Doug Smith: Social Impact Bonds – Right Result, Wrong Way (Part 1)
By Douglas K. Smith, Member, Board of Directors, SeaChange Capital Partners
Social impact bonds, a useful experiment underway in England, is gaining attention on this side of the pond, including from the Obama administration. We are glad to see this at SeaChange (a non-profit group seeking innovative ways to bring capital to the non-profit sector). What is deeply concerning, though, is how some elites are packaging and promoting social impact bonds as yet one more example of everything the market does is good while everything government does is bad. Moreover, these same elites betray a stunningly superficial grasp about how markets actually work.
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