Interesting thougts Sanjay and I agree that we neglect the 60% for profit sector
My biggest concern with your solution in one sentence: as long as people mostly care about money they want to act on advice that maximises their financial return. Of course we could ” subsidise” a service like that for social profit, but as long as it is not in the systems interest to act on our advice it’s useless.
So changing the incentives of the system (through policy advocacy) or movement building (expanding the moral circle) seem more promosing from this viewpoint. On the other hand: once enough people are really interested in social profits we need to have the insights which companies do good and which do not. Maybe it’s more a question of the right timing...
When I started thinking about these issues last year, my thinking was pretty similar to what you said.
I thought about it and considered that for the biggest risks, investors may have a selfish incentive to avoid to model and manage the impacts that their companies have on the wider world—if only because the wider world includes the rest of their own portfolio!
It turns out I was not the first to think of this concept, and its name is Universal Ownership. (I’ve described it on the forum here)
Universal Ownership doesn’t go far enough, in my view, but it’s a step forward compared to where we are today, and gives people an incentive to care about social impacts (or social “profits”)
Interesting thougts Sanjay and I agree that we neglect the 60% for profit sector
My biggest concern with your solution in one sentence: as long as people mostly care about money they want to act on advice that maximises their financial return. Of course we could ” subsidise” a service like that for social profit, but as long as it is not in the systems interest to act on our advice it’s useless.
So changing the incentives of the system (through policy advocacy) or movement building (expanding the moral circle) seem more promosing from this viewpoint. On the other hand: once enough people are really interested in social profits we need to have the insights which companies do good and which do not. Maybe it’s more a question of the right timing...
When I started thinking about these issues last year, my thinking was pretty similar to what you said.
I thought about it and considered that for the biggest risks, investors may have a selfish incentive to avoid to model and manage the impacts that their companies have on the wider world—if only because the wider world includes the rest of their own portfolio!
It turns out I was not the first to think of this concept, and its name is Universal Ownership. (I’ve described it on the forum here)
Universal Ownership doesn’t go far enough, in my view, but it’s a step forward compared to where we are today, and gives people an incentive to care about social impacts (or social “profits”)