I’m excited to share my new essay—“Philanthropy by the Numbers: Measurable Impact and its Civic Discontents”—published in the latest issue of The Hedgehog Review (from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture)
The essay tells the story of how, over the past 30 years, mega-rich funders and philanthropy professionals—steeped in managerialism and hell-bent on data-driven beneficence—recast civil society as objective, pragmatic, and above the fray of politics.
Tracing the cultural and organizational history of measurable impact, I argue that the more we come to see civic life in terms of quantitative abstraction and cold calculation, the more difficult it becomes to imagine alternative forms of meaningful social progress. As I put it in the piece: The familiar adage that “what gets measured gets managed” rings true. But when measurement consumes our civic imagination, everything that can’t be measured—the relationships and collective experiences that uphold democracy—is liable to wither.
See the piece at THR’s website and check out the other fantastic contributions to this issue—fittingly titled for our present moment—“In Need of Repair.”
And thanks to Al Cantor, Claire Dunning, Geof Bowker, Jay Tolson, John Summers, Leah Hunt-Hendrix, Micah McElroy, Pamala Wiepking, Stan Katz, and Taylor Stephens for helpful feedback.
(And please reach out if you’re interested in these topics. There’s more to come ::coughbookcough:: along with efforts to develop alternative paradigms that reclaim philanthropy as a tool for building civic infrastructure and fostering democracy.)
