Plain Words
Glossary
Every term this site uses, defined so a smart sixteen-year-old needs no economics class to follow the whole argument. If a word on any page isn't here and should be, tell us.
Our words
- Impactism
- The worldview and the movement: impact, not money, should be the measure of a life. Like "capitalism" names a world organized around capital, Impactism names one organized around contribution. (The word has been used by others before us; the specific thesis on this site is ours.)
- Impactist
- A member of the movement — anyone who signs the manifesto and chooses to measure their life by what it contributes. No fee, no test, no score.
- The Impact Standard インパクト本位制
- The mechanism nested inside Impactism: the proposal that what we honor in a person should be backed by contribution, the way money was once backed by gold. It is a measure of standing that works like honor — conferred by people, never computed by an authority, never exchangeable for money.
- The unit
- The form impact recognition takes inside a community — gratitude, vouching, time witnessed. Its texture is deliberately undecided (an open problem we state out loud); its rules are not: conferred by people, decaying, plural, never convertible to money. We don't call it a currency, on purpose — a currency is what you convert and spend, which is the failure mode this whole design forbids.
- Impact
- The difference your existence makes in other people's lives. Someone ate, learned, healed, got free, or got heard because of you — that's impact. Not a corporate report. A funeral word, offered to the living.
- The Recognition Letter
- The movement's first act: a written, specific honoring of one person whose contribution the money scoreboard missed — given privately, never attached to money. An Impactist's membership begins when they've written one. The format and the why.
- Circle
- Five to fifteen people who witness each other's real work, meeting one hour a month to name contributions out loud — no points, no rankings, no records. The scale at which honor is proven to work. The protocol is one page.
- The Uncounted
- The annual honors list: people whose contributions no ranking sees, nominated by witnesses, curated not computed, published unranked, with the honoree's consent. The anti-rich-list. Nominate someone.
- The floor
- A guaranteed minimum income that covers survival, so that no measure of standing can ever decide whether you eat. Everything Impactism proposes sits above the floor and may never reach below it.
- Phase 1 / Phase 2
- The two-phase model. Phase 1 is now: money still runs the world, and we make contribution visible and honored alongside it. Phase 2 is the possible future where machine abundance plus a floor mean money no longer binds a life — and impact becomes the primary measure. A curve, not a switch; you can join Phase 1 without believing in Phase 2.
Properties of the unit
- Peer-conferred
- Given by the people who witnessed your contribution — not calculated about you by a company, a government, or an algorithm.
- Giver-weighted
- Recognition counts for more when it comes from someone with real standing in the thing being recognized. A thank-you from the engineer whose project you saved outweighs a thousand strangers' likes. This is what stops impact from collapsing into a popularity contest.
- Decaying
- Standing fades unless renewed by new contribution. It measures who you are being, not who you once were — and it keeps early winners from becoming permanent aristocrats.
- Non-convertible
- Impact standing can never be bought, sold, or traded for money. The moment recognition converts to cash, it becomes a price — and prices corrupt the giving they touch. (Standing still leaks softer advantages, like trust — the design forbids the cash-out, not the consequence.)
- Personhood-bounded
- One person, one presence. Recognition attaches to real human beings, so it can't be farmed by fake accounts or bought in bulk.
- Plural ecology
- Many communities, many measures of impact, none global. Your ward, your project, your neighborhood each recognize contribution in their own way — and no dashboard ever adds them up into one number.
Ideas you'll meet on this site
- Yardstick / scoreboard
- Our shorthand for whatever a society uses to measure standing — the thing ambition aims at. Money is the current one. There has always been one.
- Positional good
- A good whose value comes from ranking above others — status, exclusivity, the front-row seat. Because the scarcity is social, not physical, no amount of economic growth can give everyone more of it. (Fred Hirsch's term, 1976.)
- Attention economy
- The system in which human attention is the scarce resource being competed for and sold — views, clicks, followers. Herbert Simon spotted the logic in 1971: when information is abundant, attention becomes the bottleneck.
- Motivation crowding
- The research finding that external rewards can weaken ("crowd out") the inner desire to do something good — mainly under specific conditions: when rewards are money-like, promised in advance, and contractual. Recognition given freely after the fact tends to strengthen the desire instead, in the evidence so far.
- Honor vs. price
- The central distinction of this whole site. A price is promised in advance, contractual, and spendable. An honor is conferred afterward, freely, and can't be cashed out. Prices corrupt giving; honors mostly strengthen it.
- Steelman
- The opposite of a strawman: restating an objection in its strongest possible form before answering it. Our entire Objections page is built this way.
- PageRank
- The algorithm that made Google work: a web page matters more when important pages link to it — importance flows from the important. The Impact Standard borrows the intuition for recognition (praise from someone who knows the work counts more) while refusing the central computation.
- Goodhart's law
- "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" (the popular phrasing is Marilyn Strathern's). Once people are judged by a number, they optimize the number instead of the thing it was supposed to track. The reason the Impact Standard refuses to be a number.
- Matthew effect
- "The rich get richer" applied to recognition: those already recognized attract more recognition, regardless of merit. Named by sociologist Robert Merton (1968) after the Gospel line about those who have being given more. The reason impact standing decays.
- Social credit system
- China's state-run "trustworthiness" infrastructure. Contrary to the meme, there is no single citizen score — it's a patchwork of blacklists that has blocked millions of ticket purchases. It is everything the Impact Standard is forbidden to be: state-run, mandatory, opaque, and tied to the necessities of life.
- ESG / impact measurement
- The industry of scoring and reporting companies' environmental and social performance for investors (ESG ratings, IRIS+ metrics, impact-weighted accounts). Tools for steering money — useful, and not what this site is about. We measure lives, not portfolios, and we don't convert impact into dollars.
- Universal basic income (UBI)
- A regular cash payment to everyone, no conditions attached. The tested versions (Finland, Kenya, Alaska) improved well-being without collapsing people's will to work. One way — not the only way — a floor could exist.
- Post-scarcity
- A possible future where machines produce so much, so cheaply, that no one needs to work to survive. Keynes predicted a version of it in 1930; today's AI leaders forecast another. On this site it is always a labeled forecast, never a promise.
- Log-linear (about money and happiness)
- The shape of the income–well-being relationship: each doubling of income buys roughly the same small increase in well-being. So $30k→$60k feels like one step up, and you'd need $60k→$120k to feel the next one. Money never stops mattering; it just buys less and less life per dollar.
- Externality
- A cost or benefit that lands on people outside a transaction, which prices therefore miss — the pollution a factory doesn't pay for, the free software the world doesn't pay for. The textbook reason money under-counts contribution.
- Gold standard 金本位制
- The old system in which paper money was a claim on actual gold. The US cut the final link on August 15, 1971; money has floated on collective trust since. Proof that what a civilization backs value with can change within a lifetime — which is the Impact Standard's founding metaphor.
- Anomie
- Sociologist Émile Durkheim's word (1897) for the unmoored feeling when life has no shared norms to give desires a shape — which he observed rising in economic booms, not just busts. Prosperity without purpose has been a documented hazard for over a century.
- PICSY
- Ken Suzuki's "propagational investment currency" (2009): a designed monetary system where your purchasing power equals your measured contribution to society, computed like Google's PageRank. The closest prior art to our idea — and different at the root: PICSY computes contribution centrally from transactions; we hold that it must be conferred by people.
Impact over money