Philanthropy and the Challenge of Quantifying Success | WIRED

One of the reasons philanthropists sometimes fail to measure what really matters is that the global political economy primarily seeks what is efficient and scalable. Unfortunately, efficiency and scalability are not the same as a healthy system. In fact, many things that grow quickly and without constraints are far from healthy—consider cancer. Because of our belief in markets, we tend to accept that an economy has to be growing for society to be healthy—but this notion is misguided, particularly when it comes to things we consider social goods. If we examine a complex system like the environment, for instance, we can see that healthy rainforests don’t grow in overall size but rather are extremely resilient, always changing and adapting.