1 January 2016
Not-for-profit (NFP) organisations are often both innovative in the way they deliver services and responsive to the needs of clients. As a result they are increasingly providing social services that were previously the domain of the public sector.
Coupled with the rise of social impact investing and the competition of ideas that it creates, NFPs are being asked by funders — both government and philanthropic — to demonstrate the economic value they generate.
Read more →1 September 2015
Before economists came along and formalised the concept, people had long tried to weigh up the costs and benefits of pursuing different choices. The American polymath Benjamin Franklin was one of the first to document this in a letter to a friend:
“When difficult cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under consideration, all the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time. To get over this, my way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one ‘Pro’, and the other ‘Con’.”
Read more →17 June 2014
Successful businesses generally don’t drop millions of dollars on a new idea without assessing if its likely to be a good investment or not. It would be fair to say that most Australian’s assume our government operates in much the same manner when divvying up the budget. In reality, spending decisions are mostly based on a combination of good intentions, ideology, horse trading, gut instinct and inertia.
We are no wiser today about how well our government spends our tax dollars than we were twenty years ago. We know precious little about the impact of all but a tiny fraction of what our government spends to increase population health, reduce crime, improve social services and lessen indigenous disadvantage.
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