Good-as-money
RULE, ALIX
Early in 2008—before the economy started acting up—the New York Times published a special issue of its Sunday magazine—the Money Issue, though it might equally well have been called the "Good"...
...Between good things—say, privacy and security, greater wealth or greater equality—one would lose out, a loss that might be justified but would remain, in some way, tragic...
...Gertner's prediction was that "philanthropy's golden age is yet to come," which seemed accurate at the time...
...We need to restore faith in the state as more than a stakeholder and a regulator...
...A more recent one, promoted by organizations like Skoll and Schwab, and taught in social entrepreneurship programs, is increasingly the default in public discourse...
...it offers an opportunity to publicly recognize the damage that our discussion of progress has suffered...
...Apparently few have considered the implications of the new understanding of social goodness for the older idea, in Tony Judt's terms, that "rights-bearing citizens [have] an unconditional claim upon the attention of the collectivity...
...With its focus on better seed technology, free markets, and measurable financial goals, the project could easily be viewed as an experimental start-up business...
...It has been seductive...
...If disempowerment is one alternative, others are yet more sinister...
...Aside from its role of regulating the "legal and fiscal arrangements" in which the parallel economy in social good is to flourish, government has no unique role...
...Dubner and Levitt refer to the cancer research community in the same mysteriously blameless terms, as a "system" "made up of countless well-meaning individuals who, collectively, turned into a hive of competing interests and misaligned incentives...
...Although the content of social value is not publicly debated among the intellectual vanguard of good-as-money, the epistemology of social value, weirdly, is...
...we haven't...
...But mere possession of a moral pulse doesn't provide much of a basis for decision-making...
...Innovation needs no parliament...
...And in the creed of good-asmoney, that is a kind of stuff that can be quantified, transferred, compared and traded in— maximized...
...Now Change seems suddenly inevitable...
...In any case, the vision that good-as-money evokes takes as its instructive example the industrial revolution—or the more recent IT revolution— where a chaotic flurry of individual activity produced radical advance...
...Enthusiasm for group decisionmaking rooted in a lack of faith in the judgment of the individuals involved (perhaps including one's own) seems a more recent development...
...But in practice few big companies can now afford to ignore it...
...Its appeal is based in despair—that the contemporary world is simply too complex, too interconnected, and too quickly changing to really get a comprehensive grip on, let alone to risk assigning blame or pursuing controversy...
...And yet, problems remain...
...THE SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR It would be hard to overestimate how widely accepted good-as-money—has become...
...Many Americans have already suffered from the abandonment of this principle implicit in the policies of the past decades, now many more are set to do so...
...These figures include gifts from individuals, corporations, nonprofits, and foundations to arts and cultural organizations, religious organizations, ecological (and certainly a few anti-ecological) causes, labor causes, and higher education...
...Over and over, the author omits the same crucial distinction as his interlocutors: between conducting grant programs more efficiently on any number of criteria and reconceptualizing the pursuits on the model of finance...
...Instead the economy itself rewards both performance and innovation...
...they will call for imagination about what kind of society and world recovery efforts should seek to rebuild...
...It bears repeating—the contemporary vision of progress that good-asmoney motivates is definitely something, no matter how delusive, or foolish, or, in many cases, how self-serving...
...The leaderlessness of such a regime is a serious source of its appeal...
...Many have been advised that they should never let on what motivates them...
...What we need, more than ever, are strong social movements that can say what kind of change they want...
...But he seems to doubt that sensible readers will find it controversial...
...The new ethos has undermined our ability to make such judgments...
...Consider the discussion of American primary and secondary education reproduced in the Money Issue...
...Indeed, when pitching a reluctant government, Mullaney refers to cleft children as "nonperforming assets," who can soon be returned to the economic mainstream...
...In a very short time we have become so used to it that, apparently, it is not...
...There were great debates about what counted as progress and what didn't, and who got to say...
...Here indeed is a story of creativity and, perhaps in a certain sense, of freedom...
...For isn't the vision of social change that runs through the Money Issue strikingly bizarre...
...The editors "sum all this up as the sensibility of giving a damn...
...It's an orthodoxy for those who find politics too fraught or hard or complicated or demanding or nasty—or who don't find it at all...
...And the desideratum of all parties— governments, foundations, billionaires, African farmers, and concerned readers alike—is taken to be identical...
