Success Quote by George Soros

Soros is doing something canny here: he’s lowering the temperature around a domain where everyone is hungry for verdicts. In finance, you can pretend the scoreboard is clean - returns, benchmarks, quarters. In “social consequences,” he suggests, the very idea of a scoreboard collapses into pluralism and noise: “all different people acting in different ways.” That line isn’t just descriptive; it’s a preemptive strike against the demand for simple accountability, the kind that turns philanthropy or political influence into a binary of good/evil, win/lose.

The key phrase is “proper criterion of success.” Soros isn’t denying ambition; he’s challenging the legitimacy of the metrics. Social change is a swarm problem: feedback loops, second-order effects, and actors who don’t share goals. If your intervention shifts incentives, people adapt. Outcomes splinter. Credit assignment becomes a fantasy. The subtext reads like a defense of messiness - and, implicitly, of himself. A billionaire tied to “open society” projects is perpetually on trial in public discourse; insisting that success criteria are contested reframes critique as epistemological, not just moral.

Context matters: Soros has long argued that markets and democracies are shaped by reflexivity, where expectations alter reality. This quote imports that worldview into social policy. It’s also a rhetorical humility that doubles as power: by emphasizing difficulty, he claims seriousness. The punchline is quiet but pointed: if you want clean results, you’re asking the wrong question about human systems.