These targets, endorsed by all UN member countries, comprise the eight Millennium Development Goals.

None of these goals (perhaps with the exception of the last one) were partisan issues.

And most important, a wise person does this improvising and rule bending in the service of the right aims.

There is no reason why the West s strategic objectives concerning Afghanistan should change fundamentally in the coming years.

And then, finally, I firmly believe, if we want the MDGs to work the Millennium Development Goals we need to add family planning to it.

What's happened is that the normative goals of the support groups that we're used to, came from the institutions that were framing them, and not from the infrastructure.

Not only are these objectives important in themselves they are also central in creating the right framework for a settlement between the various Afghan parties and the Taliban.

Economic progress is important and can greatly improve the quality of life, but only if it is pursued in line with other goals.

The Millennium Village Project, a partnership of academia, business, and UN agencies, aims to show how these goals can be achieved in even the poorest communities in the world.

The MDGs might once have seemed to be merely a set of hopes and aspirations. Now we know that they are actually a practical roadmap out of poverty.

Is there something you've always meant to do, wanted to do, but just ... haven't? Matt Cutts suggests Try it for 30 days. This short, lighthearted talk offers a neat way to think about setting and achieving goals.

The European project has clearly failed to achieve what French political leaders have wanted from the beginning. Instead of the amity and sense of purpose of which Monnet and Schuman dreamed, there is conflict and disarray.

In lofty language, the UN claims that the Agenda for Sustainable Development s 169 targets are integrated and indivisible. This is nonsense.

With these questions in mind, the Copenhagen Consensus (which I direct) asked some of the world s top economists to assess the economic, social, and environmental costs and benefits of many different targets. Education for all was among the goals that were assessed.

The lesson of the past 15 years is that defeating world poverty is not a hopeless cause. In the years to come, the SDGs can move the world further toward success especially if these new goals are helped by a rigorous effort to strengthen governments ability to achieve them.

Accomplishing all three objectives quality, quantity, and cost efficiency simultaneously is difficult, and the likelihood of compromise is great. With graduation rates and government spending easy to calculate, educational quality, which is difficult to measure, is likely to be the objective that slips.

And if we can resist this crazy slogan, we shall discover in Egypt, in Syria, in Libya, and anywhere else we go in the world that if we can often do much less than we pretend, we can do much more than we fear.

So, as the world signs up this week to the MDGs successor framework, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it should do so with considerable confidence. The challenge, however, is to make global goal setting still more effective, in part by learning the lessons of the last 15 years.

Among the objectives they considered essential or very important, 51 mentioned improving my understanding of other countries and cultures, 45.6 cited developing a meaningful philosophy of life, and substantial fractions listed such goals as becoming a community leader, helping to promote racial understanding, and becoming involved in programs to clean up the environment.

The post Wall generation, whose members are less than 40 years old and thus far removed from WWII, has little appreciation for this cause. For them, debtor and creditor countries increasingly divergent economic objectives are much more meaningful.