Hello, everyone. I'm Asheem Singh, I'm Director
of Economics here at the RSA. It's my great
pleasure to welcome you to the latest event
in our Bridges to the Future Series, where
we're exploring ideas to shape change in the
post-COVID world – whenever we actually
get to that point. Today, I am delighted to
be joined by Sir Ronald Cohen, Chairman of
the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment,
Chairman of the Portland Trust, author, raconteur,
pioneering philanthropist, venture capitalist,
private equity investor, and social innovator.
For nearly two decades, his initiatives have
catalyzed a global movement, I think it's
fair to call it, to drive private capital
to serve social environmental good. We're
going to get right into that over the course
of this talk. He's joined us today to discuss
a new book he's written. It's called Impact:
Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change.
Here it is. Very handsome it is too. I would
refer to it as a whistle-stop tour of more
than a decade of global development catalyzed
by what many of his own initiatives in the
global impact investment market. Purists note,
Sir Ronald has very graciously encouraged
me to call him Ronnie, which, Ronnie, I will
be taking you up on that. Thank you very much.
Thank you also, it's a real privilege to be
here with you, especially if I may say is,
I also wrote a book along these lines a couple
of years back that I called The Moral Marketplace.
We covered some of the same ground. Interestingly,
I think it's fair to say I was maybe a hair
more skeptical about some of the areas than
perhaps it comes over in your very fine text.
Over the next 30 minutes or so, we'd like
to get into some of these arguments, surface
what the book is saying. Also, a few of these
points of difference as well and really get
into the meat of some of these huge issues.
Let's get into it.
Ronnie, you acknowledged in the foreword to
the book that it emerges in a world transformed
by the pandemic, something you couldn't possibly
have foreseen when you set out to write it.
Our economy is a mess. The V-shaped recovery
that we were promised by the Panglossians
and the commentariat is a sham, inequality
seems destined to grow. The world is aflame
with cries of racial and gender injustice.
Into this vale of tears, strides the impact
revolution. What is it? Why is it so important?
How can it possibly help us at this our darkest
hour?
Asheem, it's very nice to be here with you
and with all the members of the RSA to talk
about impact, both the book and the movement.
There are echoes of 1929 in the air, Asheem.
In 1929 after the Great Crash, investors sat
up and said, "Have we really been investing
in companies without measuring properly the
profit they make?" Of course, it led to the
generally accepted accounting principles four
years later when legislation was passed in
the United States, which was then followed
across the world and to the use of independent
auditors.
And I think today, investors who are channelling
more than $30 trillion to environmental, social,
and governance investments, and more than
$700 billion into impact investment, where
the impact is measured. Unlike ESG, impact
investment as you well know, has not only
the intention to create impact, but also,
the measurement of it. With more than $30
trillion, about a third of professionally
managed assets in the world going to companies,
investors are sitting up and saying, this
time, “we're only investing in companies
on the basis of the profit they make with
no transparency on the impact companies are
creating."
I believe that COVID-19 will accelerate now
a move to transparency on the impact that
our whole economic system creates, which is
of course, comprised primarily of companies
and of investors. As we're going to see governments
emerge from this crisis with higher level
of debt than we have seen in decades, perhaps
since the Great Depression and the similarly
high levels of unemployment, we're going to
need to bring impact investment and companies
to provide solutions to the great social and
the environmental challenges we face. I see
COVID-19 as an accelerator of this transition
to impact economies.
That's really interesting. For you, impact
is a very practical thing. It makes sense.
It's not just from an idea. If a tree falls
in a forest and no one is there to hear it,
does it really make an impact? It's not a
philosophical idea or approach. It's actually
a series of practices that cut across all
institutions in society and that can transform
or make a difference to all of them. Is that
the argument here?
Yes, indeed. I think what's been happening
in the world over the last couple of decades
is an evolution in thinking and the revolution
in the means we use to tackle social and the
environmental issues. The revolution in thinking
has been around the notion that we can't just
worry about profit and not worry about the
huge damage, environmental, and social, that
companies are creating and then rely on our
governments to tax us all in order to try
to remedy them. The system is self-defeating
and we have to change it. I think COVID has
heightened the sense of disquiet and increased
the questioning of capitalism. That's the
evolution in thinking.
