What constitutes development? This question arose on a list serve I pay a lot of atention to. I’ve been working at this one a while. I think the market is most effective communication of value and the feedback loops of business failure or success that exists. And now that wants and needs have been changed, subtly altered by the new moral hunger, as Kathleen Fulton calls it, as people wake up to the situation the world is in, their buying and investing behavior is changing.
I think the market is learning how to factor in a new set of risks and opportunities, which will lead to meaningful development (I’m with Amartya Sen on this one, development equals freedom, along with my friend and his colleague Sabina Alkire at her new center at Oxford Univ..
What’s changed? The basic investment equation has moved from a single focus, what I get, risk and return, to risk, return and impact. Risk and return, for you or for me was the way, post Friedman (dead Milt) the market calibrated value. It was the way individual investors believed (not knowing where that belief came from really, it was just part of the cultural furniture and still is to a large extent. It’s just dead and hollow and rapidly passing away. The question is, how big a laggard are you going to be.
“Was this thinking, maybe like a legacy, a tradition that was passed down?” the guy asked?” “More like an inherited environmental disease,” I sez to him. “A twisted parasite, that grew out of a bad idea. a crust of meme gnome in the baby’s pudding. But that’s another part of the story” .
Now people are realizing Jed Emerson is right that business creates undifferentiated value; some is social some is financial, but it’s all value; it’s all important to us, it creates we things we want and find valuable. Or it doesn’t. And those businesses fail,which is a very good thing as we watch it happen and see what works and what doesn’t. If only bad foundations would fold up shop as well.
We are looking up from the consumer trough, I think, to the state of the cafeteria and trying to make consumerism sustainable. We’ve reached a point where more isn’t more anymore. Yet consumer power is still a way we express ourselves and buying things and services can be a way to do good. To those who are skeptical about using consumerism as a tool to change the world, I say one thing: Get over it. You move the ship that exists, not wait for the world you would rather live in in your (or my) public radio encrusted, blogosphere saturated echo chambers.
For instance, there’s Better World Books.
Kevin Jones is a serial entrepreneur and clergy spouse. Kevin was the editor of the Every Voice daily newspaper at the 2003 General Convention of the Episcopal Church and has worked on global poverty issues for several years, through on the ground projects in sub-Saharan Africa (such as the Anglican Malaria Project), technology infrastructure to make it simpler for people to care about the people effected by the Millennium Development Goals, and events. He is also active in investing for good.
