Jeremy Price's Library tagged capitalism → View Popular

The insight of creative capitalism is that the warm glow of giving can be marketed. But the warm glow runs the risk of being divorced from any actual benefit.
The insight of creative capitalism is that the warm glow of giving can be marketed. But the warm glow runs the risk of being divorced from any actual benefit. What makes a consumer, employee or shareholder feel good is not necessarily what truly helps a poor person. It is in this wedge that Bill Easterly’s criticism lives; in fact, he often argues that what makes the rich feel good actually hurts the poor.
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- focus on identifying areas where a gap between private and social value does not exist, or is sufficiently small
- requiring ‘sustainability’ in the narrow financial sense (each project must generate enough revenue to finance itself) may result in very valuable projects not becoming real.
- Thus, creative capitalism should not be equated with having a ‘double bottom line.’ The confusion between creative capitalism and social entrepreneurship can lead us astray, because it can lead the creative capitalists to focus solely on the search for sustainable investments, when plenty of investments may never yield a profit but will yield much greater social returns. But if we accept this point, we still have to solve the problem of aligning public recognition and social value. The solution is to create a system in which companies have an incentive to rigorously assess the impact of the projects they support or initiate, and to publish these assessments
- focus on creative experimentation: thinking outside the box to come up with new ideas or identifying them among their local partners, and then spending the time and money to rigorously evaluate them
- focus on scaling up: implementing on a large scale ideas that have been demonstrated to work elsewhere.
- This will require institutions to gather, validate, and spread knowledge, and it requires some standard for what constitutes an acceptable evaluation.