Some resources.

Best ‘big picture’ book:

“The End of Poverty” by Jeff Sachs.
Sachs is the economist behind a lot of the best practical work on behalf of the poor around the world. The book–basically, a history explaining how poor countries and people make their way out of abject poverty–was a NY Times best seller for a couple of years.

Next best ‘big picture’ book. “Globalization and Its Discontents” by Joseph Stiglitz. Nobel Prize winner in economics with a take that many progressive evangelicals will appreciate while feeling challenged.

Best ‘weekly’ input.

“The Economist.”

In my mind, a pretty essential read. Don’t be put off by the title. Strongest general interest mag around with great takes on culture, politics, religion, technology, and economics, with a format that focuses on various regions of the world.

All of ‘em try to explain–at least abstractly–how the mostly coastal, culturally elite thing for organic agriculture and local markets does and doesn’t do much good for the poorest people overseas.

No really good evangelical take on current economics, and certainly no paragraph length explanation suitable for blog comments. Some smart Christian stuff in the past but mostly outdated by now.

Our strong desire for relatively easy answers and our love/hate relationship with money–mostly love over the past thirty years–puts us at a disadvantage when trying to make sense of complicated and potentially dangerous/fruitful encounters with bread, bones and Benjamins :^)

I really appreciate what you’ve added to the discussion here. Can you point me toward some resources that would help flesh out this tension a bit more?

Thanks!

We’ve supported various agri-cooperative, organic, ‘get a local face on the food’ schemes over the years too and get why that’s important.

My daughter recently served as the ‘kitchen goddess’ (’cook and buyer’ in the prosaic language of most of us over the age of 40 ;^) at a room and board organic cooperative at Stanford.

We’ve been all in re supporting the local organic farming yokel.

Here’s the thing, though.

That ‘put a face on the organic local produce’ approach among liberal types in the developed world mostly damages poor farmers and the agricultural economies that depend on them in the developing world.

If you’re interested in serving really poor people in the developing world, at least in the short run, better to shop at places like Safeway (which get a lot of their food from poor overseas markets) and do all you can to end the agricultural tariffs we erect to block produce from poor countries and the subsidies we give to our own farmers.

I wish our choices were more cut and dried.

Let’s do it! So far that is us, Ingrid, and you…only seventeen households to go! We need to figure out a way to get the word out, both in our church family and in the neighborhood, pretty quickly if we want to do it in time for Summer. Fun!