Service-focused Impact Investing

Before I drift off into my next book, the most important idea to come out of Kai Fu Lee's AI Superpowers, to my mind, is "service-focused impact investing." Impact Investing is the emerging discipline of allocating money with a view to effecting not just economic but non-economic goods: social equity, the environment, gender equity, etc. Service-focused impact investing, in Lee's formulation, involves investing in businesses or other enterprises that specifically seek to employ people in a way that benefits them as well as those they serve. Investing to encourage volunteerism, caregiving, education, etc. Really without explicit aims of economic return to the investor, or at least without that being the primary goal. To broadly encourage love in society.

He gets to this position after fighting off cancer. It was an unexpected turn in the book, but he's the , first person I've read to really take this issue on in a direct way and try to think it through, and the first with the weight and visibility to push it at high levels. Worth watching. Because he is on to something.