Profit from the Change You Wish to See in the World
An alternative to "Be the change . . ."
My general advice for those who want to bring about change in the world amounts to this: If you can’t make money off of the solution to a problem, it either isn’t a problem worth solving or you aren’t the one to solve it.
This advice applies broadly to everyone from non-profit organizations to public-policy advocates to motivated activists as well as demonstrative protestors. Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit (protests and boycotts) and follow with the more conceptually difficult application (non-profits).
While I understand the motives behind boycotts, I rarely agree with them. This is aside from the fact that they are rarely successful—recent conservative efforts notwithstanding1.
Abstinence is fine, but boycotting is by its nature a use of resources to bring about change. This activity can easily expanded beyond being just advocacy. It can become interference with the peaceful exchange between third parties. In that case it is a forceful attempt to manipulate one of the parties to change their ways.
Before you exclaim, “That’s the point!”, understand that the argument against it is that in doing so we move from the realm of persuasion to that of force. There is a big difference between these realms. Persuasion is the use of reason to discover truth. Force is the use of coercion to bring about desired ends regardless of their truth value.
Boycotting is almost always a moralistic crusade to make buyers feel bad, awkward, and shame. Sellers are framed as misguided at best and evil at worst. Despite attempts to rationalize it, there is little to no foundational reasoning. It is much more akin to tribal demagoguery than logical argumentation. None of this seems very socially constructive or economically beneficial.
Protests in general suffer from these same dynamics. Taking it to the streets is overwhelmingly more about feeling like you’re making a change than it is actually making a change. And this is before we consider the problem that the cause you are shouting for may not be what you think it is—at the very least the movement might contain multitudes you do not agree with.
If you think this is an argument for apathy, you wouldn’t be too far off. We simply don’t know enough to have strong enough views on most issues to justify spending a lot on them. Many protests movements from history were certainly good causes worth fighting for, and the best executed ones were the most peaceful and the simplest in design (lunch-counter sit ins > > > riotous marches). Yet in far too many cases the protest is a distraction at best and a costly setback at worst.
These efforts (resources) can be better used elsewhere. In fact the alternative is to find a way to profit from a change that is desired.
Profit is the signal a free market sends to those who have found solutions. In its most straightforward conception it is selling something (an output) for more than you paid to acquire and create it (inputs). This is the common understanding of profit, but we can expand upon that quite (pardon the pun) profitably.
Any time a result yields more than what we give up to get the result, we have a profit. Profit in this broader sense is simply to say “it is worth it” (i.e., “that was worth doing” or “knowing then what I know now, I’d do it again”). We may feel that way upon returning home from spending the morning marching, shouting, and “raising awareness”, but most often we are just deluding ourselves about what was gained/lost. Going to church feeds your soul, but it does not feed the poor.
The first thing to understand about so-called non-profits is that they in fact do or at least should make profits. The difference is in what they can do with those profits. The problem is that the restrictions on how they can use profits is that it warps their incentive structure.
A successful non-profit should derive profit by solving the cause it is working toward while using less resources to do so than the value of the solved cause. Truly this can be hard to measure. That is partially why non-profits fail so often. Still it is incumbent upon them to do so lest they cause more harm than good.
If you cannot find a way to profit, it means you cannot find a true solution. That might be because there isn’t an inherent problem, or it might be because you are not the right person or organization to solve it.
If you believe that the problem you are trying to solve is not one where a profitable solution is possible, you might be right. Might be. Yet it is much more likely you are not thinking creatively enough. In other words you are being lazy by resting on this cop out.
PS, Mahatma Gandhi never said this.