Hope. Plan. Act.

Hope is not a plan. Dreaming is not doing. In order to build a better future, or even a survivable one, we each must act. The climate crisis is real; the attacks on democracy and on the rights of the weakest among us are real; the consolidation of a global oligarchy is real. We find it as terrifying and dismaying as you do.

But we can fight back.

At Calx Institute, we are working not only to determine and describe the outcome to strive for, but to become a tool for combatting the outcomes we may dread, and for combatting our own smallness in the face of such impossibly large challenges.

We are a think tank focused on envisioning and building a sustainable and equitable global economy. We are making it our mission to quantify the hidden, societal costs of business practices—not only the environmental harms, but human rights violations, social impact, and health consequences as well. While other calculations of externalities stop with the calculation of harms, we are taking it further, reimagining how industries could operate if optimized to minimize harm and maximize shared and equitable wealth.

At this moment governments are corporate-centered and bowing to oligarchs—a cynical and selfish approach beyond even the laissez-faire of recent decades. But for each policy proposed or action taken in the interest of profit, harm is caused, and that harm has a cost. Our goal is to calculate the cost in cold, actuarial terms and, in doing so, make it clear to corporate CEOs and elected leaders alike that beyond the moral imperative to do less harm (easy to ignore when shareholders demand putting profits before people), there is a financial imperative to minimizing our impact on the earth and on one another.

Through robust quantitative analysis and innovative collaboration platforms, we aim to provide a credible foundation for understanding the true costs of today’s economy. But beyond alarm-ringing and awareness-raising, we will describe and explore viable, systemic solutions. 

This is our action to build a better, more compassionate, more equitable future. What's yours?

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. 

- Buckminster Fuller