...In the United Kingdom it's called the "third sector" (there is now a cabinet minister for it...
...Unlike value in the economic sense, it was often thought that various social goods were incommensurable...
...We'll need smart people to invest in solutions that can help illuminate the path forward...
...Here we have Frederick Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, claiming in the Money Issue, "The reality is that these things [unspecified] won't change" without private investment...
...Here market-based schemes—notably the European cap-and-trade regime and the implementation of carbon-reducing technologies—have been largely effective in reducing emissions...
...In Mulgan's Smithian appropriation, as in Sachs's new global problem-solving, the state is a major social investor...
...But the associated intellectual developments are probably most revealing...
...If privatization discharged responsibility for social welfare to the lowest bidder, the drive to reconceive social good has carried that doctrine one conceptual step further...
...The brilliance of the market mechanism is that it is automatic," writes Mulgan in an essay explaining his role in promoting social innovation for the Blair administration...
...Our environmental anxieties may have produced a mistaken view of very different collective concerns, indeed, of collective concerns in general...
...The difficulty with good-as-money is that it's more than an instrumentality, and it's not just institutional...
...The problems are too complicated and the politics are too dogmatic at this point...
...Here again, philanthropic organizations have played an important role...
...among others, the organization has funded J. B. Schramm, who advocates a college prep program to get more low-income kids into elite universities, and Matt Flannery, the TiVo employee who founded the online microlending application KIVA...
...Well before the past year's economic turmoil, there was a growing realization that the ideology that licensed waves of welfare privatization has produced some social results that no one was prepared to countenance...
...But the image of social progress that the past few decades have produced will stay with us, until we reject it in favor of something better and more honest...
...Vanessa Kirsch makes the patriotic case that "[o]ne of the things that makes America great is its entrepreneurial system...
...But it is not the guardian of the public interest, because there is no public...
...Something very troubling has happened to "good" in public discussion generally over recent years...
...Yet—with little else to talk about—the subject keeps coming up...
...Communications technologies and the global economy have brought us closer than ever before...
...Sometimes it's the "civil society sector" or the "nonprofit sector" or the "social value sector"—in any case, now it's a sector...
...No political agency here...
...It is not that these people do the same things or use the same methods or share the same beliefs...
...Sachs describes how it will work: nations will make a series of "modest public investments...
...Look no further than the odd and nonpartisan popularity of the "social entrepreneur...
...AGRA would be among the riskiest of the foundation's current programs, she told me...
...Wikipedia includes Florence Nightingale, Robert Owen, and Daniel Bell (and on occasion, Margaret Sanger) as social entrepreneurs...
...Global development has deviated far off course in Sachs's view...
...But in a three-dimensional moral universe, Mullaney's program might strike some as missing the point...
...The reason that social entrepreneurs take an interest in such metrics is, ideologically speaking, straightforward...
...Let's be Clear...
...Over the past decade, programs in social entrepreneurship have appeared at top-tier universities...
...The "sensibility of giving a damn" isn't really much to commit to...
...He fights bad incentives with better ones: when Smile Train learned that midwives in Chennai, India, were being paid off to smother baby girls born with cleft deformities, Mullaney started offering midwives as much as $10 for each girl they instead took to a hospital for a surgery...
...public discourse show no signs of subsiding...
...Progressives have been all too uncritical in accepting private sector innovation on the public behalf...
...All are simply seeking "significant impact...
...A look at the kind of support that private entities championing the monetarization of good have brokered reveals why...
...The article's focus is on social "metrics," that is, "the increasingly sophisticated techniques" foundations have lately adopted to "measure their impact...
...It is decidedly global, drawing on the flat-world triumphalism of the past two decades for its narrative cues...
...It also sends a delegation of selected change-makers to the Davos World Economic Forum, with whom the foundation shares its founder, Klaus Schwab...
...But whose conception...
...When social aims are clear and legitimate, tools of business and finance may help accomplish them...
...people want to believe in it...
...but there are no organized capital markets or support systems to give [social entrepreneurs] the help they need to be the disruptors and innovators—and, just as important, to get their innovations to scale...
...However one chooses to respond, the idea that the state's highest imperative is to maximize the production of value undermines another one, which it threatens to replace: that the state's first responsibility is to protect each of its citizens as such...
...The number of books proposing paths for social betterment published last year by economists should provide some indication...
...Good-as-money makes it impossible to discuss the value conflicts involved in social change by conceptually vacating the need to do so...
