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And this was well before 2011 gave us slightly less grounds for optimism. Now call me naïve. Tell me I have been drinking the Kool Aid in Caligulan quantities. But I have spent the last year working with a group of people that have left me thinking that, against the vast and growing body of evidence, which I am just not going to depress you further by naming, Woody might just be wrong. I'm going to come out with it straight. These people have given me tiny glimmers of optimism. Tiny, but there. So before we accept Woody's verdict, here is just one source of that optimism - a company that got some grizzled investment folk talking at the Down to Business Pitch in London this month.

Bihar: the poorest state in India. Average income of US$160 a head per year. 70% of the population of 60 million without access to the power grid.About a third of them "structurally off-grid". It just ain't going to happen for them. But one man wants to change that, Gyanesh Pandey, the Founder of Husk Power Systems (HPS). Their model is simple. The one thing the poor have got is waste, discarded husks from rice farming. So HPS scoop up the husks, stopping them rotting and giving off methane, then they gasify the husks in a furnace (total plant costs of about $25,000). They then sell the power from the gas, each plant delivering power through copper wires propped up on hand-chopped bamboo poles to about 1000 local people.

Low tech, but it works, and the model has a triple pay off. The power costs less than half the price of the kerosene and firewood that currently take 70% of the poorest of the poor's income. It gets rid of the health impacts of smoke inhalation (estimated by the WHO to be about 2 million deaths a year) and it avoids the carbon emissions of kerosene, estimated globally at 150 million tonnes a year. But the real kicker is the economics of the deal. Husk can sell the gas from the waste. Then in the ash there's silica to sell at $1.50 a kilo, and finally there's char for local women to roll up into incense sticks. These three revenue streams together give a 27% return on equity for investors. Before carbon credits. Anyone else getting that? I spent the day with Kushwaha Ji, a local businessman who has invested in one, likes a 27% return and is now getting the capital together for another five.

Husk has done 80 micro-power plants so far, with 2000 in the works, over the next 2 years.

So what makes me optimistic? What HPS could represent is the DNA for another type of growth, one that harnesses the innovative power of capitalism, but uses it differently, for the production not distribution of economic value.

Can it be scaled up as an investment class? That's what appealed to the investment veterans in London.

Point one: it's a market that's already big. Agricultural waste has got the potential to work for 500 million of the world's 1.5 billion people without power.

Point two: it's a market that's growing. It's in the emerging markets that the next 3 billion people are arriving before 2050.

Point three: it's a market with the capacity to pay. The poorest of the poor already spend an estimated $38billion globally on kerosene and firewood.

Point four: it's a business model that is the opposite of the sub-prime. Give someone a predatory loan, with a hidden ballooning interest rate payment at the end of a short grace period, and you have got an unsustainable market where value is going eventually to get destroyed. Give people Husk power, combined with mobile phones, and you take average incomes up from $160 a head to $1600 a head. The investment is productive not predatory. Put a dollar on and way more than a dollar comes out. The more you deliver the more you create the conditions for growth.

Are you optimised out? Are you exhausted? If not, just imagine this. Imagine we lay to bed the austerity-stimulus debate and started to do something simple at the macro level. Give a little less stimulus and subsidy to the stuff that's economically throwing money down the tubes. And put some funding, and our collective welly, instead to stimulate the stuff that's long-term productive. Stuff like Husk.