The revolution means comes from realizing
that consumer preferences and talent preferences
in terms of employment and investor preferences
have been shifting away from making decisions
on the basis of risk and return alone to making
decisions on the basis of risk, return and
impact. If we measure impact in a similar
way that we measure profit and risk, which
is we are perfectly capable of doing today
and I could give you a database where all
our viewers can go to look at the information
on the impacts of companies.
If we're going to bring impact to the center
of our economic system, then we have to measure
it in a similar way to profit and risk. Since
we can do this now, the revolution in means
is that by optimizing risk, return and impact,
we bring all of our investments and all of
our components to create solutions to the
challenges we face instead of creating problems.
Ronnie, there is so much in what you've just
said. It's an incredibly rich answer. What
I'll try and do is I'll try and unpick bits
of that and different questions as we go.
Let's start with the first thing that you
said, which is really interesting, which is
about the way that we solve social problems.
The way that we marshal society's resources
to deal with endemic social issues. You begin
the book actually with a story that I think
RSA fellows who work in the charity sector,
who work in social enterprise, who work in
government, even, will be familiar or at least
incidentally at the margins. That's the story
of the social impact bond, the certain kind
of impact investment instrument that
It seems for you, it exemplifies, it's a touchstone
of this revolution of means or practice of
impact, of an efficiency that you're talking
about. It's otherwise, it's known variously
as a social impact bond or payment on success
bond, I think in other places, in the development
space, its known as a development impact bond,
with some variations. You're a champion of
it. For you, it's ground zero. The Archimedean
point of the wave of innovation of the last
decade. Can you explain, first of all, before
we get into some analysis of that, just what
exactly an SIB is and why they're so important
as you argue they are?
Absolutely. The purpose of the social impact
bond is to provide the investment initially
to a nonprofit, but today more widely to a
nonprofit and purpose-driven businesses in
addressing social issues and environmental
issues as well. For the first time, this way
of investing links the return of capital and
the financial return on investment to the
achievement of a social or environmental goal.
The first bond, the Peterborough Bond sought
to reduce the number of young people who go
back to jail after they're released. As you
know Asheem, more than 60% go back to jail
within 18 months of release. The first bond
involved raising 5 million pounds to fund
nonprofits working with these prisoners and
because we achieved the reduction of 9½ percent
in the number going back over a period of
five years, the Ministry of Justice in the
UK repaid the 5 million pounds and the annual
return of 3.1%, to the foundations that had
put the money up. Now it's broadened to be
a much broader tool than we did initially
envisage. As you were saying, it's being used
in emerging markets in the form of development
impact bonds.
There are a couple of hundred social and development
impact bonds across the world. They involve
outcome payments of a billion dollars or more
investment of about half of that, they tackle
15 different social issues across 30 countries.
What is really significant about the social
impact bond as you are suggesting, and which
I do see in the book as really the start of
this whole impact economy effort if you like,
is that they optimize not just risk and return,
but risk-return and impact.
Actually the social impact bond and all forms
of impact investments, which involve traditional
asset classes like venture capital, private
equity, investment in public stocks, investments
in bonds, where there is a measurement of
impact, all of those forms of investment optimize
risk-return and impact which the social impact
bond did for the first time.
Fascinating, and you referred to this in the
book as a new frontier of efficiency when
it comes to tackling social problems, which
is a wonderful, exhilarating image. I remember
when I first-- As a lowly researcher in 2008,
when I first came across the plans for social
impact bond, that your team at Social Finance
put together, Toby Eccles and Emily Bolton,
and I remember taking this to my boss at the
time and saying, "We've got to get into this.
This is really interesting. We've got to understand
this a bit better."
Over the years I've come to understand it
a bit better. Just for the sake of our viewers,
I want to really spell out what's going on
here. You've got investors investing, providing
upfront capital, in Peterborough it wasn't
the private sector but it was a pilot, so
that makes sense. You've got government paying
from public funds. You've got the charity
is delivering. There's a delivery group. There's
also a control group, isn't there?
You can see whether the delivery group is
doing, it's doing a better job than if the
intervention hadn't happened at all in terms
of reducing re-offending, and therefore the
cost on the state. You've got a bunch of smart
people working out how much everyone gets
in the event of a successful outcome, but
also what a successful outcome looks like.
It is quantifying, measuring, and putting
all the data together to do that. Then for
every success an investor would receive a
quantum of public funds by way of returns
for initial investment they put in. That's
the basic idea I think there's to it.
