$3768 per second

There can't be many people who'd like to see a nuclear conflict but, with expenditures like this, it's increasingly likely that we'll see one:

In 2025, the nine nuclear-armed states spent just under $119 billion, or $3,768 per second, on their nuclear arsenals. [T]he combined spending of the nuclear armed states – China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, UK and US increased 19% from the previous year....Premeditated: 2025 global nuclear weapons spending, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), June 2026   

In 2025, at least 25 companies working on nuclear weapons development and maintenance held significant contracts for their work. These companies earned at least $38 billion in the year for nuclear weapons related activities and hold at least $394 billion in outstanding contracts. In 2025, new contracts worth around $2.5 billion were awarded to these companies. The companies identified in this report paid lobbyists in France and the United States more than $138 million to represent their interests last year. 2025 Nuclear Weapons Spending Reaches $119 billion, ICAN, June 2026

These sums represent a massive failure on the part of our species. A big part of the problem is that there's no obvious way in which ordinary people - the part of humanity that hopes nuclear weapons will never be used - can channel our wishes into opposing their continued development and deployment. There are bodies, such as ICAN, dedicated to campaigning for the abolition of nuclear weapons, but their resources are pitiful in comparison to the sums wielded by the companies working to develop them. The financial rewards to those companies, and the incentives to acquire them, vastly outweigh organised opposition to t heir deployment and use. Incentives are crucial and we need to offer meaningful and effective incentives for people to do everything they can to deter the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons.     

What I propose is that we offer incentives for people to explore more ways of reducing the likelihood of nuclear conflict as efficiently as possible. I suggest that we put in place a system that encourages and rewards people for researching, refining and implementing the most promising activities that would ensure sustained nuclear peace. 

Nuclear Peace Bonds would be an ideal application of the Social Policy Bond concept, which is a way of rewarding the more efficient achievement social and environmental outcomes. In this instance, the targeted outcome could be nuclear peace sustained for thirty years. 'Nuclear peace' could be defined as something like 'the detonation of a nuclear device that directly kills more than 50 people' (with added provisos about any electromagnetic pulse effects). The bonds would reward those who achieve such a sustained period of nuclear peace, whoever they are and however they do so: only the outcome would be stipulated. For a short piece on how Nuclear Peace Bonds would work, please click here. For essays about applying the bonds to conflict in general, click here.

As well as pursuing activities the exact nature of which we cannot anticipate, investors in Nuclear Peace Bonds could do things that cannot be done by existing organisations, constrained as they are by precedent, and their perceived need to maintain their existence and so satisfy the bodies that fund them. So, for example, in today's world, nobody would have any incentive to bribe people close to decision makers in politics or the military to advocate nuclear disarmament. Likewise, an existing body is unlikely to try to get religious extremists to tone down their rhetoric, even if it believed that were the most efficient way of reducing the probability of nuclear conflict. The risk and consequences of exposure and backlash are too great for current institutions to bear. Holders of Nuclear Peace Bonds, however, would not be deterred from whatever actions they think most effective: funds to redeem their bonds could be held in escrow. Once nuclear peace had been achieved and sustained, their reward would be guaranteed. Nuclear Peace Bonds could run in parallel with existing efforts. Indeed, it's likely to channel more resources into those existing bodies whose activities are most promising. It would also encourage new approaches, the precise nature of which we cannot and need not know in advance.

A Nuclear Peace Bond regime would reward those who achieve peace, whoever they are and however they do so. It’s an admittedly novel approach, but the relevant question is 'what is the alternative?'. The Doomsday Clock is currently at 85 seconds to midnight....

Outcomes and accountability

George Monbiot writes about the UK:

Our entire political system is premised on the idea of accountability. Brilliant theory: just a shame it bears no relation to reality. Nothing sums up the death of accountability like the prospect of Nigel Farage in No10, 'the Guardian', 20 May 2026

Under the current system, people rarely monitor the distance between what politicians say and what they do. Even less frequently do we identify links between what they say and what actually happens. This is not just because of short attentions spans; it's also because society is far too complex for such relationships to be obvious. Things might have been different in the past, when there were fewer variables, fewer people, and time lags between a politician's statement and its consequences were shorter. Then, choosing between electoral candidates would have felt more meaningful, and politicians could be held more accountable. We became used to the idea of framing policy goals in terms of the ideas and personalities of the people who enunciated them. But those days are over, and people are now far more cynical not only about politicians, but about elections and democracy itself. 