...business, it's often said, cannot afford to ignore them...
...Their unit of analysis is the "social problem...
...Understanding the new orientation as a formula for giving money away is myopic...
...IS GOOD-AS-MONEY GOOD...
...We may be at the end of an economic era...
...With the economic downturn, adventuring in corporate social responsibility is also bound to recede...
...From the free market Manhattan Institute to the left-leaning Tides Foundation, institutions today are seeking to back such valueproducing activity...
...And to a certain extent, people agreed to disagree and settled on institutions to keep things civil...
...Battles over the meaning and legal status of life in U.S...
...As poverty, disease, homelessness, pollution, and violence decline, the popularity and value of the social businesses active in those causes will grow—and so will the value of the Social Dow Jones index...
...But for people who are serious about such things, social entrepreneurship is a clear-cut concept, one adapted from Joseph Schumpeter...
...Geoff Mulgan, former top policy adviser to Tony Blair, has claimed that in fact "there are no neat dividing lines between different kinds of value: economic and social, public and private...
...The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which "seeks to be the preferred partner for companies and social investors around the world," has twenty-odd corporate partners, who sponsor social entrepreneurs in twenty-four countries...
...But the success of such projects has little to do with the fact that we've all become postpartisan...
...When what is socially valuable becomes just one facet of economic growth, it no longer has a claim to trump the others...
...As the Times explained, for much of the twentieth century, not much action went on there—"government made it unnecessary...
...Innovation needs no object...
...Many also have a sense that social entrepreneurs are possessors of practical, non-ideological solutions to social and environmental ills...
...Skepticism about public leadership is not necessarily a bad thing, and it's hardly new...
...Times magazine contributors and Freakonomics authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner approvingly describe the social activities of Kevin Mullaney and Ray Furst ("Bottom Line Philanthropy...
...It is an ideological affliction that seems to strike the young hardest...
...These will be drawn on to mobilize scientific research, to create incentives for the development of ideas for social intervention, and to finance a "global scaling up" of the interventions deemed successful...
...When good is like money, no one has to be ultimately accountable for achieving it...
...Rather than own that we've largely devalued the skills of organizing and movement building, ideas like social entrepreneurship promise that the skills we've been cultivating all along in pursuit of profit—"science, technology and professionalism" in Sachs's terms—will turn out to be more effective anyway...
...No one can ignore them...
...Yunus believes that "capitalism is a half-developed structure" that in full bloom would produce social as well as economic benefit...
...they include avant-garde philanthropists like Skoll and Schwab, economists like Sachs, and pundits like David Gergen, wonks and politicians in and out of government...
...Much like the growth of social science disciplines in the United States, the support of donors who see themselves as having a stake in the field has been significant: Skoll endowed the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University...
...It has lots to do with a failure to provide political actors with articulated visions of a better society and a better world...
...On the contrary, good-as-money could be with us for a while...
...The new "change agents" are conceived as Schumpeterian entrepreneurs for the social world...
...All the tiresome utilitarian dilemmas come into play: Is social value defined as the aggregate of individual value...
...And this realization coincided inconveniently with the increasing awareness that our destinies are bound up with those of people scattered across the globe: the relationship between foreign and domestic affairs needs to be carefully rethought...
...Good—social good, that is—has become more fungible, in the parlance of economists...
...If so, are the units interchangeable...
...there are no trade-offs or hierarchies or conflicting loyalties here, either...
...If it's possible to form a comprehensive picture of what they've consisted in, no one has done it...
...Yet, when good is like money, individuals do not need coherent approaches to it any more than institutions do...
...The drive for corporations to accept responsibilities for their actions, the increased scrutiny of those actions by financial stakeholders and concerned citizens, the development of mechanisms that make it easier to donate private wealth, appeals to consumers to support more ethical industry practices—all these are trends we may want to endorse...
...Creative destruction was the entrepreneur's purport...
...Such are the high stakes in debates about whether abstinence programs or the distribution of condoms or education of girls would do better in reducing the rate of AIDS infections...
...The discussion reveals how the new paradigm has affected talk of social improvement: for all the enthusiasm with which the transformation is discussed, its substance, the ideals driving it, are never mentioned...
...It has become more uniform and unitary, less complex and differentiated...
...They also talk with a certain historical disregard—as though to treat schooling in terms of national aspirations for racial integration, gender parity, or socioeconomic equality would be retrograde or, in the new parlance, impractical...
