Defanging the apex fanatics

James Ganesh writes about the current US administration's approach to war in Ukraine:  

Trump is a commercial animal. So is his envoy Steve Witkoff. By “commercial animal”, I don’t just mean someone from the private sector, such as Mitt Romney, but someone who views the whole world through a business lens. ... [T]he war —in fact, war itself — must baffle a commercial animal. The idea that people would fight out of principle is alien to homo economicus. A political commentator must befriend business people, for their original angle on things, for their range of international experiences, for their (often) pleasanter company. But doing so also brings home their intellectual blind spot, which is an inability to understand fanaticism. And by that I mean a literal refusal to believe that such a thing really exists. There are exceptions, but people who have to be pragmatic for a living will tend to assume that all the world is the same, and that ideology is just a cover for reasonable material interests. When business and democracy don't mix, James Ganesh, Financial Times, 18 December 2025

I will grant that there are fanatics who will not be swayed by any sort of financial inducement. But they are all supported to some degree by people who, I believe, could be encouraged to topple or defang those at the apex of the power structure. I think the fanatics who have accumulated power - including the power to start wars of aggression - did so because of the passive or active support of people who were amenable to non-ideological incentives. Such enablers may have been drawn in by the charisma of the apex fanatic, or believed that the apex fanatic could help their business; they might just have wished to be close to power, and thought that backing the apex fanatic was their best bet. Or they may even be ordinary members of the public, desperate for a change. All these enablers might sympathise with the fanatic's ideas and ideology; few of them, though would share the apex fanatics' total commitment to their cause. 

Social Policy Bonds could help (1) deal with existing fanatic-led activities, and (2) constrain the influence of political fanatics. 

(1) Take the war in Ukraine or, indeed, any areas of existing or potential conflict in the world. And assume that the goal of everyone - apart from the apex fanatics - is a lasting peace. Applying the Social Policy Bond principle to that conflict, or any other, would mean issuing bonds that become redeemable only when peace had been sustained for, say, fifty years. Such a lasting peace would be viable only if each side of the conflict came to some sort of agreement, tacit or otherwise, to end their conflict and to reduce the likelihood of future conflict. Such bonds, targeting regional conflicts, or world peace, would do little to deter the apex fanatics, but would help offset the incentives that currently encourage their enablers to support their accession to positions of power. 

(2) We shouldn't have to put up with fanatics starting wars or otherwise creating mayhem. But we can't outlaw fanaticism, nor do we need to. We should focus instead on the limiting the incentives that drive the enablers to hand power to the fanatics. Social Policy Bonds, by targeting outcomes, could shrink the role of ideology and hence fanaticism in the political process. Instead of voting on the basis of soundbites, personality or tribal loyalty, people would be presented with an array of broad social and environmental improvements, which they would prioritise. Government would then articulate voters' wishes, and raise the revenue that would fund their achievement. Apex fanatics would be marginalised and maybe divert their energies into less disruptive endeavours. Business perhaps? 

For more on how the bond principle could be applied to regional or global conflict, please follow the links on this page. 

 

Priorities

It's lamentable (to me) that so much brainpower gets channeled into lucrative, but socially useless, activities:

High-speed traders are feuding over a way to save 3.2 billionths of a second

A millisecond used to be a big deal for the world’s quickest traders. A dispute over huge trading profits at one of the world’s largest futures exchanges shows they now think a million times faster. The controversy is about an arcane technical maneuver in which high-speed traders bombard Frankfurt-based Eurex with useless data. The idea is to keep their connections to the exchange warm so they can react fractionally faster to market-moving information. Link Alexander Osipovich, 'Wall Street Journal', 15 December 2025

We shouldn't condemn these people, whatever the net results of their collective actions. They are reacting rationally to the incentives on offer; and few of us spend all our time solving the world's problems. It's the incentives that are perverse. If people can make enough cash to bring up a family by shaving off some nanoseconds per financial transaction more than the next guy, then that is what they will strive to do. It is disappointing, though, that the undoubted ingenuity that went into these traders' software isn't channeled into more socially beneficial activities. 