To change this, I suggest that we frame policy in terms of broad outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people, rather than, as now, funding arrangements, institutional structures and legalisms. So, instead of politicians focusing on where society's scarce resources should go, they would instead concentrate on things that, in democratic countries, they are actually good at: articulating society's wishes and raising the revenue for their achievement. Under a Social Policy Bond regime, investors in the bonds who would decide how our goals would be best achieved. They would be constantly motivated to find the most efficient ways of doing so. The bonds, being tradable, could target long-term goals, so that holders need not hold them to redemption to benefit from any increase in value that would arise from their working to make the goals' being achieved more quickly. The bonds would channel the market's incentives and efficiencies into solving our social and environmental problems. By focusing on broad, meaningful outcomes, our policymaking would be more transparent and bring about more public engagement in the process. There'd be more buy-in, less blaming and less cynicism. The role of politicians would change; they'd be more concerned with society's wishes, and less with power: they'd have effectively contracted out the achievement of social goals to bodies beyond their control. As well as the greater efficiency with which our goals would be achieved, the people attracted to politics would be less driven by the possibility of exercising power while overseeing process, and more by representing the informed views of their constituents as to the social and environmental outcomes they wish to see. 

Complexity

James C Scott writes:  

[T]he very strength of scientific agricultural experimentation— its simplifying assumptions and its ability to isolate the impact of a single variable on total production—is incapable of dealing adequately with certain forms of complexity. It tends to ignore, or discount, agricultural practices that are not assimilable to its techniques. James C Scott, Seeing Like a State, (Chapter 8), 1998

As in agriculture, so with society and the environment. Society is too complex for simplistic goals, such as maximising food production, necessarily to improve net societal well-being. We'd do better to target the outcomes we wish to see, rather than the supposed means of getting there. In a Social Policy Bond regime, we might ignore 'agricultural policy' (notoriously inefficient and corrupt) and explicitly target broader goals as the physical health of the population. Subsidising farmers might be one way of getting there, but it would be up to bondholders to work out whether there are more efficient ways of achieving that goal. (There probably are.) Societal complexity has risen hugely since relatively simple goals and policies could adequately anticipate all its variables and time lags, and their effects on well-being. 

Social Policy Bonds would target the outcomes we wish to see, rather than the alleged means of reaching them. As well as efficiency and transparency about what government is trying to achieve, other advantages of a bond regime would arise from its ability to target long-term goals, and so encourage research, experimentation and refinement of a diverse and adaptive array of approaches to solutions to our social and environmental problems. Though the concept has been in the public arena for decades, it  hasn't advanced very far. I think this is partly because the left doesn't like anything to do with markets and elements of the right doesn't want to think in terms of government intervention of any sort (though a bond regime would shrink the role of politicians). Most institutions of any sort, public- or private-sector, are mainly concerned with self-perpetuation, and would fell threatened by Social Policy Bonds, which would prioritise efficiency most of all.  

Misaligned incentives

Tadeusz Patzek writes: 

Humans did not unknowingly create climate breakdown; they proceeded with eyes open, repeatedly prioritizing immediate growth over long-term habitability. The subsequent failure to restrain fossil-fuel use was therefore not a failure of science, measurement, or foresight; it was a failure of political economy. Decision-makers understood that the benefits of fossil-fuel expansion were immediate, concentrated, and readily monetized, while the damages were delayed, diffuse, probabilistic, and politically externalizable, and that institutional power flowed toward those who maximized short-term growth. Thermal Power and Climate Change: A Data-Driven Analysis of Cause and Effect, 1800-2100, Tadeusz W Patzek, February 2026 (This is a preprint available for free download from here. My ellipses indicate citations.)

The last sentence sums up much of the human predicament. Most of us, including policymakers, are offered incentives that reward short-term thinking. There are few financial incentives that would reward such crucial goals such as the survival of humanity. Too much human ingenuity is channelled into activities that, given the urgency of our challenges, are trivial or worse. 

Social Policy Bonds are an attempt to re-orientate the incentives, to encourage solutions to our urgent, long-term problems. They aim to inject the market's incentives and efficiencies into the achievement of such outcomes as disaster prevention, conflict reduction, nuclear peace or climate stability. Historically, at the national level, such outcomes have been neglected, or have been the subject of ad hoc arrangements. At the global level, the resources available to the dedicated staff of NGOs working for peace, for example, are orders of magnitude lower than those that would adequately reflect the diffuse wishes of humanity. A bond regime would divert funds into the most efficient of these organisations, allowing them not just to raise the salaries of their employees, but to attract more expertise and more resources. 

