A Concert for Hope - Part 3

We were inspired by the words of former president Jimmy Carter, who wrote: We decided it would be good and lovely and within our talents and possibilities, to focus on domestic poverty. To do what we can to create new hope for the disenfranchised; who live, quite literally in some cases, on our very doorsteps. Now to be sure the environmental argument was won on hard science. And hard science likewise has to be the foundation of this new smart war on poverty. This comment leads to a second reason why a moral argument shouldn’t be the exclusive platform on which to build a case for a renewed attention to poverty and inequality. The moral argument suggests after all, that good intentions are enough. That we simply have to get enough people to care and that if we do so all else will ultimately fall in place. That’s a dangerous sentiment. We shouldn’t, for example, spend money for poverty abatement in ways that create perverse incentives that ultimately lower the GNP, and in the end generate more poverty not less. It’s precisely for this reason that the center was founded. We want to make it possible to do the right thing smartly, to support the development and to disseminate science-based interventions. Interventions that work and that are not counterproductive. So what we need in short is a new smart war on poverty. In his grand epic of this country, our national poet Walt Whitman wrote, Simply by taking the time to be here, to engage with this, you join in the song, “In Harmony with Hope” in the conviction that together we can bring about change. We can do something to alleviate poverty and inequality. And doing that, in President Carter’s words, would be “good and lovely.” I want to lead off with a story about Bob…