Social Policy Bonds could change that. A bond regime would reward people for solving society's urgent, long-term problems. It would stimulate diverse, adaptive approaches the nature of which we need not know in advance, but which are necessary given the failings of our current political systems to end the militarisation of our planet, deal with climate change or otherwise improve social and environmental well-being. 

A Social Policy Bond regime would allow us to target broad global and national goals explicitly, while channeling the market's efficiencies into the best use of our limited resources. Given that the survival of the planet itself is under threat, I think the case for such targeting is a strong one, even if we have to give up high-frequency trading to get there. Incentives aren't everything, but they do matter. 

Who would go into politics?

Who would go into politics? The obstacles and disincentives for ordinary people who consider a political career keep increasing:

• you and your immediate family will need enhanced security - even if you are not very high profile; this might apply even after your political career ends; 
• everything you said or put in writing over the past few decades will be trawled and used against you; 
• in most democratic countries, the financial rewards aren't very high.

The results are plain to see: politics has become a game for billionaires and those acting for them. We have a political caste of (mostly) mediocrities who've had little experience in productive enterprises. Some would have embarked on a political career for idealistic reasons, but many of these leave because they can achieve their goals more effectively outside the political circus, or because they aren't sufficiently thick-skinned to take all the abuse their position inevitably attracts. 

One idea might be to adopt the Singapore model: 

Singapore’s remarkable transformation is built on meritocratic governance, where competence, integrity, and performance drive leadership and policy decisions. In political leadership & governance, leaders are selected based on expertise rather than popularity, with rigorous recruitment, performance-based promotions, and corruption-free administration ensuring stability and long-term vision. In public administration & civil service, a highly efficient, professional bureaucracy ensures that civil servants are promoted based on performance, not tenure, with strict anti-corruption measures and ongoing training programs maintaining accountability. Meritocracy in Government Leadership: Example of Singapore, Metamatics and Jakub Zeglitz-Bares, Strategic Intelligence, 20 February 2025

And, crucially (from the same source):

Ministerial salaries in Singapore are pegged to the salaries of top earners in the private sector (such as CEOs and top executives). This ensures that talented individuals do not avoid government service due to financial reasons. 

Singapore's Prime Minister was paid $1.6 million in 2024. There are opportunities for less well-paid politicians to become wealthy from, for example, speeches or writing their memoirs, but they are less certain than official salaries, often less ethical, or the rewards usually have to be deferred until after they have left office. 

An alternative approach could involve issuing Social Policy Bonds: a bond regime would shrink the role of politicians and their ideologies; under a bond regime, political debate would focus on articulating society's goals and raising the revenue required for their achievement. Goals are less divisive than the supposed means of achieving them; and they would be expressed in ways meaningful to everybody, so that there would be greater public participation in the policymaking process, and hence more buy-in. This would be in stark contrast to policymaking today, which is difficult and tedious for people to follow unless they are paid to do so, or are lawyers. Reducing the role of politicians in this way could enlarge the circle of would-be entrants to the profession, such that it might then encompass people from more diverse backgrounds. 

It's all too complicated. I'm off to the boozer

George Monbiot writes:

Today, foreign corporations, or the oligarchs who own them, can sue governments for the laws they pass, at offshore tribunals composed of corporate lawyers. The cases are held in secret. Unlike our courts, these tribunals allow no right of appeal or judicial review. You or I cannot take a case to them, nor can our government, or even businesses based in this country. They are open only to corporations based overseas. If a tribunal determines that a law or policy may compromise the corporation’s projected profits, it can award damages of hundreds of millions, even billions. These sums represent not actual losses, but money the arbitrators decide the company might otherwise have made. The government may have to abandon its policy. It will be discouraged from passing future laws along the same lines, for fear of being sued. Record numbers of cases are being brought, as corporations learn from each other, and hedge funds finance suits in return for a share of the takings. The result? Sovereignty and democracy are becoming unaffordable. The process is known as “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS). Hello, foreign oligarchs and corporations! Please come and sue the UK for billions, George Monbiot, 'The Guardian', 1 December 2025