...Jeffrey Sachs's Common Wealth is paradigmatic...
...But this is an old story...
...Philanthropic organizations that price goodness have had striking success in attracting corporate support...
...The numbers have been much cited as an index of qualitative shifts in philanthropy, which Gertner goes on to survey: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, are funding AGRA, a program aimed at augmenting crop yields in Africa that "resembles an investment more than a charity...
...And, not unrelatedly, a diverse cast of activists, lobbyists, and other purveyors of social solutions have branded or re-branded themselves as social entrepreneurs...
...Dilemmas of social justice have vanished...
...Its recognition was considered more problematic...
...It could be a microcosm of the new economy of goodness—in it, incentive realignment is the job of the changeagents, the "disruptive force" whose role is to create better social equilibria...
...Not only are there no conflicts between different kinds of good, there are also none between different types of growth— or between social progress and growth...
...Managers of social mutual funds will compete to find companies that are developing the most innovative and powerful tools for promoting social progress....Smart investors will listen for two numbers on the daily news report, and a good day will be one in which both the [traditional] Dow Jones and the Social Dow Jones finish on the upside...
...Of the former's aid project—dispatching American doctors to perform cleft lip correction procedures in the developing world—the authors note, Fixing a child's cleft lip or palate is a relatively cheap procedure with outsize payoffs: cleft children in many countries are ostracized and have a hard time in school, getting jobs and marrying, and the surgery reverses those disadvantages...
...Its cover package touted various strategies for transforming money into social good—and in some serendipitous cases, back into money...
...yet "the main problem is not.the absence of reasonable and low-cost solutions, but the difficulty of implementing global cooperation to put those solutions into place...
...Labor governments in the United Kingdom have made its promotion part of their platforms and have experimented with delegating health care provision to social entrepreneurs...
...The monetarization of good has indeed had the effect of rallying traditional free-marketeers alongside various putative opponents...
...Most people have the sense that social entrepreneurs are businesslike folks who promote their ideas about social change, which is, more or less, accurate...
...Of course, it is by no means clear how those citizens should measure social value...
...The discussants indeed sound optimistic about the future success of American education— through the discovery of new, replicable models...
...To insist on assigning duties is by no means to stifle independent social activism (as boosters would have it...
...By harnessing the motives and energies that are already there, it avoids the need for a king or a commander to 'run' the economy...
...That's what we now have to do...
...Over a period of unprecedented accumulations of wealth, a distinctive philosophy of progress has taken shape...
...Stanford Social Innovation Review, the leading scholarly journal on the subject, defines the innovative solution to a problem as the one "that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions"—as though deciding which of these considerations ought to be paramount weren't precisely the question in any particular intervention...
...See how thoroughly it has recast the way we imagine social reform...
...Sachs initially asks himself what appropriate aims of global collaboration might be—and finds, sure enough, that his answer coincides nicely with the aims staked out in documents like the UN's Millennium Development plan...
...The meaning of social value is by no means self-evident...
...Indeed, the development of metrics of the kind discussed in Gertner's article is at the top of research agendas in the new field...
...But we should think very carefully about the consequences of glibly jettisoning the older ideal in favor of another (or perhaps the same) "invisible hand...
...3) We must not conflate supportfor a robust range of non-state social activities and the foisting off of responsibilities by governments, corporations, or individuals...
...The authors seem unmoved by the notion that there might be a morally relevant issue here that paying nurses not to kill female children doesn't quite dissolve...
...In the words of Michael Specter of the New Yorker, "facts like these have transformed carbon dioxide into a strange but powerful new currency, difficult to evaluate, yet impossible to ignore...
...Consensus on even the most rudimentary definitions remains elusive...
...Mlulgan 's easy elision is no fluke— once social value starts mimicking economic value, it is hard to maintain a nice distinction between the two...
...Choose GOOD," and "100% of your payment is donated to the nonprofit of your choice" from among the list of the magazine's Nonprofit Partners...
...It has seeped into teeshirts, whole lines of apparel...
...Such non-arguments are only one piece of a larger puzzle...
...It's not much of a story, but at least it's optimistic...
...The past decade's exercises in corporate social responsibility have surely been wildly varied...
...Pointing out that there have been nine recessions since 1950, he characterized the current one as a cyclical downturn, stating that "we need not lose our heads...
