The folks over at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst have an interesting forum topic coming this academic year: The Forum on Social Wealth (thanks to OnTheCommons.org for the link). The program overview states the problem rather well:
Our common wealth is endangered. The natural wealth of our ecosystem, the social wealth of our families and communities, and the information and creativity that constitute our culture — all are fundamentally different from private wealth. None of these was created by businesses or governments, and none can be effectively managed as private property. Yet we have no coherent framework for valuing and understanding these types of social wealth.
The challenge of attaching ”value” to soft, social goods is bubbling up a lot lately. In fact, I’m giving two keynotes this fall on that very subject: one at a New Jersey Theatre Alliance event at the end of this week, the other at the CAPACOA conference in Ottawa in November (if you’ll be at either, drop me a note).
I’ll post my comments after I deliver them (and after I figure out what they’ll be). But the basic gist of the challenge is this: as the social and commercial infractructures get more complex, and as economic resources plateau, there will be increasing calls to justify any expenditure (especially of public resources) against the value it creates. That builds pressure for measurements of value — even for the most abstract and ethereal services (like cultural production and consumption). We can’t fight the tide of accountability and countability, it’s coming for sure and in many ways it’s already here. But perhaps we can help determine what is counted in the algorithms.
We will all be judged by numbers in the decade to come. What those numbers are, and how they are measured, will determine the health and vitality of our field and many others. So, let’s start crunching.