Most of us are unaware of ISDS, and I wonder whether even our politicians know about it and its implications. Maybe they do know, but don't care. Maybe they would care if they knew but, as with most people, are prone to the learned helplessness and demoralisation that afflicts those faced with incomprehensible processes. Perhaps ISDS and similar stratagems are purposely made incomprehensible for that reason. Complexity can be used cynically to deter scrutiny and deflect blame. 

Social Policy Bonds have two essential elements. Injecting market forces into the achievement of our social and environmental goals is one. But perhaps even more important is that the bonds express policy in terms of meaningful, explicit, verifiable outcomes. The ISDS is allowed to override domestic law and the decisions made by parliaments because it has been 'written – without public consent, and often in conditions of extreme secrecy – into trade treaties.' Under a bond regime, people would have incentives to see whether such treaties conform with society's goals, and to veto them if, like the ISDS, they obviously don't. Under the current regime, the only people who understand and participate in the drafting of these treaties are those who are paid to follow the process. Whether the treaties are consistent with society's goals or not has nothing to do with how they are renumerated. 

Expressing policy in terms of outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people would encourage greater public participation in the policymaking process: an end in itself, as well as a likely means to more effective policies. Currently, policy debates focus on institutional structures and funding arrangements; the people who make policy are often chosen on the basis of the campaigning skills of their sponsors; and the policies themselves have only vague ostensible goals, and real goals that can be easily obscured by their  tedium and complexity of policymaking process. The gap between politicians, officials and the wealthy on one side; and ordinary people on the other, grows ever wider. 

Complexity and learned helplessness

When people's wishes clash with vested interests it's the vested interests (aka 'the deep state'; aka the 'elites') that win every time. Our political systems are too complex, arcane or corrupt for ordinary people to stand a chance. One result is obvious: ever-rising income and wealth inequality. Another is learned helplessness. 

Voting makes little difference. And, while we don't really know the intentions of the people in power, I suspect that whoever they are doesn't make much difference. The vested interests are too powerful. They have perpetuated a policymaking process that effectively excludes influence from people outside their exalted circle. They have weaponised the complexity and obscurity of our systems of government for selfish ends.

They can get away with this because our political discourse centres on sound-bites, personality, and image. Actual policymaking is an entirely distinct process: much of it focuses on the structures and funding of government bodies, law and regulation; all of which are opaque to non-professionals - which is to say, ordinary people. The public. The rest of us. The only people who now really understand policymaking are those who are paid to do so, and the only people who influence it are those who have the millions of dollars necessary to pay them.You might even think the system has been specifically designed to keep ordinary citizens out of it. The barriers to entry into the world policymaking are high, and the public is almost totally demoralised.

I suggest that we change this by centering our policymaking discussions on broad outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. Instead of focusing on funding arrangements, institutional structures, legal manouevres and other arcana, our politicians should articulate society's wishes in ways that we can understand and influence. 

Meaningful outcomes: they form one essential element of the Social Policy Bond idea. The other is the injection of market incentives into their achievement: rewarding those who achieve our goals according to their efficiency in actually achieving them. The idea might sound outlandish at first hearing: it would entail that politicians contract out the solution of our social and environmental problems to investors. But, under a bond regime, government would help guide and articulate society's wishes - something that democratic governments are quite good at doing, and government would still raise the revenue for their achievement. Only their achievement would be subject to the market, which economic theory and all the evidence suggest is the most efficient way of allocating society's scarce resources. No doubt the Social Policy Bond idea could do with some discussion and refinement. But the real question is: what is the alternative? To continue as we are doing, where the gap between vested interests and ordinary people grows ever wider, risks, in my view, social collapse.