Yes, absolutely, and today we're finding philanthropists
stepping in alongside government and the aid
organizations stepping in alongside government
and huge increase in scale. The Global Steering
Group for Impact Investment which I chair
is capitalizing a billion-dollar outcomes
fund which will collect contributions from
eight organizations like DFID, from philanthropists
and from local governments to improve the
education of 10 million children in Africa
and the Middle East. I think it's a tool which
has gone through its proof of concept which
is now ready for scaling.
These numbers are exhilarating and vast. Your
book is filled with these fantastic examples
of this large-scale impact being driven by
its instruments, but I suppose there's a challenge
in this, isn't there because people may well
ask for all of this complication and it is
a complicated seeming instrument. Can't better
outcomes or these just these outcomes be achieved
by simply taxing more and using the extra
funds that you received to deliver more or
better services? Why are we taking money out
of tax and putting it into the hands of private
investors?
The reason is that if you use entrepreneurship
and open the door to innovation which is not
government's forte, you begin to develop very,
very powerful solutions. I remember in the
days of venture capital when I got into the
nascent field, I was 26 years old. I remember-
[crosstalk]
I was in the pub when I was 26. I think you
were a bit more conscientious than I was.
Well, I was also in the pub, but
[laughs]
the whole concept of venture capital led people
to say similar things. It's so much more complicated
to have an investment agreement with a company
which is unquoted and so it doesn't give you
the ability to sell your stake and backing
young people who haven't really proven themselves.
It's so much easier just to buy a share on
the stock market. But it's not the same thing.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Venture
capital brought us the tech revolution.
The stock market wouldn't have brought that.
It was a combination of expertise and patient
capital and people who are experts at looking
at products and markets and management and
competition and growth trends. Similarly with
impact investment and social impact bonds
is one aspect of it. Of course, it involves
effort to measure impact if you're not just
going to invest on the basis of risk and return.
But our system is going to improve many more
lives and improve our planet instead of digging
ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole as
we're doing now.
The complications as happened with venture
capital-- Venture capital and private equity
is today at $7 trillion pool or at least 5$
trillion to 7$ trillion pool, is you standardize
the agreements around social impact bonds.
You create big outcomes funds, so you don't
have to go around looking for outcome funding
for every bond. You know where you can go.
The investors don't have to be found every
time you go to a social impact bond or a development
impact bond fund and so, you begin to reduce
the time, reduce the complexity and increase
the scale.
We'll come back to measurements. The question
of whose measurements or what are we measuring,
I think it's a really interesting, practical
and philosophical point. But just one final
thing about Peterborough. You referred to
it as a success. You said the concept has
been proven, government tried it, everyone
did well, everyone who needed to make money
for their foundations, that they made money.
These are all good outcomes, it seems to me,
based on what we're trying to achieve there
and yet government hasn't followed up. They're
not doing it anymore. What happened there?
Is it that your analysis is flawed or is it
that the government are flawed and they've
completely dropped the ball there?
Well, the answer is Brexit for the UK.
[laughs]
When Ian Duncan Smith and David Cameron left
office who were great proponents of this,
the governments after that were preoccupied
with Brexit. Now, it's interesting, Central
Government hasn't pushed but local government
has. There are now 60 social impact bonds
in the UK, about a third of the world total
and another 60 in the pipeline. We have two
social impact bond funds managed by Bridges
Ventures.
I hope the government now with COVID creating
such huge challenges for economic recovery,
the government will grasp with both hands
the opportunity created by outcomes funds.
We should have billions of dollars going into
outcomes funds to reskill the unemployed.
The unemployed, many of them, will not find
the old jobs they had. We have to face the
fact they're going to be employed by smaller
companies, more entrepreneurial companies,
rather than big companies because big companies
coming out of this crisis, have learned to
operate on a slimmed-down basis and they're
going to try and hold on to these productivity
gains.
We're going to have a major challenge of reskilling
people for new jobs in new companies. Now,
government should grasp this with both hands.
Look at what we've done in the UK with the
apprenticeship scheme, we've raised billions
of pounds which has not been expended. Let
us put those billions into an outcomes fund
that pays for those who can successfully train
apprentices and get them into jobs.
Interesting. I suppose a further question,
but this again this speaks to the management,
the measurement sorry issues. There's jobs,
and there's good jobs isn't there and can
an instrument like a social impact bond be
sensitive enough to filter for say, getting
people into good jobs, long-term jobs, jobs
that are good for mental health rather than
simply getting into jobs, or will such funds
always because of exigencies and difficulties
of measurement, find some compromise position
that is, on one level, on an individualistic
level, somewhat harmful?
