Personally, I hope (and want to believe) that outcome-based indicators would make the connection between giving and accomplishing stronger, that people would not just give in order to "do a good deed" but also start giving to "have an impact on malnutrition" or "reduce malaria" etc. But other people might believe that the consequences would be different. Two possible worries that immediately come to mind:
- Myopic funding: The more concrete, short-term and certain a program was according to its outcome indicator, the more funding it might receive. This might make it easy to get funding for vaccines and malaria nets, but hard to get funding for investments and development in health infrastructure, education, human rights work with women, etc.
- Over-focused funding: Some measures may catch the public's interest far more than others ("go viral"), and this might lead to large shares of funds going to these areas - not because the need is the largest or the impact the greatest, but simply because the indicator is catchy in some way
One way of trying to grasp the problem is to realize that we are talking about (at least) three different types of information that are important:
- State of the world: What are the problems facing the world (malnutrition, excess mortality, human right abuses, illiteracy, poverty, pollution, etc) and how severe are they?
- Action alternatives: What are the programs or projects or strategies we have developed to tackle these problems, and what would the cost and impact associated with these be?
- Personal judgment: How do we weight and judge the different problems the world faces up against each other, and how do we choose between action alternatives? In economist language: What are our preferences?
Would you be worried about a "reductionist" or "oversimplified" interpretation of indicators? Would you be afraid that important but unsexy long term factors might be neglected?
And even if you personally don't see the problem - how can we answer this fear and develop indicators that don't have excessive (largely unintended) negative consequences?
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