For more about Social Policy Bonds see the Social Policy Bonds homepage

We're all 'fossil fuel interests'

As expected:

The 30th conference of the parties (Cop30), the annual climate summit of all nations party to the UNFCCC, just ended. Stakeholders are out in the media trying spin the outcome as a win. ... But let us be clear. The conference was a failure. Its outcome, the decision text known as the Global Mutirão or Global Collective Effort, is, in essence, a form of climate denial. Another Cop wrecked by fossil fuel interests and our leaders’ cowardice – but there is another way, Genevieve Guenther, 'The Guardian', 24 November 2025

I don't know why we'd expect anything different. Collectively, we have decided that we'd prefer to spend our limited resources on current needs than on reducing the severity of future problems. The concept of trade-offs is rarely mentioned in this context, but it must be: reducing global greenhouse emissions by enough to show a demonstrable impact on the climate means reducing spending on the education, housing and health of our current population. I say reducing greenhouse gas emissions, since that is the main focus of the COPs. It's not just this one that's failed: 

'Climate activism became a big public cause about halfway along this graph. Notice any effect?'  From Riding the Climate Toboggan, John Michael Greer, 6 September 2024

Over the decades, I've suggested an alternative approach to addressing climate change. The first priority is to be clear whether we are more concerned about the climate or about its adverse impacts on human, animal and plant life. It would target a wide range of physical, biological, ecological, financial and social indicators, all of which would have to fall within a targeted range for a sustained period for it to succeed. People would be rewarded over the many years it would take to achieve this goal of a (relatively) stable climate. The main thrust of the Climate Stability Bond idea is that would supply incentives, continuously, for people to work towards broad, meaningful targets. Current efforts vaguely mention average temperature increases from pre-industrial levels...1.5, say, or 2.0 degrees Celsius; but (1) these are not actionable targets; and (2) nobody has incentives to achieve them. 

Ms Guenther blames 'fossil fuel interests', for COP's failure, rather than the people (that is, the world's population) who currently buy fossil fuels and the services they provide. I would say that with the climate, as with other environmental depredations, we've chosen as a species to optimise our current quality and quantity of human life to the cost of every other species on the planet. The only way out, in my view, is to channel some of our self-interest into improving our environment rather than destroying it. We should start by setting some meaningful, long-term targets and a system that rewards people for achieving them. 

Let policy evolve

One reason why solutions to our social and environmental problems are slow to appear is that we do not let evolution operate:

The defining features of an evolutionary system are variation generation (e.g., a new cell phone design, a new word), inheritance (characteristics are passed on through time), and differential success (some variants do better than others). It doesn’t matter if some new variants were produced with intent, or of there are no gene-like things involved. (My emphasis.) Mark Vellend on Everything Evolves (interview), 11 August 2025

Our current policymaking regimes do not systematically favour the most efficient policies. One reason is that time horizons are too short; in democracies particularly, any gains from implementing effective policies are likely to be way beyond the time horizons of most politicians. Well-meaning public servants will do their best, but they are unlikely to advocate for policies over which their department has no remit. As well, while they would prefer to see their most effective policies adopted, they typically do not benefit financially when that happens. 

Another reason, is that, as Stephen van Evera writes: 'states widely fail to evaluate their own ideas.' Citing Aaron Wildavsky, van Evera writes:

Evaluation promotes innovation and change. This threatens the jobs and status of incumbent members of the organization. Hence incumbents often seek to hamper or prevent evaluation and to punish evaluators. These incumbents tend to dominate the organization's decision making, so evaluation finds itself with stronger enemies than friends within the organization. Hence self-evaluation is often timid and ineffective. 

A Social Policy Bond regime would be different. It would not take existing organisations as given, and it would aim for outcomes that can be achieved only in the long term. (Because they would be tradable, people could benefit by holding the bonds for a short period.) Importantly, bondholders would have the time horizon and incentive to experiment with new approaches, choosing to follow only those that are most promising. For our most urgent national and global challenges, I believe it's essential that we take the long-term view and put in place a regime that encourages diverse policy approaches, and then selects only those that are most promising. 