Asheem, you've raised a very important point,
the great thing about impact bonds is their
flexibility. You can have a five-year bond,
and if it doesn't work out, unlike a government
program, which would continue for another
15 years, it comes to an end. At the end of
five years, if you want to launch another
bond, you've learned about the metrics that
need to be set so that you channel the effort
to the population you want to help, and so
you redesign the metrics for the second bond.
It is a very flexible instrument, and the
key thing about it, and it applies to philanthropists
as well as governments.
The key thing about it is we're not spending
money prescribing to those who are going to
help vulnerable populations be they not for
profits or purpose-driven businesses, you're
going to have to do the following. You're
going to visit every prisoner three times
a month or four times a month, or whatever
it is. We're giving money to these organizations
and saying your goal is to reduce the number
of prisoners going back to jail by more than
7½% over a period of time. If you achieve
that, you get your money back, and you get
a return that increases with your success.
So, the delivery organizations become like
businesses, even if they're nonprofits. They
have investment capital, they can define what
innovation they want to use to achieve their
targets. What other ways they want to achieve
to help a greater number of people. At the
end of the day, they know that if they deliver
a return to their investors, which is sufficiently
attractive, they'd be able to raise twice
as much money, and so you give the key to
the capital markets, to nonprofits and to
social entrepreneurs leading purpose-driven
businesses as well.
That's a fantastic segue because it leads
me right into my next line of questioning,
which is around impact investment, one of
the pillars of the impact revolution, as you
outlined it in the book. We both describe
I think, impact investment the same way. You
have ethical, responsible investment which
is about doing no harm, you have impact investment
which is about not doing no harm but actually
doing good, so an ethical responsible investment
might screen out for tobacco or for arms,
you say I’m not investing in these things.
I don't agree with them.
Whereas an impact investment it's about actually
investing in hospitals, schools in cancer
treatments, in reducing recidivism, as was
the social impact bonds in Peterborough.
I suppose, the obvious response to all that
is, it sounds great. It's a growing market.
It was referred to by JP Morgan as an asset
class. I think that's possibly overstating
it. It's a series of different approaches
moving in a similar direction, but I suppose
what I got from your book is that you see
impact investment as auguring a greater holistic
revolution. Tell us about that.
Yes. I see impact investment as the path to
impact economies because we learn to optimize
risk, return and impact and to deliver returns,
which are at least as good in my view as market
rates of returns, at least as good because
when we invest with impact as a dimension
of our decision making, we reduce the risk
of consumers walking away from the products
of the companies we invest in, the risk of
talent walking away from them, of investors
shifting away from them as they've done from
fossil fuel companies and so on, to clean
energy, and also the risk of regulation and
taxation coming because the government inevitably
are going to have to minimize the harm that
companies do.
You improve the risk side of your equation.
You also improve the opportunity side. I just
want to give you an example of what I mean
to bring this home because it illustrates
what an impact economy can do. There's a company
called OrCam in Israel, which wanted to help
the blind. The aunt of one of the founders
was going blind. The founder was a very sophisticated
entrepreneur and AI, artificial intelligence
expert.
He sold out his first company which he cofounded
for $15 billion to Intel in the area of driverless
cars. OrCam has developed a pair of spectacles
for the blind, spectacles like those you and
I are wearing with a little memory stick-like
device hanging from the side which whispers
into the ear of the wearer, the page of the
book they're reading, or the newspaper or
the banknote in their hands.
You and I and everyone else viewing us today
would say this is a fantastic impact venture.
It can help 35 million blind people in the
world and 250 million visually impaired people.
The company indeed has been very successful.
It's raised $100 million of capital, the last
round was at $600 million dollars. Now, if
you view things with an impact lens, you ask
yourself the question, "How could my technology
help the maximum number of people?" Then the
answer is a surprising one.
The answer is, what if you gave these spectacles
to the 800 million illiterate adults in the
world? What would that do for their lives
and their livelihoods? What would it do for
their economies and what would it do for the
world economy to bring 800 million people
from illiteracy to being able to read. I'm
a firm believer and I speak as a seasoned
investor, that optimizing risk return and
impact will open up new sets of growth and
profit opportunities at the same time.
