Who We Are

The Calx Institute is a private, non-for-profit organization working to quantify and analyze the societal and material damage done in the search for gain.

The current understanding of an industry’s value is based solely on profit and loss. On shareholder success and not collective good. It prioritizes short-term earnings over long-term sustainability. But money isn’t made in a vacuum. Doing business—whether that business is providing fuel or creating products—results in downstream harms (usually called “externalities”). Those harms come in the form of environmental damage, social destabilization, human rights violations, health issues, and more.

In our current economic model, those responsible for harms are often spared the burden of their resolution. Instead, the burden becomes ours to carry, and the recovery ours to pay for.

It becomes a loss in our collective ledger. 

We’re aiming to change that. 

We perform deep analyses of industries and companies, ferreting out the truth of their associated downstream harms, and quantifying the external damages of major tangible-product industries like fossil fuels, apparel, coal, and palm oil, as well as those of industries focused on intangible goods and services, like social networks and artificial intelligence.

We create objective reports so that activists, academics, policymakers, journalists, and consumers can rely on solid data in their messaging and narratives.

Our research illuminates an aspect of the economy often hidden from public view. It expands value to include not only an industry’s impact on the bottom line, but its impact on the collective good. By exposing harms, we can reduce them. We can prevent them. In doing so, we return the money that would be used for recovery back into the economy, and into the communities, that need it. We begin building a world optimized for minimizing harm and maximizing shared prosperity.

As we dig into these industries, we are creating new tools that make future analyses faster and more accurate, easing the path for others to continue the redefinition of value, and creating the framework for economic and environmental prosperity.

We are building robust, open, quantitative descriptions of external harms, and creating the IT systems to scale our data intake, curation, and representation. We have already published analyses of coal and of the global apparel industry, and we aim to weave these types of siloed descriptions into holistic models that enable the realistic, quantitative description of an economy in which external harms are properly accounted for, controlled, and minimized. 

More recently, we have expanded into rapid-response analyses of governmental policy, breaking down the true impact of both proposed and enacted legislation.

This is not work we seek to do alone. It is not proprietary; it is collaborative. We invite and welcome input from business analysts, policy experts, and more.

We believe the work to create a better, more just society falls to all of us. 

If you’d like to learn more, please don't hesitate to reach out to john@calx.institute.