Foreign billionaires: the real beneficiaries of agricultural policy

Government's involvement in agriculture in the rich countries has a long history. Its subsidies, originally well intentioned and (to some extent) rational, have created powerful interests that resist change. They've led to farming at an intensity that degrades the soil, water, and animal welfare. One of their - stated - aims was to preserve the family farm, which they haven't done. They are capitalised into farmland values, making entry into agriculture almost impossible for those who don't inherit. They raise food prices, while barriers to food imports stifle the prospects of food-rich developing countries and transfer money from taxpayers and consumers to the wealthy: 

UAE’s ruling royal family benefits from more than €71m in EU farming subsidies

The United Arab Emirates’ ruling royal family is benefiting from tens of millions in EU subsidies to grow crops destined for the Gulf, it can be revealed. A cross-border investigation by DeSmog and shared with the Guardian found subsidiaries controlled by the Al Nahyans collected more than €71m (£61m) in six years for farmland it controls in Romania, Italy and Spain. The Al Nahyan family is the second richest in the world, with an estimated wealth of more than $320bn (£235bn), mostly derived from the Emirates’ vast oil reserves. Subsidies under the common agricultural policy (Cap) make up a third of the EU’s entire budget, paying out about €54bn each year to farmers and rural areas across the bloc. UAE’s ruling royal family benefits from more than €71m in EU farming subsidies, Clare Carlile, 'The Guardian', 7 May 2026

These subsidies have been widely challenged for decades (I wrote about them in 2001), but still they continue....

All of which points to the need to be very clear about what are the actual intentions of government policy. If, for instance, it's to achieve self-sufficiency in food production, then we need to look beyond outputs to inputs - especially oil. If it's to help smaller farmers, then target the incomes of small farmers, rather than subsidise land ownership. If it's to raise the cost of food so as enrich billionaires, then come clean and tell us that that is your intention. 

A Social Policy Bond regime would oblige policymakers to be clear about the outcomes they wish to see. This should be a starting point for all policies, in contrast to today, where stated intentions are vague, incoherent, uncosted and deceptive. Politicians can get away with such obfuscation because we are used to policies being framed in terms of funding arrangements, legalisms and institutional structures. The connections between what politicians say, what they do, and outcomes are too obscure to be identified. A bond regime, though, would have explicit, verifiable goals, which the public could help prioritise and with which ordinary citizens could engage - necessary to generate buy-in to policies that invariably create losers as well as winners. Transparency, efficiency and buy-in are just some of the advantages of a Social Policy Bond regime, about which there is much more on SocialGoals.com. 

Aim for nuclear peace first

PANews reports: 

In April 2026, a hair dryer was used to heat a meteorological sensor at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, causing abnormal temperature spikes. The attacker exploited rule vulnerabilities in Polymarket's prediction market, winning $34,000 in prizes. Polymarket relies on a single data source and does not revise data after settlement, making physical intervention possible. After the incident was exposed, Polymarket quietly changed the data source without publicly acknowledging the vulnerability. This is known as a 'physical oracle attack,' with low cost but high returns. A hair dryer "blew" $34,000 away from Polymarket, PANews, 23 April 2026

Campbell's Law states that as soon as you use a specific number to judge people's success, people will start "gaming the system" to make that number look good, even if it ruins the actual quality of the work. The hairdryer is a relatively trivial example; a more serious one is 'teaching to the test'. It's a problem that afflicts current policymakers and could, potentially, derail a Social Policy Bond regime, which depends entirely on the definition and targeting of quantitative variables. A solution would be to target goals that are, or are inextricably lined to, what we actually want to achieve. This could be made to work well for bonds that target broad goals at a highly aggregated level and in the long term. Take literacy: if we want to see improvements in the literacy of, say, 7-year old children in a country over the next decade, we could sample children of that age over a wide area, waiting until the end of the decade to take the sample. Nobody would know in advance the identity of those children, so only a genuine improvement in the national literacy level of 7-year olds would signify that the goal had been achieved. 

