What change does Swift hope to affect?

In A Modest Proposal, Swift exposed the prejudice against the Irish poor by taking that prejudice to an extreme with a shocking suggestion. He also intended to lampoon a series of proposals that were being published at the time about solving Ireland’s economic problems, although many of them were unfeasible and unhelpful. By asserting, like these other pamphlets, to have a cure-all solution, Swift exposed the naiveté of such a view. “A Modest Proposal” was also satirizing the new trend in political thought that applied scientific innovations to political questions. Many British thinkers of the day, including economist Sir William Petty (1623-1687), believed that simple mathematics was all it took to solve society’s ills. Swift intended to mock this idea with “A Modest Proposal,” suggesting that it isn’t merely numbers, but people’s lives that are at stake in political and social decisions.