Now, if you imagine this is at the center
of our economic system, Asheem, if you imagine
that companies have been required by governments,
which governments should do today, to publish
impact weighted financial accounts, where
any investor, any employee, any consumer can
find both the impact and the profit performance
of a company. Then you begin to use our economic
system to bring solutions rather than to create
problems which we then have to try to remedy.
An initiative I chair at Harvard Business
School published just a few days ago, the
environmental cost of 1,800 companies broken
down by each area of environmental impact.
Next year, we will add to that the employment
impact of companies as well as their product
impact. We will be able to measure the total
impact of a company. What numbers emerged
from that?
Take three chemical companies, Sasol in South
Africa has $12 billion of sales and creates
$17 billion in environmental damage a year.
Solvay in Europe has similar sales 12 billion,
and creates 3.7 billion of environmental damage.
BASF, also based in Europe, has $70 billion
of sales and creates $7 billion of environmental
damage. One creates 10% of its sales in damage,
the other 29% and the last one 139% damage.
Now, isn't that a set of figures that all
of us should know? Shouldn't we create a race
to the top?
When we think in terms of social problems,
when we think in terms of social diversity,
take Intel, for example. Here's a company
that has been driving for diversity and well-being
in its workforce. It pays $7 billion a year
to its 50,000 US employees. Superficially,
we'd all say that's a fantastic social impact,
but if you look at the local demographics
surrounding their facilities and compare it
with their employment, you realize that there
is a huge social cost that Intel is causing.
If you add it to the missing number of people
from minority groups all the way up its organization,
the salary levels that they would have earned
and if you account for other negative employment
impact, Intel's positive employment impact
falls from $7 billion to just $2½ billion.
That's probably the best in the tech world.
Now, shouldn't we be sharing these numbers
across all tech firms for all of us to see,
and if we do so, isn't the result going to
be that consumers and talent and investors
will go to those who do a better job of delivering
impact as well as profits?
Impact-weighted accounts are, seems to me
when I was reading the book, that was the
big idea, it seemed to me that emerged from
it towards the end. I have to say I find myself
saying yes a lot in response to some of those
rhetorical questions that you put our way.
I think it's a really interesting idea. It's
information that I think would really enrich
the public space.
I suppose in that spirit though, there are
a couple of challenges. One direct one perhaps,
and one broader challenge, that I'd just like
to put to you and get your response to, as
we move into the final section of our-- Time's
just flown by frankly.
The first thing that is a very direct challenge
is, you talk a lot in the book, in our conversation
today about measurement, measuring things,
measuring good things, measuring change. One
of the things that we know certainly from
the last few weeks and months, whether it's
questions of racial justice when it comes
to the Black Lives Matter movement, whether
it's gender justice and then the Me Too movement,
often the question of measurement isn't simply
an objective thing. It's about who's doing
the measuring, where does the power come from,
and who ultimately has a say in the construction
of the system that you're using to define
what good looks like?
Isn't the danger not just with impact - I
think the dangers are lesser with impact-weighted
accounts actually because that seems to be
quite a good idea to attach to business bottom
lines more generally, but generally speaking
with the impact movement, isn't there a danger
here that we're simply instantiating and internalizing
privilege by reflecting an existing view of
what good or good change or social change
looks like that doesn't speak to a diversity
of perspectives and voices?
I think the rules of our system create the
norms and values as well as reflect them.
In 1929 and I said there were echoes of 1929
in the air, every company picked its own financial
accounting policies. There were no auditors
to verify the numbers and each company could
clear the way profits without explaining to
investors how much or why.
It seems ridiculous.[laughs]
It seems ridiculous today and yet when the
idea that you should have a standard set of
accounting principles for all companies so
you can make comparisons and somebody should
be looking at the numbers and saying, "These
numbers are true," there were remonstrations
in Congress that this would spell the end
of American capitalism. Now, when we changed
the rules and went to generally accepted accounting
principles, which gave an objective view of
what the real profit of the company is, and
when we had auditors verify that, we increased
confidence in our system, and we began to
impose certain norms of behavior which companies
had to follow and so the integrity of companies
became extremely important and we could all
measure it, right?
If a company had published false information,
the people who did it went to jail. The same
has to become true of impact now. We're in
the same situation we were in for profit in
'29 with impact today. 30 trillion is going
in and companies are reporting about the wonderful
things they're doing in the area of impact
without talking about the bad things they're
doing, without giving us any numbers about
the value of either the good or the bad.
