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Date: 2024-03-28 Page is: DBtxt001.php txt00005175 |
SCHWAB FOUNDATION
SOCIAL FINANCE Initiative of the Schwab Foundation Breaking the Binary: Policy Guide to Scaling Social Innovation Open PDF: Policy Guide to Scaling Social Innovation See also: TVM webpage #24517 Peter Burgess COMMENTARY (circa August 2013) When I read this, the main thing that was going through my mind was simply 'How big it this?' After a lot of reading, it became clear that in economic terms it is tiny compared to all the other economic activities that dominate society ... at any rate, I think it is tiny, I really don't know. My agenda is very simple ... I want to see a system of reporting that makes it very easy to see the scale of an economic activity and to see very easily what are all the impacts of the activity, and where the impacts can be seen. The metrics that I want to see will have a big oil company and a small social enterprise use the same approach to metrics with good and bad impact reported in the same framework. So an oil company may be improving the economy with the profits from its activities, but it may also be depleting the reasources available for future generations and it may also be polluting the fisheries and having a bad impact on traditional fisheries. Because of the scale of the oil company these may be multi-million dollar impacts, while the small social enterprise may be doing something with a positive impact by at a scale measured in thousands or hundreds of dollars. The idea of value accounting is relatively simple, but its impact could be huge. Peter Burgess Peter Burgess COMMENTARY (updated May 2023) I have been reviewing a lot of my old papers ... that is papers that go back 10, 20 or more years ago. It is interesting to take note of how my thinking has changed, not to mention my abilities or lack thereof. In many ways my thinking seems to have improved over time, though my ability to write and communicate has probably degraded. I seem to be a lot less tolerant of 'double standards' for people in high places than I was a decade or more ago. Part of this is because some of the key indicators have 'accumulated' over time and now are clearly showing bad outcomes that are more obvious now than they were a decade or more ago. Taken as a whole, the chronic dysfunction of the modern global socio-enviro-economic system is a lot more obvious now than it was a decade ago. In recent years, I have talked a lot about the policy choices that have been made since the early 1980s ... and now find that more analysts are talking about an even longer period ... going back to Nixon rather than Reagan. I prefer my own choice because the circumstances of the 1970s were in my view quite unique. At the time, I wrote something to the effect that the economic jolt delivered by the OPEC oil cartel in 1973 was the biggest economic event in 'all of history' ... bigger than even WWII. This might have been a little exaggerated, but not by very much! Since the early 1980s 'economic' performance of the modern economy has recovered significantly, and there have been record levels of wealth accumulation at the 'top' of the economic pyramid. At the same time in the four decades since 1980 all sorts of social and environmental performance indicators have trended down. Nobody seems to care because those with any power and influence are using GDP as a metric of performance even though it was called out as being seriously flawsd by none other than its original creators ... John Maynard Keynes (UK) and Simon Kuznets (USA) ... before I became a student of economics at Cambridge! In my view, GDP is still in widespread common use because it 'supports' an inappropriate valuation of investments and therefore associated wealth ... and this is all that many wealthy people care about!!!!!!!!!!! The following about the Schwab Foundation shows to some extent how 'tiny' the impact of social investment is compared to the scale of an organization's general investment. There is little or no coherent data about the total performance of the Schwab investments ... but reading between the lines it seems that taken as a whole the economic performance is way bigger than the social performance ... and environmental peformance is totally ignored. When you 'add up' all the social investment it is offset many times over by economic investment which is serious enough ... but people do have some 'agency' albeit not much. The situation with respect to environmental investment is far worse, because 'nature' has no 'agency'. Peter Burgess | ||
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