...Much of what has been written—for example, by Sachs—would appear to suggest that there might be some biological conception readily at hand...
...their resonance can fade quickly...
...But foundations like Ford and Rockefeller have always sought to measure their results, as in fact Gertner notes...
...It has become more like money...
...Giving in the United States had reached record highs, jumping 32 percent between 2002 and 2006...
...it also robs them of the claim to speak for themselves...
...As we enter a period of fiercer contention over scarcer resources, this is going to matter...
...But this is the principle that should guide a public response to the recession and the one that should shape plans for recovery...
...But the developments that have propelled good-as-money thinking to prominence need not all be ones we reject...
...The piece de resistance was an article by Jon Gertner—"For Good Measure"—surveying contemporary practices of philanthropic foundations...
...Ashoka's global strategic partners are McKinsey and Company, Hill and Knowlton, and the International Senior Lawyers Project (ISLP...
...But there can be little question that one result of CSR's ascendance has been to hasten in a more reliable relationship between good and money...
...It is characteristic of good-as-money talk that it is never clear whether this is a hope or a prediction...
...It has been the world's fastest growing religion...
...We should surely be as prepared to conclude against any of these practices as in their favor...
...Governments and foundations are now "social investors...
...As the Economist resignedly put it last year, citing the "sharp rise in CSR among global executives' priorities," "none of this means that CSR has suddenly become a great idea...
...The paradigm case is widely taken to be microfinance— loans to people otherwise too poor to have access to credit—for which Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize...
...This is so both as a matter of expediency in dealing with the economic crisis, and also as a matter of principle...
...the Catherine Reynolds Foundation sponsors Harvard's Social Entrepreneurship Fellowships...
...The moral imperative of corporate social responsibility (CSR) may not have convinced corporations, but that is not to say it hasn't affected them...
...which make them significant, noteworthy, and troubling...
...At what point...
...What reasonable people might be concerned about, apparently, is what the bill for the new global approach will come to...
...The innovation metaphor suggests that we don't need to answer this question...
...The appropriate response is a "solution," and the best solution is the "smartest"— judged in terms of "efficacy and effectiveness...
...We— businesses, nongovernmental organizations, governments, activists—need to work together...
...Politics, if not totally absent, enters the picture only incidentally, as an obstacle to "social Innovation...
...A cast of characters that includes Hess, America Forward's Vanessa Kirsch, and Tom Vander Ark of the X-Prize Foundation ("Revolution through Competition"), New York City's chancellor of education, a charter school CEO, and the magazine's editor engage in excited talk about how "investors" could "give the system a huge shaking," by putting their money into "new solutions...
...In December 2007, Barack Obama announced that, if elected, he would institute a national Social Entrepreneurship Agency to extend to nonprofit organizations the kind of support enjoyed by businesses...
...In 1983, Irving Howe chastised a Left appalled by the success of Reaganism: "You can't win with nothing against something...
...Conceiving good as money is an intellectual strategy of least resistance...
...It has attracted a flood of individual and institutional investment, spurred at least in part by low default and an attractive rate of return...
...But let's shorten it, let's call it GOOD...
...Yunus envisions a complete parallel economy: There will be a Social Dow Jones Index, reflecting the share value of some of the world's largest, most important, and most broadly representative social businesses...
...Of course, mass castration would go a long way toward preventing both AIDS and overpopulation, and be novel besides—but no need to belabor the point...
...The death of free market ideology as an economic dogma has been announced on a number of occasions this year—as government attempts to rescue the economy continue, we can expect to hear more of the same...
...The Skoll Foundation, founded by eBay's first president, calls them "pioneers whose innovations benefit humanity...
...It does need reliable markets...
...its success, and theirs, has had everything to do with what David Brooks referred to recently as surplus capital's "slosh...
...it's rather our interpretations of these data, and our ability to imagine an acceptable response...
...Microfinance has been judged successful largely because it has been deemed practical by those whose actions have in fact made it a success...
...It is a picture of progress that features precisely one value: an unproblematic Good...
...The new thinking's most visible proponents have been today's "philanthrocapitalists...
...And as the trouble increasingly seems symptomatic of fundamental problems in the economy, is there not good reason to suppose that enthusiasm for market metaphors will dissipate—and that the good-as-money refrain will recede along with it...
