This discussion would benefit from an empirical analysis of social impact bonds and previous efforts to quantify and financialize social impact. My not super deep understanding from talking to old school foundation COO types is that those examples are a very mixed bag and very difficult to measure. The market dynamics discussed here take well functioning measurement as a given but that is usually not the case. Consider all the debates about the impact of various education “reform” interventions in the United States for example.
By “measurement” do you mean the measurements of metrics that the payouts are conditional on (we don’t use those) or measurements of the extent to which the prizes encourage efforts that would not otherwise have happened (we’d be very interested in those)?
This discussion would benefit from an empirical analysis of social impact bonds and previous efforts to quantify and financialize social impact. My not super deep understanding from talking to old school foundation COO types is that those examples are a very mixed bag and very difficult to measure. The market dynamics discussed here take well functioning measurement as a given but that is usually not the case. Consider all the debates about the impact of various education “reform” interventions in the United States for example.
Here is the canonical first US social impact bond example: https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/UV7311-PDF-ENG
By “measurement” do you mean the measurements of metrics that the payouts are conditional on (we don’t use those) or measurements of the extent to which the prizes encourage efforts that would not otherwise have happened (we’d be very interested in those)?