They say you can’t put a value on a good friend - but maybe you should try?

A lot of what I do revolves around trying to put a value on things that don’t have an obvious value.

For one, with any business decision worth its salt, we need to find ways to estimate impacts and likelihoods of things that haven’t happened yet - potential profit from a new idea in 5 years, the chance of an alternative market taking off, the costs of water shortage in 10 years in some key location.

This is doubly true in sustainability world - the first step towards getting companies and governments to care about pollution, or social good, for example, is to be able to set numerical estimates against the costs or benefits to society (and then, of course, to find a way that said costs or benefits have some impact on the company and or government, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish!)

Basically, what I’m saying is that to get noticed, something needs to be measurable. 

Case in point: the most widely used measure of a country's success is GDP - essentially, economic growth. 

It’s easily measurable, comparable, and usable. But even viewed through an economic lens, it misses out a whole heap of things that we might think are important - the contribution to the economy of unpaid work; childcare, cleaning, for example. 

And there are non-economic things too, that we can hopefully agree are important - a big one being, simply, happiness. 

I’m not alone in this thinking (though I will stake a claim in - many moons ago, my undergrad dissertation was on this very topic!) - there’s been a growing body of work on how we can measure happiness and use it as a measure of success. Bhutan has been doing it for years. The UN has acknowledged its importance. It even features in the government’s official data collection. 

On the flip side - let’s talk about loneliness. The US Surgeon General has said that the impact of loneliness on health is equivalent to 15 cigarettes a day.

This kind of comparison - a real, data driven and critically researched one, rather than one derived for headlines - is priceless for actually getting things done. 

Imagine the progress we could make for mental and social health if we could describe it to the funders as tangibly and vividly as physical health.

The future is numerical!