Now we can create impact accounting principles
today, and they should be audited and they
will change the norms of our behavior, in
the sense that for a company just to make
money will become unacceptable. A company
that is polluting and creating social issues
will show a much lower impact-weighted profit
than a company that is as profitable, but
improving the environmental and the social
dimensions of our lives, so we will begin
to create norms about creating impact as well
as profit. That should be the norm for our
society today.
I think that's really interesting. There's
a broader question here, isn't there? I mentioned
earlier, perhaps there's one final bit of
mischief that I want to sling your way. Perhaps
I can refer to a conversation I had on this
stage. Well, not on this stage. This is my
parents' front room but on the RSA stage.
When we were doing an equivalent series of
talks last year with Anand Giridharadas, who's
a presenter in CNBC and on Vice TV. He wrote
a quite cool little book called Winners Take
All. He's not an economist. He's not a philosopher.
He's a journalist but as a philosopher, I'd
categorize his approach as Aristotelian in
nature.
He asks quite simply, "On a personal level
are impact investors with financial backgrounds,
the right people we want handling our improvement
of the world?" Think of the crash. Do we really
want to give the keys to the fire truck to
the arsonists who started the fire? Then there's
a broader institutional critique which is,
"Do we want to shift political decisions in
society about what's improved and what isn't
from elected democratic politicians, bureaucrats
unelected but they serve politicians to unelected
philanthropists, investors, and so on?" It's
an important challenge. Isn't it? It's potentially
a massive movement of power within society.
How do you respond as a final response to
my challenges? How would you respond to those
two quite distinct, but interrelated problems?
Dealing with the first. The lifeblood of our
economic system is investment. Capitalism
is about capital. We don't want to give up
the power of capitalism to create growth and
improve the standards of living in the way
that it has done and take people out of poverty
in the way that capitalism has done. What's
happening today is that the consequences of
the capitalist system are just too great,
even for our governments to cope with environmentally
and socially and so we have to change its
self-defeating nature by balancing risk which
we began to measure in the middle of the last
century, return which we've measured for some
centuries, and now impact. We have to bring
those three to the center of our decision
making.
Now, will wealthy people who make investments
drive the creation of impact? Yes, they will
within that system. Now, if you look at the
wealthy today, many of them come from nothing
like me. I was a refugee. I came to Britain
at the age of 11. I was lucky to be helped.
I went to a state school. My education was
paid for at Oxford. I got a scholarship to
Harvard Business School.
I'm wealthy today. I'm wealthy because I was
lucky enough to get that education, and then
it allowed me to take advantage of a new industry,
venture capital and then private equity. For
me, they were ways of doing something useful,
of creating jobs at a time when there were
three million unemployed in the UK. Now, you
can either view me as a wealthy person who
is trying to perpetuate the existing system
which is what he would say or you can view
me as a refugee who because he has been helped,
wants to help others. I leave you to judge
on the basis of my book, Impact, which of
the two categories I fit in.
Now, let's come to your second very important
question. The rules of the game have to be
objectively observed. An impact accounting
system has to give an objective view of the
impact created just as our financial system
gives an accurate view of the profit that
is created. If government then wants to provide
incentives to companies creating impact in
the area of diversity, positive impact or
in the environmental area, or in recruiting
the unemployed, government can provide such
incentives for them.
Perhaps where the world will be some years
from now, is that the tax rate of companies
that deliver great impact will be lower than
the tax rate of companies that deliver negative
impact. That is the role of governments, not
the role of the accounting system. The accounting
system helps to provide the information to
reshape our norms. I think the wealthy who
are vast in the investment world and who have
significant resources today, we've seen far
too much money go to the wealthy relative
to other people in society.
For 25 years, salaries for most people have
stagnated and because of technology and because
of the importance of the growing importance
of finance, those who have been lucky enough
to involved in these two fields have been
able to make gargantuan amounts of money.
We have to use that money. We have to use
their philanthropy, we have to use their investment.
They're open-minded. Most of them came from
nothing. They didn't come from wealthy families.
We're not talking of inherited wealth. If
you look today at the biggest fortunes out
of tech, if you look at Bill Gates or Bezos
or anyone else that you know or Zuckerberg,
these are not people who inherited wealth.
