Creating sustainable impact

The brainchild of Prof. Alex Pentland, Director of MIT Media Lab, Social Physics studies patterns of social connections to make predictions on a wide range of issues in health, education, finance, etc. Those models are then employed to design social incentives for speciic patterns of behaviours that achieve specific socio-economic outcomes. Also, the models, I feel, offer a more graphic illustration of Richard Thaler's Behavioural Economics.

Developed by Harvard Business School's Prof. Michael Porter, Shared Value shifts the paradigm from the distinction between core business and CSR, bringing together social need, business opportunity, and strategy into a sustainable ecosystem that creates value for both shareholders and society. It is only smart to realise that a community overcome with poverty and (therefore) crime may not be too conducive to the growth of one's local hotel business.

“Composers’ Syndrome” is perhaps best illustrated by an image of a poet creating real-life experiences--adventures and conflicts-- without really caring about the real-life impact of those adventures or conflicts for himself and for others.

To fully unleash the impact of the access to knowledge people now have, people may have to often expose themselves to nudges to learn new things, and, if possible, they should be able to do so in an environment that is an eclectic mix of skills and experiences.

Few people would argue that traditional economics has produced Compassionate Systems. What it has done is paint a picture of an incomplete human person. We know, for example, that human beings do not have social relationships that are in any substantial way independent of their financial circumstances and decisions.