The instrument
The Prevention Ledger
An interactive public instrument for measuring prevention-oriented resource allocation: your Prevention Ratio™, computed privately in your browser, and the Prevention Dividend™ evidence, domain by domain, with the metric class on every card.
What is inside
- Part One
The Prevention Ratio
A Quick Estimate from two totals, or Guided Entry across ten categories, five reactive and five preventive. A worked example, Sample City, shows the arithmetic.
- Part Two
The Prevention Dividend
The published evidence, each finding labeled by the kind of number it is, and an illustrative reallocation: what a dollar moved to prevention has tended to return elsewhere.
- Foundation
Methodology and sources
Every figure with its source, the kind of number it is, and its limits.
Nothing you enter leaves your browser.
The instrument lives on impactentrepreneur.com, where it opens in a new tab. Free to use, no account, nothing stored.
Public beta · v0.9.5 Developed by Laurie Lane-Zucker; introduced in The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough (Berrett-Koehler, 2026).
Before you begin
Three things worth knowing first. Your ratio is an estimate based on the budgets and years you choose to count. It is a starting point for conversation, not an audited finding. The 10–20% band on the gauge is the book’s context band, where preventive spending often sits. It is not a target, and it is not yet a benchmark. And nothing you enter leaves your browser: no accounts, no cookies, no storage, no analytics of your entries.
What the Ledger cannot tell you
The Ledger is deliberately simple, and it is open about what it can’t do. It can’t sort budget lines that are part prevention and part response: insurance pays for recovery but also prices risk, and maintenance prevents failures but is also ordinary upkeep. Those calls take judgment no public tool attempts. It can’t decide for you which budgets and years to count, and your ratio can be compared with another institution’s only if both were counted the same way. It can’t rank you against peers, because verified peer data does not yet exist. And it can’t turn a range into a recommendation. The evidence for the Prevention Dividend is real, but what it means for your budget depends on which dollar moves, what would have happened anyway, and who ends up with the savings.
That is the work of a Defense Audit: every budget line sorted, with each judgment call written down; a Prevention Ratio you can defend; and estimates, in ranges, of what prevention could return in each field, ready to take to a board.
The benchmark waitlist
The next step is a benchmark: where your ratio sits among institutions like yours, counted the same way. It needs verified data first. If you would like to hear when it is ready, leave your address.
Where the figures come from
Natural-hazard mitigation $4–$7 per $1 (National Institute of Building Sciences, 2019 (opens in a new tab)); ecosystem restoration $7–$30 (Ding et al., World Resources Institute, 2018 (opens in a new tab); corroborated by OECD, 2019 (opens in a new tab)); early childhood a 7–13% annual rate of return (Heckman et al., 2010 (opens in a new tab); García et al., 2020 (opens in a new tab)); pandemic preparedness $1,102 in expected averted GDP loss per $1, a U.S. estimate (Jameel Institute, Imperial College London (opens in a new tab)); conflict prevention $16 per $1, a modeled cost-effectiveness ratio from a scenario that more than doubles peacebuilding funding in the 31 most fragile and conflict-affected countries for a decade (Institute for Economics and Peace, Measuring Peacebuilding Cost-Effectiveness, 2017 (opens in a new tab)). Global military expenditure reached approximately $2.9 trillion in 2025 (SIPRI, April 2026 (opens in a new tab)).
What this instrument is, and is not
The Prevention Ledger is an educational instrument accompanying The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough. It produces approximate, illustrative figures from published research and the numbers you enter. It is not professional, financial, legal, or engineering advice; it makes no institution-specific recommendation; and its outputs are properly read as ranges with stated context, never as guarantees. No warranty of any kind is made regarding results or their application. Feedback on the instrument: info@impactalchemist.com.