Sustainability accounting quantifies some impacts while obscuring hard-to-measure ones

Evidence

Even the notion of sustainability is becoming financialized by introducing devices such as sustainability accounting, which integrates noneconomic factors such as social, environmental, and ethical values into the realm of financial calculation (Hiss 2013). Although these new tools enabled corporations to measure their noneconomic impacts, they also led to the omission of key sustainability-related aspects that are difficult to objectively measure and quantify—essentially, while water usage or greenhouse gas emission attracts greater attention, complex social consequences of corporate actions on local communities are more likely to be overlooked. — Gerald F. Davis & Suntae Kim, Financialization of the Economy, 88

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines sustainability accounting as a financialization device and spells out its perverse selectivity.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: empirical evidence on what sustainability accounting systematically excludes, and whether quantification itself distorts which harms get addressed.
• XREF: connects to: Accounting practices involve interpretation and are not straightforwardly performative — Kean Birch, Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy:…, 35; Accounting for biological assets reflects chosen methods, not intrinsic biological qualities — Kean Birch, Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy:…, 78; GDP as a metric conceals wealth concentration and environmental destruction — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 93 (+5 more)

Related

• Market-driven consumer economics omits environmental costs from its calculations (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• GDP as a metric conceals wealth concentration and environmental destruction #expands (0.78) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 93
• Market-driven consumer economics omits environmental costs from its calculations #expands (0.78) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2656
• Efficiency displaces friction onto hidden labor and environmental costs throughout supply chains #expands (0.75) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 777
• Global supply-chain efficiency transfers ecological costs onto the world’s most vulnerable people #expands (0.73) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 306
• Short-term profit incentives override distant and slowly accumulating environmental harms #expands (0.72)
• Measuring profits rather than employment reveals financialization as the dominant economic trend #expands (0.72) — Greta R. Krippner, The Financialization of the American…, 37