...For this, his candidacy (John McCain's too) enjoyed the support of America Forward, a coalition of "results-oriented, entrepreneurial organizations" formed in 2007 in order to "advance a policy agenda that will create an infrastructure for social entrepreneurs and government...
...The advocates of good-as-money are various...
...But this goes against the grain of the current intellectual tendency...
...Barack Obama is a former community organizer who has been tempted to clothe important proposals for increased support to nonprofits in the disarmingly vacuous language of "innovation...
...Gone are the days when myth and tribalism dominated our worldviews...
...The urgency of constructing markets in "good" has been discussed with increasing nonchalance, not only by theorists like Mulgan, by activists like Yunus, and at vanguardist gatherings like the Skoll Forum and at Davos, but in middlebrow publications designed to be read sleepily on Sunday mornings...
...It was widely believed that theories of social value had everything to do with the perspectives of their holders, that try as they might people found it hard to recognize goods that cut against their interests...
...Have we welcomed these developments as "on balance better" than nothing at all...
...Activists have heard for a long time that to be successful we must effectively go in disguise, adopting the manners and norms of the business world, the real world...
...The sense of impotence is real, hence the uncritical enthusiasm for the new story...
...when the right answer presents itself, we'll know...
...Good-as-money is a bad strategy for activists seeking to shape the course of development...
...Rather than face the possibility that the cultivation of business acumen over the past decades has not been matched with a good-faith effort to develop ethical orientations to a collective future, the message here is that the former provides a suitable, even superior, substitute for the latter...
...We need not continue the debate on those terms...
...But it is, of course, not such "facts"— though facts they surely be—that created the carbon trading industry and the technocratic environmental politics correlated with it...
...So far, innovations are recognizable by what they exclude, that is, a reevaluation of collective priorities, a change in social relations...
...He ran on a platform of Change, and through an incredible effort that included knocking on doors and selling T-shirts, we elected him...
...it doesn't necessarily involve any actual money...
...As the recession deepens, and governments are more strapped for cash, there will be more pressure to do just that...
...The political appeal of social entrepreneurship is conceptually limited only by the variety of notions of social value that can be supplied...
...There's one other arena that I'd recommend our philanthropist invest in, and that is public policy," suggests Vander Ark, framing legislative decision as a conveniently available tool to leverage well-financed visions of social betterment...
...There are very good reasons to want the forces that shape our collective and personal destinies to be at minimum visible—and, ideally, accountable, democratic, just...
...There is no doubt that the idea that social good can be treated like money has been promoted as a flattering narrative for a regime of voluntary donation...
...GOOD appeals to readers with a shared interest, which "revolves around a passion for potential mixed with fierce pragmatism and creative engagement...
...In recent years, an increasing number and variety of practices have brought profit-seeking and the pursuit of social goals into close proximity...
...We must put differences and vested interests aside and get busy producing what is in everyone's interest: social value...
...Social good has been transubstantiated as more and more entities—companies, billionaires, celebrities—have become interested in it...
...In place of a critical moral framework, we're furnished with a sort of cabinet of curiosities, the decontextualized contents of which are presumably to be enjoyed as peculiarly shaped artifacts of good...
...Goodness has crept into cars in the form of green technology, into commodities in the form of fair trade, and into vacations as carbon offsets...
...There is a certain optimism to the thought that the most important question about social change is how much it will cost...
...In a November 11, 2008, editorial in the Guardian, Sachs warned against alarmist responses to the unfolding economic crisis...
...On the contrary, the dangers of this way of thinking are greatest for the activists who have embraced it...
...Today there is little doubt about the catastrophic possibilities posed by global warming...
...It is now commonplace to hear that while publicly decrying the ideology of their predecessors, governments that followed Reagan and Thatcher not only carried through their mandates, but advanced their moral claims...
...Many big grant makers have made social entrepreneurship their main focus...
...Lately there has been plenty of wise criticism of an environmentalism that reduces our relationship to the planet to one indisputable imperative, to the exclusion of all other ecological concerns, even, some have suggested, ultimately to the exclusion of democratic politics...
...Business has become increasingly saturated with Good—thanks to corporate social responsibility norms and a growth industry in think tanks that try to define them and consultancies that help meet them...
...That is preposterous...
...The implication is not so much that these are the right goals, but rather that among sincere interlocutors there can be no disagreement about what they are...