A current preoccupation of mine is the urgent need for conflict reduction. Coming up with a range of indicators that we could target for world peace, or even regional (such as the Middle East) peace could be done: I envisage an array of indicators, including: numbers of people killed directly by conflict; people seriously maimed; people made homeless; expenditure on weaponry; numbers in armed forces; numbers of schoolbooks inciting hatred; and many others. All these indicators could be debated, then rigorously defined for targeting purposes. This would take time, but would be worth doing, given the payoffs that we would target, such as peace in the world (or region) sustained for at least thirty years. But simpler, and only slightly less ambitious, would be to target nuclear peace: detection of a nuclear explosion is a relatively simple matter: from Wikipedia:

There are many different ways to detect a nuclear detonation, these include seismic, hydroacoustic, and infrasound detection, air sampling, and satellites. They have their own weaknesses and strengths, as well as different utilities. Each has been used separately, but at present the best results occur when data is used in tandem, since the energy caused by an explosion will transfer over to different mediums. Source

I've written about Nuclear Peace Bonds here. I'd hope that, once nuclear peace were targeted, we could then begin the more arduous work on defining exactly what we'd want World Peace Bonds or, say, Middle East Peace Bonds to target. 

Documenting conflict isn't helping

Author and Middle East correspondent, Charles Glass, writes about the current conflict in Lebanon:  

I hear and sometimes see this war, but I’m not covering it. What good would it do? You, dear reader, don’t give a damn. Nor do the Israeli invaders, their American enablers or Hizbullah’s aspiring martyrs. ...Would anything I write compel the arms dealers and ultra-high-tech digital warfare providers to deprive their managers and shareholders of the profits accruing from their wizard new methods of taking human life? Like the rest of Lebanon, I wake in the night at the sound of every loud bang, unsure whether it is thunder, an Israeli naval shell, a drone explosion or a jet dropping a two-thousand-pound bomb to destroy an entire city block. Diary: Beirut, now and then, Charles Glass, 'London Review of Books', 23 April 2026

It's a sad fact that writing about conflicts, and even showing gruesome videos, does little to stop them. Such documentation cannot oppose the formidable coalition of 'warfare providers' on the other side: the arms merchants, the ideologues, the religious zealots and all their corrupt or gullible hangers-on. Most of us don't want any of that. But the politicians' relentless focus on the short term means that ceasefires and truces are merely pauses in the action that allow parties to stoke resentments and re-arm. A lasting peace is more likely to be a just peace, and we need to create a constituency that is rewarded for achieving it. 

World Peace Bonds, or a variant of more modest focus, could be the solution. They would reward a sustained absence of conflict: I suggest a minimum period of thirty years. This long-term focus would encourage investors in the bonds to research, experiment and refine approaches to ending conflict. Such activities would probably include sparing the next generation the neuroses and resentments of their parents - something that good people are doing nowadays (see here, for example), but with a pitifully limited  command of resources. A bond regime would channel funding and expertise into the most promising of these activities. If financed by philanthropists, with contributions from NGOs and the public, it could bypass politicians whose narrow short-termism does much to keep conflict going. 

World peace is an ambitious goal, about which I have written here, with my book on the subject available here (downloads are free of charge). More modest goals about which I have also written include Middle East Peace Bonds and Nuclear Peace Bonds. 

Processism

Stephen Bush writes about Sir Keir Starmer, the UK Prime Minister: 

Instead Starmer believes that the combination of the right process and hard work is enough to solve more or less any problem, and that mobilising the right amount of institutional memory will result in a better standard of government. This, then, is Starmerism: the belief that process can, in and of itself, lead to better outcomes. The trouble is that this approach is wrong...[t]he job of prime minister isn't to follow process; it is to navigate and advocate for trade-offs. The Mandelson fiasco reveals true nature of Starmerism, Stephen Bush, 'Financial Times', 21 April 2026

In today's policymaking world, the notion of tradeoffs is largely absent from debate. It's a world in which vague promises can be made and nobody dare publicly identify the people who will inevitably lose out from any particular policy. There's no long-term strategy: faith in the legislative process is what passes for strategy and vision. Government bodies, politicians and their paymasters in the large corporations - or their lawyers - are the only people who can understand, follow and manipulate the policymaking process, which they do to their advantage. 

A Social Policy Bond regime would be different: policy would be expressed in terms of long-term outcomes rather than process. This would bring more public participation into the policymaking process - an end in itself as well as generating more of the buy-in that is essential when policy goals have to be prioritised and costed. Goals would be explicit and stable and achieved with maximum efficiency. Discussion would centre on what vision and strategy, rather than process. 

For more about Social Policy Bonds, see here. 

