Values-Based Consumerism

Bruce Cahan, an Ashoka Fellow and recent addition to Samasource’s Advisory Committee, gave a TechTalk at Google’s Mountain View campus a few weeks back on the need for better feedback loops for consumers who wish to buy products that reflect their values.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niGJCNN1FbA]

The talk raised a couple of interesting points:

1. Ratings systems for ethical consumerism (including fair trade and over 150,000 other labeling systems) aren’t centralized, so it’s very difficult to figure out the net impact of your purchases on the issues you care about.

2. Attempts to quantify social impact for individual consumers haven’t met with much success because it’s not easy for consumers to share information about their social preferences with search engines and advertisers, or to view their social investments in terms of revenue dollars.

3. Case studies of “ethical banks” like Wainwright in the aftermath of the recent sub-prime crisis and data on individuals that use ethical criteria to decide what to buy have shown, not all that surprisingly, that socially responsible companies and consumers are a better credit risk.

Mr. Cahan’s talk highlights the need for tools that help consumers make the right choice in all kinds of buying decisions, including outsourcing services. We’re excited to have him on board.