Ruling the void

Fintan O’Toole, writing in the New York Review of Books, quotes Peter Mair who wrote, in Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (2013):

The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form. The Lingering Delusion, Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, dated 20 November 2025

The reasons for the disconnect have to do with the rise of a self-contained political profession whose participants are expert in just two things: gaining power and retaining it. They might have started out as idealistic, but those who rise to the top rarely do so on merit. Within the pool of potential representatives we make our choices on the basis of their looks, sound-bites, personality, promises, or tribal origins. The consequences - the inability to sustain democracy - are becoming increasingly clear as society becomes more complex and government's role in our lives becomes more significant. 

Much less clear is what to do about it. My suggestion is that we learn to express our long-term social and environmental goals in terms of broad outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. As a way of closing the gap between people and politicians, a political party could give explicit, verifiable goals: for example: by the end of our term in office crime will have fallen by x percent. 

Under a Social Policy Bond regime, we'd agree on a set of broad outcomes, such as universal literacy, improved general health, reduced crime rates or, on a global scale, the elimination of violent political conflict (war and civil war), or catastrophe, whether natural or man-made. Then government, or a consortium of private-sector bodies, would issue bonds that will reward people for solving these problems, however they do so. In short, target outcomes and don't focus too much on the identity or media performance of people who promise to spend taxpayer revenue on our behalf. Rely, instead, on a motivated coalition of bondholders, who will have every incentive to subordinate all their activities to the achievement of society's targeted goals.

I don't think we can look to the political class to change our politics in such a way, except perhaps by giving grants to bodies that have a long-term vision. Our global problems and many of our national problems are too big, though, for  existing bodies to take on. My thinking is that we should look to alternative sources of funding for our long-term social and environmental goals: enlightened, visionary philanthropists come to mind, perhaps supplying initial funding that could attract funds from other sources, including ordinary citizens. Unfortunately I have no entree into the world of such people. 

Deforestation: there's no good news

From the Economist:

Some 67,000km² of virgin rainforest were destroyed last year [ie 2024], an area roughly the size of Ireland and nearly twice as much as was cleared in 2023. A pledge made by world leaders at the COP climate conference in 2021 to halt deforestation by 2030 is nowhere close to being fulfilled: despite fluctuations, the pace of global deforestation is roughly the same as it was at the beginning of the decade. To save the world’s tropical forests, learn from Brazil, the Economist, 23 October 2025

The article tries to be positive: the rate of deforestation was falling before recent wildfires, and Brazil is making more effort to protect indigenous reserves and establish property rights. But the overall picture is undeniably gloomy, much as it is with almost all of humanity's environmental depredations. 

As well as deforestation, with all its attendant dangers, we are facing biodiversity loss, overfishing, water and air pollution, and the impacts of climate change. But we can't expect policymakers, in Brazil or elsewhere, to weigh up all the impacts of our activities and price or regulate them accordingly, and to do so on a continuous basis to ensure that policy keeps up with scientific advances and the growth of our knowledge about ecological relationships.

So I propose a different method. The current system, at its best, reacts to problems when they become politically unavoidable, and then tries to identify and address their causes. My suggestion would be instead to specify acceptable ranges of indicators of environmental health, including human, animal and plant health, and supply incentives for people to ensure that the targeted indicators remain within those ranges for a sustained period. In short, to target broad environmental goals and reward those who achieve them.

My suggested way of doing this at the national level would be for the government to issue Environmental Policy Bonds. These bonds would not bear interest, but would be redeemable once the specified environmental targets had been achieved and sustained. The bonds would be tradeable and, could have a very long-term focus, encouraging people to research, refine and undertake activities directed toward one or all of the targeted goals. In this, and in other ways, they would have several advantages over current policymaking:

• We'd be targeting outcomes, for which there is more consensus than for the means to achieve them.  
•  People can identify more readily with explicit environmental goals than with the means to achieve them, which means that there would be more engagement with the public when developing environmental policy, which in turns means more buy-in, which I consider to be essential. 
• The target outcomes would be stable and have a very long-term focus: essential if we are to encourage new ways of achieving our environmental goals. 