...Common Wealth lays out a "new approach to global problem solving," which would discover those remedies through a division of labor between governments and the private sector, and which is driven by the "creativity and dynamism of the nongovernmental sector...
...That the dollars and pounds being donated each year will decline with the recession seems certain...
...Gertner explains that Rockefeller's new president "talks of her foundation's grants...as investments to create sustainable change—a 'portfolio' in her words, in which risk is balanced, dispersed, and hedged...
...The fundamental change is simple enough, and yet never stated: they now conceive their mandates in monetary terms...
...That's right...
...GOOD-AS-MONEY WITHOUT MONEY Of COUrSe, stories are just that...
...Modern societies," Mulgan continues, "depend not only on the invisible hand of the market, but also on another invisible hand: the legal and fiscal arrangements that serve to channel the moral sentiments, the motivations of care, civic energy, and social commitment into the service of the common good...
...Max Weber defined the entrepreneur as the founder of institutions...
...some will argue that they are not all of the same order, that each must be evaluated on its own terms...
...2) The idea of the welfare state has endured many beatings, some of them justified...
...But for those that remain, the fundamental concern motivating CSR's acceptance may be felt even more acutely: the possibility that a public relations fallout—ä la Nike, Gap, Coca-Cola, or Dannon—could bring incalculable costs is a very scary one for operations whose success depends on an exacting scrutiny of risk...
...But she also points out that portfolio theory suggests that the higher the risk, the higher the return...
...That was bad advice...
...Some corporations themselves have disappeared, and more will no doubt follow...
...But in this respect, of course, the parties could hardly be more unequal...
...We are the generation that brought you GOOD magazine, "providing a platform for the ideas, people, and businesses that are driving change in the world...
...Social initiative becomes a choice between products, credentialing consumers whose hearts are in the right place, absolving us if our attention is elsewhere...
...A regime of good-as-money abdicates the definition of social value to its financiers...
...The metier of the new progressive ethos is sloppy metaphor, but as to the reality we should make no mistake: investors who now come to the new marketplace in social good "on equal footing" may or may not expect to make a profit on their endeavors, but they are expected to bring real capital to finance them...
...The value of this index will rise and fall in response to news from the world of social development...
...Here are three reasons to articulate our criticisms of visions of social progress driven by good-asmoney, and to work hard to discover more satisfying stories: (1) If political despair has been the occasion for the rise of good-as-money, good-as-money kills democratic politics...
...We have entrepreneurs in every corner of the private sector...
...from his disciplinary perspective, a definition that involved "value" would have been analytically slipshod...
...But is there not something about it that is also repellent...
...Common Wealth is the same: though it stresses the importance of clear goals for the new problem-solving, it holds these to be neither potentially contentious nor eligible for revision...
...Many on the Left may find these practices commendable...
...The financial implosion gives us a chance not just to build a fairer economy...
...Or several points...
...POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY The world as good-as-money enjoins us to re-imagine it is without blame—and also without responsibility...
...The mission of Common Wealth is to deliver an equally reasonable answer: less than 2 percent of global GDP...
...Nor is it clearer what counts as a solution in any particular case, which depends, naturally, on how you understand the case...
...This should cause us to ask who is doing the looking...
...Not bad things to do, of course...
...Gertner cites Google.org as another challenge to "the common assumption that creating financial value (as a corporation might) and creating social value (as a philanthropy might) are necessarily different pursuits...
...But an alternative account of collective advance has been lacking...
...But if the aims of a market-based environmentalism focused narrowly on reducing carbon dioxide emissions are impoverished, at least they are clear—and "innovative" is what helps meet them, the faster the better...
...Recognizing such activity is Skoll's exclusive focus...
...Good-as-money needs to be emphatically rejected, and especially now...
...Early in 2008—before the economy started acting up—the New York Times published a special issue of its Sunday magazine—the Money Issue, though it might equally well have been called the "Good" Issue...
...In 2003, the New York Times discovered the "social sector...
...it's that they find efficient ways to produce the same "good...
...Namely, that there is no collectivity in this story at all...
...Magazines devoted to social business will pop up on the newsstands, and television featuring leading experts on social investment will pop up on the news networks...
...But it explains why there is widespread confusion about who the new change-makers are and what, precisely, they do...
...But it has succeeded as a story of progress for post-political times...
...It sounded a bit too reassuring...