They're people who came from nothing and can
empathize with those who come from nothing.
They can contribute hugely to the improvement
of our society and our planet.
Well, thank you very much. This was trendily
called philanthrocapitalism, wasn't it? A
few years back. The question of the role of
the rich and even the super-rich in improving
our world. It's definitely an incredibly vociferous
issue. There are so many who take your view.
When you were responding to that question
you said, "Do you think I'm one of the good
guys or the bad guys? I very much see the
work you've done over the last 10 years as
incredibly inspiring to someone like myself.
I can also see that the perspectives of people
who are wary of privilege and also objectively
aware You talk about COVID and circling us
back to the beginning. When Bill Gates was
talking about vaccinations, there were so
many conspiracy theories that emerged about
them. People online, the populist movement
against the philanthrocapitalist trend that
was saying, "We don't want this guy. I'll
never get the vaccination if it's been produced
by Bill Gates all the rest of it Really crazy
stuff out there.
I suppose my final question, my final bit
of mischief, and you've been very patient
with my various little challenges, so thank
you, is do you fear that all of these very
reasonable things that you're saying is, the
real case that you're making is might be lost
in the fog of the current media environment
that is populist, that is a backlash against
the rich, that's a backlash against these
fortunes? Do you fear this agenda might be
lost in that and how do we mitigate against
that?
I think we are at a crossroad, again 1929
is in the air where we can either go the populist
street which creates great divisions in our
society or we can go the direction of Roosevelt
and the new deal and try open a new chapter
in our development as a society. Some would
go one way and some would go the other.
I'm hoping that the majority of democratic
countries would go into the direction of the
new deal. The most important step in providing
that new deal is to ensure that companies
are transparent about their impact so that
they have a major incentive to improve it
and to bring solutions to us. I am fearful
that too many countries would go the populist
route. The way to avoid that as we did in
'29 to preserve our system and improve it
and improve lives as a result of it. There's
been huge economic progress since 1929 for
the majority of people.
We have to recognize that the system we have
today, the economic system we have does not
distribute outcomes fairly. It just does not
do that. If we want to have a fair and sustainable
recovery from COVID-19 and have a better system
that improves lives, spreads equality of opportunity
better, enables people to improve their lives
better, measures the harm and the good that
people do as they run companies and work in
companies, as well as the profit that they
make, then we have to be bold as we were or
the US was in 1933.
We have to mandate that the era of impact
has now come and that companies have to be
transparent not just about their financial
performance, but about their impact performance
as well. In this way, we will use our economic
system to improve lives and our planet, instead
of constantly creating harm…unsuccessful
efforts to remedy the harm that's been done.
“The era of impact has come”, quote Ronnie
Cohen. I can't believe it. We've covered so
much in our session. We've covered the new
deal, '29, impact-weighted accounts, how to
do charitable action better, philanthropy,
investments, millions of people helped, AI,
and other technologies. It's been a fascinating
conversation, but we have run out of time,
I'm afraid. All that's left for me to say
is, thanks again for talking to me today,
Ronnie. I hope you enjoyed joining us.
I know that RSA fellows will be really grateful
and hopefully inspired by some of the things
that you've been talking about and that we've
debated today. If you've been watching along
today and bless you if you have, do head over
to the RSA website now for more information
on impact, revolution, and links to impact.
It is again, the book, very handsome volume
as I said earlier Tweet me @Robinasheem. Tell
me I've been talking nonsense, or I think
you're on Twitter as well. Aren't you Ronnie?
Yes, I am indeed. Please go to Twitter.
Tell Ronnie I didn't like what Asheem was
saying to you or generally join in the debate
then. Of course, on the RSA website, there's
lots of information on our work on inclusive
economies and economic resilience, post COVID,
a fair deal for key workers, the future of
the firm, and indeed what tomorrow's company
and business environment looks like. I think
impact-weighted accounts are going to be part
of that future. I just have a hunch, social
impact bond are here, and maybe impact-weighted
accounts are going to go the same way.
And there’s also, of course, all the news
from our 30,000 fellows all over the world.
Just to say, we'd love to hear your ideas
on what's needed to tackle economic insecurity
on what we've been talking about today and
to create more just, resilient post-pandemic
futures. Do get involved in the conversation
on the #RSAbridges and find me. Thank you
once again to Ronnie, Sir Ronald Cohen for
joining us and thank you all for watching.
Thank you Asheem.
