Quantifying Goodness
March 20, 2012My friend and KMZ REB collaborator Adrian Hornsby has spent the past few years devoted to a most unusual project: creating a complicated system to accurately measure what was once considered immeasurable – ‘goodness’.
Adrian has been working with the English firm Investing for Good to create the Methodology for Impact Analysis and Assessment or the MIAA. (I tried to convince him this Marseille anthem should be the official theme song for the project, but was gently rebuffed.) The basic idea is to grade social purpose organizations such as homeless shelters or green energy companies or fair trade quinoa farms so that ethical investors and governments can direct money to the organizations that are the most efficient at what they do. Which would mean, we would all get more goodness for the same amount of money.
The fruit of this labor is The Good Analyst, available as either a proper book or a free PDF download or ebook from the Investing for Good website. Its goal is to give government and investment analysts a took kit to properly assess social purpose organizations and direct their funds to the most proficient among them. As Adrian writes, A good analyst is one who analyses social and environmental good, as well as one who does so skillfully. But there is a third meaning too, as like a good Samaritan or a good witch, a good analyst can be a force for good, with a moral power and a social impact all of their own.
This book is not only a fascinating exploration of the abstract notion of measuring goodness, it is also a tremendously important and relevant social project. At a time when the world economy teeters and nations are forced to reduce discretionary spending, using Adrian’s methodology to make money work more efficiently in the social sector might be the only way to maintain the programs and services that are so essential to our democracies.
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