From James Surowiecki, writing in The New Yorker on the limits of microfinance:

Thinking that everyone is, and should be, an entrepreneur leads us to underrate the virtues of larger businesses and of the income that a steady job can provide. To be sure, for some people the best route out of poverty will be a bank loan. But for most it's going to be something much simpler: a regular paycheck.

Surowiecki focuses his piece on the idea of the "missing middle" -- finance and growth opportunities for small and medium sized firms in the developing world -- as a strategy to create a regular paycheck for more people in poor economies. This idea is catching on -- an economy composed of huge MNCs and microentrepreneurs isn't going to reduce huge income disparities very fast or build a viable middle class. As Aneel Karnani commented last year, we shouldn't romanticize the poor as entrepreneurs, though there are remarkable examples of those. But for most, the value of a regular paycheck -- and the value of bigger businesses able to cut a regular paycheck -- is not to be underestimated.