Parenting & Family Quote by James Wolfensohn

Wolfensohn’s line reads like a calm warning delivered by someone who has seen the spreadsheets and the street protests. The intent is blunt: peace isn’t a matter of better diplomacy or bigger armies, it’s an economic outcome. By tying “development” and “poverty” directly to whether “our children” inherit a peaceful world, he drags global finance out of the technocratic lane and into the moral one. It’s a businessman’s argument dressed in a parent’s vocabulary.

The subtext is doing heavy work. “Unless we can deal with” quietly shifts responsibility from governments alone to a larger “we” that includes lenders, corporations, donors, and the institutions that set the terms of growth. “Development” sits beside “poverty” as both promise and critique: the world can post GDP gains and still fail if those gains don’t translate into dignity, services, and opportunity. His escalating phrasing - “deeply concerned then, and… more concerned since” - signals that the old post-Cold War fantasy (markets will smooth the world’s rough edges) is cracking under evidence.

Context matters: Wolfensohn led the World Bank in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, when globalization accelerated, debt crises and structural adjustment backlash intensified, and conflicts increasingly intertwined with state fragility and inequality. The rhetorical move is strategic: if you can persuade security-minded elites that poverty is a destabilizer, anti-poverty policy becomes not charity but risk management. It’s pragmatic compassion, aimed at the people who control capital.