Accounting for Democracy

What is the return on our investment?

There is a simple question that can help us make sense of our troubled times: What do we value?

By this, I mean not what we feel our values are. Rather, I’m asking how we assign and assess the actual worth of what we make, do, and prioritize.

You hear a lot these days about ROI—return on investment. The term, which refers to a formula that’s now standard in business parlance, was coined back in 1914 by Frank Donaldson Brown, an executive at DuPont.

In business, ROI comes in many forms and is part of increasingly complex calculations around inputs and value. But at its core, it’s simple: the amount of return you make relative to what you put in. For example, if you invest $1,000 and make $1,200, that’s an ROI of 20 percent.

If you’re putting money into something, you want to know it’s going to be worth it. But “worth” depends on how you define both investment and return—the time frame you’re considering, who’s doing the investing and why, and what incentives are being optimized.

In the nonprofit world, ROI often comes up in conversations with funders. There is nothing wrong with accountability. If someone is investing significant resources in a program, it’s reasonable to ask whether—and how—it’s making a difference.

But the nuance is where it gets interesting. Especially for those of us working in the creative space, where a “return” isn’t measured in purely monetary terms.

How would you measure the ROI of the Mona Lisa? The recordings of Miles Davis? A neighborhood mural? For those of us who make movies, we can count box office receipts. But what is the value of a child who starts to see the world differently after watching a film? Or someone who is suffering and finds the ability to laugh again during a live performance?

Journalism, my original occupation, is running into a similar dilemma. By conventional accounting, investing in newspapers today is unlikely to yield high profits. Unless, of course, you believe it’s profitable for a democracy to hold the powerful accountable—and that there is always value in uncovering the truth.

I marvel at the fact that we’re living in a time when we no longer know how to measure the full value of what we’re doing.

In my film The Last Class, about former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Professor Reich offers a prediction that resonates with me—and I suspect will with many of you:

One hundred years from now, looking back on this era we are in, it may be that historians say, “Power and money—the lust for both—pulled society apart. There was just too much. Too much temptation, too much power, too much money.”’ Maybe, sometimes I think that that’s the problem.

Money and power are easy, but crude, proxies for value, and they’ve come to dominate our public discourse. You feel this especially out here in the Bay Area, where IPO valuations, stock options, and the rise of the next tech tycoon command outsized attention.

An article in The New York Times this summer noted that A.I. researchers are making tens of millions of dollars and are being recruited like sports stars. There are real questions about the ultimate business value of this technology. Many worry it’s a bubble. But what’s even more unknowable is what it will mean for human society.

The lessons from the recent business past are worrisome. Social media companies made early investors and founders ungodly amounts of money. But what about the returns when measured in terms of the negative impacts it has on our communities? Our children? Our politics?

At the same time, the current regime continues to destroy some of our most effective public investments under the lie of “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The tech bros at DOGE have gutted foreign aid, particularly USAID and the State Department. Yet these programs have saved millions of lives and helped ensure global stability and peace—a huge return on a very small investment. The regime is also attacking education, quite literally an investment in our collective future.

Particularly egregious is the assault on basic scientific research, which by almost any formulation of ROI—even the most hard-nosed capitalist one—has delivered more economic return than nearly any investment this country has ever made. And that’s before accounting for the human suffering science has alleviated, or the wonder it has inspired, like the breathtaking images we’ve seen from space telescopes.

It is difficult to comprehend why people with more money than they could ever spend seem so willing to hurt others—and to break society itself—in pursuit of more. We live in a world beholden to an increasingly narrow definition of success. And this is not accidental. It is a deliberate choice, especially by those who benefit from division and inequality.

Time and again throughout history, we’ve seen systems collapse because they were built on false assumptions and inherent weaknesses. Often, that collapse brings immense pain—the Civil War, the Great Depression. But ultimately, the most powerful agents of change are those who channel the full measure of our humanity.

All of us have experience investing in ourselves, our loved ones, our communities, and even our country and the world, in ways that can’t be accounted for in dollars. We give love and hope, empathy and service. We do good deeds without any expected financial benefit—or even recognition.

Most of us do this because we understand that the most important returns are not measured by accumulated wealth or material goods. Those leading our country do not understand this. They mouth platitudes about service and honor, but live by a code of greed and selfishness.

So it is our responsibility to correct their toxic assumptions by redefining what we invest in and how we measure the returns. We must put in the labor required to build a vibrant democracy grounded in justice and the rule of law. And we must judge our success with an honest accounting of the common good.

It is worth the effort, and we will reap the dividends.