The next frontier of progress is social finance
Progress is the fuel of human history: the reason we live longer, safer, more interesting lives and yes, the reason technologies like AI exist at all. But progress has a structure. Some frontiers get crowded and over-mined; others are wide open.
In the early days, a handful of explorers could redraw the map of the world. Today, global exploration is "solved"; finding something truly new on Earth is incredibly expensive. In physics, a single mind could give us quantum theory or natural selection; now it takes thousands of scientists and billion-dollar colliders to push the frontier by a millimetre. Progress in some domains has become harder and costlier at the margin. Capitalism is similar. Over centuries, we got very good at finding financial value: first in trade and industry, then in public markets, then in ever more abstract instruments and algorithms. As the obvious opportunities were exhausted, the system went hunting in stranger places, sometimes extracting value from our attention, our data, even the social fabric itself.
But there is a vast frontier that remains under-explored: the frontier of social outcomes. How do we systematically reduce rough sleeping, improve children's care, support mental health, and strengthen communities and do it in a way that is financially sustainable and scalable?
Historically, we treated this as a sphere outside capitalism. The hunter in a simple society provides for their family, and gives a portion of their surplus to a central authority to keep everyone safe, educate the children, care for the vulnerable. That model, taxes for social protection, was a huge step forward. It built the incubator that let each generation climb higher up Maslow's hierarchy. But today that central system is straining. Demographics, debt, political cycles and complexity make it harder for governments alone to design, fund and deliver all the social infrastructure a modern society needs.
So we need new institutional technology. New financial technologies. A renewed focus on social infrastruture. Social progress. Social finance is one emerging answer: a way of bending the tools of capitalism towards social progress instead of away from it. By explicitly pricing social outcomes into contracts and investments, we can invite private capital into the work of solving public problems without abandoning democratic control or social purpose.