few decades, free markets have swept the globe and brought positive change. Nevertheless, traditional capitalism cannot solve problems of inequality and poverty because of its view of people as one-dimensional beings concerned only with profit. In fact, human beings have many other drives and passions, including spiritual, social, and altruistic.

Welcome to the world of social business, where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today’s most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, and protecting the planet. Creating a World without Poverty tells the stories of some of the earliest examples of social businesses, including Yunus’ own Grameen Bank. It reveals the next phase in an economic and social revolution that is already underway and in the worldwide effort to eliminate poverty by unleashing the productive energy of every human being.

Nobel Prize recipient Muhammad Yunus profiles 20 Nobel Peace Prize laureates with Multi-Grammy-winning producer and New York Times bestselling author Kabir Sehgal, Monica Yunus, and Camille Zamora, teaching readers to incorporate lessons from each laureate’s life into their own.

When Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred B. Nobel passed in 1896, he left several millions in his will to establish the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded annually in six concentrations: peace, literature, physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and economic science. Since its establishment, there have been over 130 Nobel Peace laureates selected, each bringing his/her own unique experiences and lessons forward as an example to others.

In LEGION OF PEACE, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, Kabir Sehgal, Monica Yunus, and Camille Zamora profile 20 prize recipients in a narrative accompanied by songs inspired by these great leaders, composed by Grammy-nominated children’s artist Lori Henriques Quintet and three-time Grammy-nominated pianist Joey Alexander.

Through this lyrical narrative, the authors share stories of these laureates’ seemingly ordinary actions that transformed their lives and communities. The authors assign a superpower to each laureate that exemplifies the one basic principle that guided their actions, demonstrating to readers that all people from vastly different backgrounds can be connected by a common thread to come together to form a legion of peace.