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What We're Thinking
Social Investments Must Be Intimate Investments
As we enter the work of social enterprise and social finance, discussions about measurement will become more lively and necessary.
One of the tricks will be to understand that those tools used to manage finance are not universally applicable to the measurement of other objectives. Money lends itself well to monetary, numerically defined metrics. It is, after all, measured by a universal unit of exchange. It is an object and so is easily measured.
A dollar is a dollar is a dollar. We cannot say a person is a person is a person. Each social result will be highly emergent and unfold as people work together to co-create a new social reality. It is somewhat misleading to expect that you can predict or design a social result and then measure your linear progress in that direction according to that pre-determined result.
Further to this, we cannot even boil social evaluation down to individuals. Social results are even more complex than the effects on individuals, who in themselves are highly diverse and differentiated. Collect all of these individuals into a society and you have something even more curious to evaluate.
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