...All are ultimately committed to the same outcome: a scenario in which a plurality of public and private entities, foundations, corporations, corporate foundations, moneyed individuals, governments, and quasi public bodies seamlessly promote a socially valuable activity through investment...
...While so much of today's media is taking up our space, dumbing us down, impeding our productivity, GOOD exists to add value...
...Social good WaS not always widely conceived of in this way (it seems strange, but necessary, to point it out...
...GOOD's mode of adding value turns out to be a business plan as well...
...The next few years will require tough decisions about how to distribute suddenly scarcer resources fairly...
...Figures from 2007 put private giving, for the first time in history, over $300 billion...
...The Acumen Fund, a "nonprofit venture capital firm," counts Google among its major donors...
...Trying to realize them produced practical or moral conflicts, at least sometimes...
...These are, for the most part, intended to be universal measurements, available to anyone with an interest in measuring social good...
...Over the past decade, the term has become common...
...The man who invented Tofurky runs a thriving meat alternative business—GOOD tells us—the DeLorean is enjoying a revival, there is a high-rise in Portland that offers affordable housing to drugand alcohol-free tenants...
...More than an endorsement of real markets, this attitude probably has to do with the power of futures betting and the other mysterious aggregative possibilities of the Internet...
...Speaking at the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship, Al Gore suggested that social value may be like invisible light on the electromagnetic spectrum...
...That will mean a day in which our world is getting richer in both economic terms and human terms...
...The thought that the state cannot be innovative has provoked a further, decisive turning away from it as the locus of social reform...
...The subtext of conversations like this one is that talk about values is self-indulgent or even dangerous—it denies the urgency of action...
...It robs those engaged in public discourse of the means to articulate what's at stake in social conflicts and trade-offs...
...pitched successfully, his ventures yielded higher profits, edging out competitors for supply-side resources, ultimately creating new industries...
...It is motivated by the idea that social goodness is best conceptualized as analogous to economic value, and that social betterment is best achieved through the mechanisms of growth...
...conveniently, most everyone's already committed...
...Sachs allows that the world's current political leaders won't necessarily embrace the framework he proposes, because "our social philosophies consistently lag behind present realities...
...Good-as-money reframes political debate not as the opportunity to shape the collective will, but as a brake on social progress: "Politics," Muhammad Yunus states bluntly, "stands in the way of efficiency in government...
...it's something...
...The author's treatment is typical in its unreflective acceptance of the ideas that characterize recent changes in philanthropy...
...It is not just the sense that encouraging governments to think of citizens as "assets" may be a very bad idea (and for what might be considered unsentimental reasons...
...The "golden age of philanthropy" may produce wins for some of those who have lost out in the global economy—now there's more scope than ever...
...They work to harness the universal natural desire to "do good"— a desire newly ascribed to the self-interested actors of economic theory—and to design ways for us to manifest this desire most efficiently...
...Standards of social good, once worked out individually, were considered very hard to forge collectively, by some, prohibitively so...
...still, the swiftness with which the concept has been taken up across the spectrum has been dazzling...
...Now we need to harness our goodwill to our acumen and look for an explosion of productive capacity...
...Xigi.net makes data on the financing of social projects transparent and available free of charge, so that anyone can "discover the capital market that invests in good" — and get involved promoting social ideas as a buyer or seller...
...according to its Web site, it also "has relationships with Latham & Watkins and Ernst & Young"—thanks to the characteristic ambiguity created by importing business language to unlikely contexts, their nature remains unspecified...
...If you hold that social value, once thought of as a rather complicated, not to say embattled area, is something that certain people produce objectively more of, then methods of quantifying it are crucial...
...Whether this last represents an attempt to disarm criticism of unpopular housing policies or an intrusion into the privacy of the residents or an endeavor worth replicating—absent the semblance of a context — we're ill-equipped to judge...
...Like Sachs, we have more staked on the growth paradigm than our material fortunes...
...For one thing, appearing to disregard good is increasingly costly, money-wise...
...The Research Initiative on Social Entrepreneurship, at Columbia University's School of Business, describes its aims as "improving the markets, metrics, and management of social enterprise...
...Once the right instruments for detecting the substance exist, corporations will have no trouble responding to it...
...For Schumpeter, entrepreneurs were interesting because their interventions produced more value...
...the reasons for its tenacity are broader and make it likely to outlast the recent philanthropic boom...
...to scale the impact of solutions that work...
Vol. 56 • April 2009 • No. 2
