The great push to serve the hundreds of millions of unbanked people, while noble, is just as experimental as Wall Street's adventures in subprime debt.

ECONOMIST: Banks in emerging markets

While noble rot concentrates the sugars, allowing the water to evaporate and imparting the grapes with an attractive sweetness, gray rot attacks the grapes, leaving them tasting distinctly rotten and ruining at least part of the crop.

WSJ: Will Lyons on Wine: The Bitter Economics of Sweet Wines

As for the right to education, while noble in its goal of providing every child a schooling, it may have the unintended effect of shutting down good private schools for some of India's poorest children by mandating infrastructure many won't be able to afford.

WSJ: India's Socialist Godmother