Economist, Episcopalian, and Mother Jones Magazine founder Richard Parker visited Trinity Wall Street on February 27th. He told Trinity the realization of the Millennium Development Goals is not only a possibility but within sight – if we knuckle down.
Economics is intimidating. But the discussion of economics as a technical science is about instruments towards goals. And the goals are available for all of us to talk about.
The MDGs focus on global goals. As Episcopalians and members of the Anglican Communion, we’re not simply Americans. We’re worshipping in churches that are part of the global community.
What the MDGs goes to is the most powerful challenge that exists in the Bible and in which ultimately the claim that the poor you have always with you is actually historically wrong. We now live on the cusp of a period in human life when we can put the poor behind us.
But that’s not going to be the product of an unfolding of history that is determined simply by some sort of large, Darwinian process of globalization. It’s going to come as a process of conscious struggle over the ends — the goals — of development.
So for me, the Millennium Development Goals are an opportunity to take what’s intimidating about economics, translate it into a sense of moral goals, give concrete terms to those moral goals, and specific pictures of what it looks like to reduce poverty: more education for women, cleaner water, better public health. I think of them as a framework in which to think about poverty and its ending.