Focusing on health outcomes

 Dr Vernon Coleman compares healthcare in the UK today to how it used to be in the 1970s:

The main single advance in medicine [in the 20th century] has been the (accidental) discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics. The discoveries of insulin, steroid hormones and a few other pharmaceutical products made a difference. But most of the essential and useful discoveries were made in the first half of the twentieth century. Since then the pharmaceutical industry has produced very little of consequence. Vaccines have been incredibly profitable for drug companies and a disaster for patients. There has been no heart drug as effective as digitalis (from the foxglove) and no pain killers as useful or as safe as aspirin (from the willow tree) and morphine (from the opium poppy). 

On the other hand the practice and management of health care has become incredibly complex, bureaucratic and expensive and patients are provided with much poorer care than their parents, their grandparents and their great grandparents. In the UK, the National Health Service has far too much money but most of it is wasted on administration, meetings, paperwork and pointless regulations. Trade unions and disciplinary bodies seem to me to be little more than outposts of the drug industry and seem to serve their interests rather than the interests of patients. Why doctors now do more harm than good, Dr Vernon Coleman, 18 April 2026

Given the widespread distrust of pharmaceutical companies, it would seem that this is the time to move towards rewarding those who achieve favourable health outcomes, rather than those who merely engage in activities purporting to deliver those outcomes. Those currently employed in healthcare are reacting rationally to the incentives on offer, to the detriment of our physical and mental health. And those incentives encourage over-screening and over-treatment, and the neglect of commercially nonnviable preventive interventions. It's the same, or worse, in the US:

The system is deemed broken, consuming 17% of GDP yet ranking last among high-income nations in life expectancy, maternal mortality, and preventable deaths, with 26 million uninsured and 43 million underinsured. Employer costs rose 160% in 20 years, driving wage stagnation and ER overuse; premiums for Obamacare and employer plans are surging in 2026 amid subsidy expirations. Shortages loom for providers, especially in rural areas, amid corporatized care and underfunded public health. US healthcare system is in crisis, James K Elsey 5 February 2025

It's time for a new approach. My suggestion is that, rather than policymakers' focusing on the means by which they think good health can be achieved, they instead focus on targets for good physical and mental health, and provide incentives for people to achieve those targets. The Social Policy Bond concept, applied to health, would do this, and more: it would inject the market's incentives and efficiencies into all the processes necessary to improve a nation's health. Health Bonds would channel our scarce resources into the most efficient means of improving our health, including those currently neglected or not even considered by our current healthcare bodies, most of which have little incentive or capacity to consider broad health outcomes that fall outside their increasingly specialised remit.

Health Bonds wouldn't stipulate how our health goals shall be achieved, nor who shall achieve them. This allows a broader approach. For example: our current compartmentalised accountancy-driven policy approach would not take into consideration the adverse health impacts of subsidising advanced driving courses for young owners of motorbikes or cars. But holders of Health Bonds would look at such measures, investigate their possible health impacts, and make an informed decision as to how any improvement they might bring to the nation's health compares to other possible interventions.

Nuclear peace; not much else matters

It's difficult to write about social problems when war looms so large, especially the possibility of nuclear conflict. Even global environmental concerns like climate change, or the destruction of fishing grounds, would fade into the background if the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons were ever to be broken. I've written copiously about the sustained nuclear peace, urged the issuing of Nuclear Peace Bonds to achieve it, mainly because the need for it is so great, but also because it would make an ideal target for a Social Policy Bond regime: 

• Existing policies don't appear to be doing anything to reduce the likelihood of a nuclear conflict;
• Nuclear peace sustained for at least 30 years is the sort of long-term goal that will require a lot of groundwork with many different approaches that will need winnowing out to find the most promising;
• Verifying whether the goal has been achieved would be easy; 
• The range of possible approaches is big, and there are complexities and feedback loops that make conventional policymaking, limited as it is by the imaginations and time horizons of its practitioners, useless; diverse, adaptive approaches are needed; and 
• There are few financial incentives to those people or organisations trying, or pretending to be trying, to achieve nuclear peace. 

The last of these requires some explanation: financial incentives are not solely about making the people who work for nuclear peace better off (which is not in itself an ignoble outcome), but also about attracting resources into what is currently a policy goal as unglamorous as it is urgent and necessary. With more funding, organisations working to achieve nuclear peace could employ more people and more resources, giving them a better chance of advancing the goal. 

All my work on Nuclear Peace Bonds and, more broadly, conflict reduction, can be found via this page. It is all available free of charge, including the text of my book on World Peace Bonds, though printed copies can also be purchased.