Brad S🍁/1 ….about a dozen years ago a member of a board i worked for gave me an interesting gift that has been bobbling around my brain for the last decade. he gave a presentation on something called #triplebottomline accounting, which sounds terribly boring but is actually a logically planned out way of thinking systematically about #social and #environmental externalities in the context of business and political decisions.
/2 the idea being that if you start to think about debt and surplus beyond pure money terms and have, in effect, three bottom lines you can start to understand in a numbers sense that the things we do incur both #social costs and #environmental costs. In as much, balancing your books for just pure financial numbers becomes pretty meaningless if you are incurring huge debt in the other two columns.
/3 #social debt manifests in things like #crimerates going up and social disorder increasing. #environmental debt is probably more obvious. The point being however is that none of these happen in isolation or independently of each other. Pull one thread here and the whole weave of society twists a little over there. #SystemThinking
/4 … this has left me thinking a lot more about #political systems, left versus right politics, hierarchical decision trees around spending priorities, and this constant battle of wills about who’s better at “balancing the budget “ a notion that takes on a whole new meaning when you factor in multiple externalities including a bottom line for each of #socialdebt and #environmentaldebt
/5 i’m by no means an economist nor an expert in these things but i think it becomes really more simple to think as all the decisions we make as credits and debits against a big complex accounting system for society’s priorities than as #political abstractions. and it really starts to draw real connections between things like #houselessness say and #tieredhealthcare systems or #TransitSafety say and investment in #education when it’s a connected web of our collective choices made manifest