Ecumenical Poverty Initiative is proud to announce that we have endorsed the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. In state capitols and Washington, D.C., policies that promote systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and ecological devastation are threatening our democracy and decaying our national morality. We refuse to be silent in the face […]
Committing to the Common Good: The Faith Community’s Role in Addressing Predatory Lending
This article has been adapted from a reflection by Reverend Ebony Grisom at a Faith for Just Lending convening in January. Faith for Just Lending is a national coalition of faith-based institutions working to end predatory payday lending. Learn more about how predatory payday lending harms families and communities here. I’ve been reading Nehemiah for the past […]
Sermon – The Reign of God
So, when I read the lessons and found out that I was preaching about the end times, my first thought was to deliver a good old-fashioned fire and brimstone sermon. But I ran into three problems. First, I had to use google just to figure out what brimstone was. (It’s sulfer, so basically volcanic ash). […]
Poverty Used To Be Considered A Social Good
Sometimes it feels like poverty advocates are making the same arguments year after year and getting nowhere. The good news is, looking over a longer time frame we can actually see that a lot of progress has been made. The past two centuries have seen a remarkable change in the role of governments in combating […]
Economics for Advocates: The Tragedy of the Commons
The tragedy of the commons refers primarily to a basic demonstration that pure utility-maximizing economic logic leads to a situation in which everyone winds up worse off than they would have if they had cooperated. The phrase “Tragedy of the Commons” is from Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article of the same name in the journal Science. […]
Poverty News Round Up
With the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other: 1. Low-income students now make up a majority of school-children in the South and West: “But by 2011, almost half of the nation’s 50 million public-school students — 48 percent — qualified for free or reduced-price meals. In some states, such as Mississippi, that proportion […]
Economics for Advocates: Public Goods
Economists define public goods has having two characteristics Non-rivalrous in consumption Non-excludable Being non-rivalrous means that more than one person can enjoy the good at the same time. For example, my enjoyment of a park is (under usual circumstances) not lessened by your enjoyment of the same park. By contrast, a rivalrous good might be […]
The Angels and Us
The feast of St. Michael and All Angels seems like a good time to remind us that angels aren’t here to do our work for us. Angels are messengers (from the Greek angelos) of God’s word. It’s up to us to hear that message and put it into action. Injustice is our responsibility to correct. […]
How do we know the safety net isn’t lulling people into dependency?
There are a lot of ways we could ask about the motivational effects of the safety net. We could do complicated analysis of the rate at which benefits phase out as income increases, and then compare the level of benefits from the safety net to those of holding a minimum wage job. But the simplest […]
Economics for Advocates: Preferences and Social Welfare
A physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stranded on a desert island. A can of beans washes ashore. They debate how to open it. The physicist says, “let’s smash the can open with a rock,” The chemist says, “let’s build a fire and heat it first.” The economist says, “Let us assume we have […]
