Microfinance arrived with a promise that small loans would lift poor borrowers, especially women, out of poverty. Kleinman argues the industry has quietly changed its object and now answers to investors seeking returns rather than to the social purpose it was founded on, a shift that mounting defaults and predatory lending have made hard to ignore.

His method is discourse analysis rather than economics. Reading the mission statements, reports and press releases of lenders working in Haiti, among them Fonkoze, ACME and Sogesol, alongside the literature of the World Bank and the large philanthropies, he examines how the vocabulary of human and social capital turns borrowers into subjects to be governed, in Foucault's sense, and lets a basic contradiction pass unnoticed.

Where interest rates on these loans have run between thirty and fifty-five percent, the distance between short-term social claims and long-term financial goals is plain enough.