“As a public servant, I have a public charge. I’m a fiduciary over [philanthropic and public] money through our government which has decided to give you philanthropists a $32 billion earmark because that is the amount of money we forego in revenues to the federal budget in order to give a tax deduction to those who make a charitable contribution. So I have an obligation to make sure that those 32 billion dollars that would have gone to the federal treasury but for that charitable contribution are used … to create public good …” Becerra wasn’t talking about scandals of public charities and private foundations having transgressed the negative requirements of 501(c)(3) status, but rather questions about what they were doing affirmatively to deliver a public good for people in need. As Becerra has previously told NPQ, “[The charitable tax] subsidy should serve a good purpose. What are we getting for some $32 billion in lost revenues, lost to the federal treasury in paid taxes? Is it serving a good public purpose? Statistics I’ve seen suggest that only one in every 10 dollars are serving poor people or disadvantaged people. I have to wonder where the other nine dollars are going. It is absolutely essential to maintain our higher education and arts institutions, [but] we have to know whether it’s worth giving up $32 billion [in tax revenues] when only one in every 10 reaches or serves [the poor and disadvantaged].”

Our results showed that although the consulting intervention caused short-term changes in business practices, these impacts dissipated within a year after the consulting ended. On average, we found no long-term benefit from the consulting, and actually lower short-term profits. We believe some businesspeople hoped the advice would work and thus took it. But better bookkeeping and other business practices potentially took time away from the physical act of sewing clothes. Once profits took a hit, enterprise owners likely abandoned the practices and reverted to their previous methods. If these tiny firms don’t benefit from consulting, would they benefit from more capital? To test this hypothesis, we handed out unconditional cash grants of $160—roughly equal to the businesses’ average monthly revenues—to a random subset of the tailors and seamstresses. The cash was generally invested in the businesses. As with the advice, the cash grants did not lead to increases in profits, but rather decreased profits. We see the capital infusion as not much different from the advice infusion: both represent a push from afar to expand operations, when these businesses were actually operating at their optimal scale. Following these interventions, the business owners made some changes, but they didn’t work out well. So they eventually reverted to former practices (which is good).

Today it is clear that the independence of social value and commercial revenue creation is a myth. In reality, the vectors of social value and commercial revenue creation can reinforce and undermine each other. The social consequences of the recent financial crisis demonstrated with great clarity the danger of “negative externalities”—social costs resulting from corporate profit-seeking activities. But in some cases, “positive externalities” may also exist. It is this possibility that integrated hybrid models seek to exploit.

Meanwhile, a small team of volunteers took just 10 days last summer to create an Apple iPad app that uses Global Positioning System technology to track all of the city’s buses in real time, allowing transit managers and passengers to monitor problems and delays. Most who saw the SMART Muni app — including Edwin M. Lee and 15 other mayoral candidates in October, and senior leadership from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency in February — considered it an improvement over the four-channel radio and old paper clipboards currently used to track problems. But now, 10 months later, the app that the volunteer developers created for Muni is unused. Muni hopes to put the app to good use some day, but the agency is $29 million over budget and cannot afford to buy the iPads required to run the software, a Muni spokesman said. Nor is the city willing to invest $100,000 to run a pilot program.

Mere ‘consultation’ leads to largely negative engagements, and in the worst cases, active distrust and NIMBYism (“Not In My Back Yard). Sometimes such frustrations can result in grass roots activism, which attempt to side-step or halt institutional developments. Brickstarter reverses the polarity from NIMBY to YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”), from complain to create, providing a platform for suggestions, developed and driven by participation of citizens, local business, and government. Brickstarter makes it easier for communities to voice a productive and collective “yes” to their best ideas. Citizens are now more eager than ever to play a part in local decision making. Promising initiatives are popping up around the world, each exploring the potential of crowd-sourced or crowd-funded approaches to shared spaces, services and public infrastructure. Yet bottom-up is only half the story.

In thinking about invented metrics, such as SAT scores, employee performance ratings and teacher ratings, bear in mind they only have names because we gave them names. Measuring things always lead to perverse behavior.

When the municipal government of Rome opened Monte Testaccio to excavation by the public to create wine cellars, the specific materiality of the landfill was leveraged to great effect. The cooling properties of the loose clay shards, along with the slope of the hill, contributed to the creation of a new form of public infrastructure. Though it could not have been known at the time, this new use would prove generative, enabling grape harvest festivals two centuries later and establishing the pattern of development of restaurants and clubs in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The reservoir of this disease of erroneous infographics is internet marketers who don’t care whether the information in their graphics is right … just so long as you link it. As a Christmas present to, well, everyone, I’m issuing a plea to bloggers to help stop this plague in its track. Below the break, a tour of some of the more egregious examples, and some thoughts on why they’ve become so prevalent.

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This is a great read if only because it covers many common problems of measurement systems. In thinking about invented metrics, such as SAT scores, employee performance ratings and teacher ratings, bear in mind they only have names because we gave them names.

Measuring things always lead to perverse behavior. Here are some examples…”