Social-Impact Report, Part 1

When most companies close the year, they assess their financial performance and thank their customers for sales. While we definitely succeeded on that dimension this year with over 1,000 retail locations across the United States and 300% sales growth, our far more important impact was increasing the quality of life for thousands of women and children across the globe – and we want to thank you for making that possible.  ...
Priya Haji, Co-founder and CEO
“World of Good” Social-Impact Report 2006, http://www.worldofgood.com/impact/index.shtml  

A “social-impact report”?  We have heard of “environmental-impact report”;  for example, one has to be filed with regard to the disposition of our Montebello Hills before a decision be made about the hills.  

What would a social-impact report, a “SIR”, contain?  

The quote above gives a glimpse of what a SIR would contain.  At the same time, a SIR could not be as definitive as an environment-impact report, because the latter is often based on empirical science, while a SIR would be based less on empiricism.  For example, how would one predict happiness if a particular change were to occur, like leaving the Montebello Hills undeveloped or, to the contrary, developing the hills?  

Well-documented history could help give credence to SIR, provided that we remembered the E-News essay which compared history to a secular faith, that is, history would always be suspect to some extent, in part because we could not gather all the accurate and all the relevant data upon which to draw conclusions.  For example, if we looked at the immigration of Europeans to the New World in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, we could predict and have some confidence that people with similar backgrounds and a similar purpose, supported by superior weaponry, settling upon relatively open lands, with large potential for development, would produce similar results sociologically, namely, the United States as it was and now is.  

Having an SIR would be strongly opposed by businesses and, perhaps, by government, because the consequences of business and government decisions would have to be analyzed and a report issued, this report delaying, perhaps canceling, a project on the drawing board.  As is it, an environment-impact report would be a burden.  A SIR would more than double that burden because social impact would not be as quantifiable.  

Would an SIR be more trouble than it was worth?  In coming parts to this essay, let us imagine what a SIR would say about certain activities, planned or in progress, in our society.  

June 26, 2008