If national governments successfully implemented Environmental Policy Bonds, they could conceivably collectively issue bonds targeting global environmental objectives, encompassing, for example, the health of the seas and atmospheric pollution as well as climate change and biodiversity loss. I have to admit that that looks extremely unlikely, especially as the concept has been in the public arena now for more than thirty years, and only a non-tradeable variant (Social Impact Bonds) has so far been tried. As I explain here and here tradeability is absolutely necessary if we want to achieve broad, long-term goals. Perhaps, rather than wait for government to change the way it does things, we should try to engage with philanthropists. I have tried to do this, but with no success. 

Fraud and incompetence

In a long and readable blog post Dr Malcolm Kendrick summarises his findings:

The point I am trying to make is that the only certain lesson we can learn from Covid-19 is that science, especially medical science, snapped and broke. My current thinking on Covid-19 – and other important issues, Dr Malcolm Kendrick, 7 October 2025

Incompetence is part of the reason; fraud is another. Dr Kendrick quotes Natalie Rhodes:

If you search for scientific research articles with COVID-19 in the title, you’ll see more than 17,000 articles published since the start of 2020, but this vital research is being undermined by weak or even fraudulent research practices. Perhaps the highest profile example so far is the Surgisphere case which saw a small US company seemingly fabricate a database, the data for which was purportedly from the medical records of nearly 100,000 COVID-19 patients treated in 167 hospitals. Was the Surgisphere case a one-off? Or does it highlight the bigger systemic problem of research fraud?, Natalie Rhodes, Transparency International, 8 July 2020

Confirming this, Vince Bielski writes:

After journals published fake papers, however, the paper mills saw the opening and pounced, accounting for nearly half of new submissions. In a corrupt echo of Moore’s Law, a 2024 study concluded that the number of suspected paper mill articles has been doubling every 18 months, “far outpacing that of legitimate science.” Paper Chase: A Global Industry Fuels Scientific Fraud in the US, Vince Bielski, RealClear Investigations, 8 October 2025

In parallel with our economic system that doesn't do much for well-being, our legal systems that no longer deliver justice, our policing that no longer reduces crime (pdf), there are grounds for believing that our global organisations are similarly dysfunctional: the UN bodies aimed at peace and climate accomplish very little. My thinking is that this is because we fail to reward outcomes. We measure success in the world of medical research by looking at the numbers of papers published or citation indices. We measure success in other areas by the resources devoted to organisations and policies that attempt to achieve what we say we want. So we end up with economic growth that devastates the environment while benefiting only the very rich; we focus on greenhouse gas emissions without actually reducing them, still less doing anything to slow the rate of climate change. 

Surrogate indicators in medicine are measurements or signs used as substitutes for direct clinical outcomes that show how a patient feels, functions, or survives; it is always better to target outcomes directly but it is not always possible in medicine. In policy, though, it is what we need to do, otherwise it's too easy, as we see, for organisations to become corrupted, to swerve away from their original, (stated) intent and to focus almost exclusively on their own goals; pre-eminently self-perpetuation. 

A Social Policy Bond regime would start by specifying exactly which outcomes we need to target. These outcomes should be broad and meaningful to ordinary people. They should themselves be, or be inextricably linked to what we want to achieve. In health, then, rather than tout increased spending on health services as an indicator of how sincere we are in wanting to improve society's health, we should be targeting an array of indicators that actually measure health: longevity, infant mortality, quality-adjusted life years etc. (See my long essay here on applying the Social Policy Bond concept to health.) Similarly with climate change, crime and war - about all of which I have written pieces that are freely available via the Social Policy Bonds home page.