Very helpful, thanks! I’d not heard of the OPP before.
I’m a bit confused on the last bullet, though. What would making a difference in the for-profit world look like? I mainly don’t understand why scalability is important, or really what it is.
Paul Polak is the guru for for-profit solutions to poverty and the importance of focusing on scalability. He has a couple books and a website and lots of videos on Youtube—I highly recommend him.
Scalability means how easily/financially-sustainably something can be spread. Charities are limited with their interventions because every person they help costs them, but socially-beneficial businesses that make profit (ie Nokero) are unlimited because they can keep on growing and spreading to help more and more people through selling their products or services. And then there’s charities like One Acre Fund that are mostly but not fully compensated by their own clients, putting them in between the two.
Very helpful, thanks! I’d not heard of the OPP before.
I’m a bit confused on the last bullet, though. What would making a difference in the for-profit world look like? I mainly don’t understand why scalability is important, or really what it is.
Scalability means how strongly you are limited by your available resources, as opposed to e.g. demand for your service.
Websites are very scalable because it takes very few resources to serve an extra person. Making houses is not very scalable (currently).
So in other words, prefer activities that help more people with less work?
Paul Polak is the guru for for-profit solutions to poverty and the importance of focusing on scalability. He has a couple books and a website and lots of videos on Youtube—I highly recommend him.
Scalability means how easily/financially-sustainably something can be spread. Charities are limited with their interventions because every person they help costs them, but socially-beneficial businesses that make profit (ie Nokero) are unlimited because they can keep on growing and spreading to help more and more people through selling their products or services. And then there’s charities like One Acre Fund that are mostly but not fully compensated by their own clients, putting them in between the two.