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. 

The legibility of complex societies

The late Professor James C Scott wrote: 

Throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability. From the Introduction to Seeing Like a State, May 2020

From the summary of the same book, on the Lies are Unbekoming website:

James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” offers a penetrating analysis of how modern states attempt to make complex societies legible and controllable, often with catastrophic consequences for the people they claim to help. Scott examines the fundamental tension between the state’s need for simplified, standardized information—cadastral maps, census data, permanent surnames, geometric city plans—and the intricate, locally adapted practices that actually sustain human communities. These “state simplifications” are not inherently evil; they enable taxation, public services, and citizenship itself. The danger emerges when states...attempt to impose their simplified maps onto reality, destroying the complex social and ecological relationships that make life possible. Unbekoming, 26 March 2026

All this points to the need for diverse, adaptive approaches, and a policymaking system that encourages them. The legibility that Professor Scott discussed is a self-entrenching way of looking at the world, and it applies at all levels of government. There are many aspects to it, but one is that it takes existing institutions as a given: what they cannot see or do not wish to see, is ignored or regarded as a threat. Government bodies have their own agendas, primarily self perpetuation, and the practical knowledge, informal process and improvisation that Professor Scott mentions do not fit in with them. 

A Social Policy Bond regime would be different. Taking a long-term view, it would target the outcomes that we wish to see and encourage diverse, adaptive approaches to achieving them. Any institutions that would arise from a bond regime would have as their one over-arching goal that of achieving social and environmental goals as quickly and efficiently as possible. In such a way, we'd combine the better aspects of 'state simplifications' with the practical, diverse and adaptive knowledge of the people actually working to achieve society's goals. The best of both worlds. 

Why Social Policy Bonds have gone nowhere

I used to think that Social Policy Bonds, which aim to bring about socially desirable outcomes, would please all policymakers, no matter their ideological bent. The bonds would inject market incentives (pleasing the 'right) into the solution of social and environmental problems (pleasing the 'left'). They'd improve efficiency and stimulate promising innovatory approaches. But - apart from adoption of the non-tradeable version - the concept hasn't taken off. Partly, I think, this is because the bonds are mainly about achieving long-term goals, such as the slashing of crime rates or improved water and air quality, and policymakers do not think that far ahead. Other reasons are:

• Social Policy Bonds would require politicians and bureaucrats to relinquish their powers to allocate funding. The exercise of this power is often an end in itself, but it also allows politicians to channel resources into activities or people that they favour, regardless of their efficiency.   

• Many in power are constrained by their ideology. An idea that combines market incentives and government intervention to solve social problems was, I realise now, never going to appeal to the idealogues.  
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• There's also a particular strain of leftism that disdains anything that smacks of profit, capital gains or financial incentives more generally. It's not always articulated, but it's a sort of subterranean contempt for commerce; a contempt that can survive only in the public sector and its offshoots in broadcasting and academia. Something like Social Policy Bonds, where people can get rich by helping others isn't ideologically pure enough for those who think that way.

There is also the fact that Social Policy Bonds aren't a perfect solution: there could be friction caused by free riding, and there are other criticisms - see here for more. That said, I do think that they are better than current policymaking systems, trapped as they are by their short-term focus and the whims and limitations of those in control. They're also better, in my view, than those ideology-driven programmes that are still occasionally propounded. 

My view now is that government is never going to look into anything as radical and threatening as Social Policy Bonds. The way forward is for those outside government with a long-term perspective and enough in the way of motivation and access to seed funding, to carry the torch. I've tried that approach with those philanthropic organisations that deign to give out email addresses, with little success. 

See also this web page.

Targeting sustained peace

How can humanity reliably target the peace that almost all of us we wish to see? The absence of conflict, expressed in terms of such objective measures as numbers of deaths or serous injuries caused by violence, or people made homeless sounds like a desirable goal. But I think it points to a qualitative difference between short- and long-term goals, and why we must have a policymaking system that targets the latter. 

A short-term peace can be the precursor to a long-lasting peace, but it can also be a period within which opposing sides of a conflict merely pause to catch breath, re-arm and prepare for another bout of hostilities. Current policymaking, in conflict reduction as in many other policy areas, is mostly geared toward the ceasing of current hostilities. There are groups doing heroic work that looks at the longer term (see here and here, for lists of such organisations), but their influence is vastly outweighed by those powerful bodies, in governments and elsewhere, that think only in the short term and for whom conflict is just another tool that they can deploy for in their own interests. As well, organisations working for long-term peace or their employees are rarely financially rewarded for success. 

Which is why I suggest that we issue Conflict Reduction Bonds, or some variant, that would explicitly target peace sustained for at least, say thirty years. The bonds would create a protean coalition of interests, all aiming at long-term peace. Their motivation would come from the increase in the value of their bonds that would result from their successful reduction in the probability of future conflict. Rewards would not only take the form of paying hard-working, dedicated employees more: efficient peace-building bodies would attract more funding and so be able to achieve far more. I've written extensively about Conflict Reduction Bonds and their variants; all my writing is downloadable free of charge via links here. 

 

Emergent properties in war - and peace

Charles Hugh Smith is writing about the models we use to plan war, but I think his argument applies as well to society and the environment: all are too complex to be modeled effectively:

Our models for planning and understanding war are inherently linear because there is no way to project what emergent properties the war will generate, or anticipate all the second-order effects (consequences generate their own consequences) unleashed by these dynamics. What emergent properties describe is the way that complex interactions generate dynamics that have their own separate properties that are different from the initial conditions. We start with systems we think we understand--military forces, logistics, political structures, etc. To manage these complex systems, we distill them into models that enable us to control the systems. But once these complex systems interact, the interactions generate knock-on effects which manifest properties that operate outside the models. Iran, En-Lai, Napoleon, Mike Tyson and Model Collapse, Charles Hugh Smith, 9 March 2026

Policymaking might have been simpler in former times; now the interactions and complexities are too great for the sort of top-down, one-size-fits-all approach that is inevitable when power is centralised. All this points to the need for a system that allows for adaptive approaches to solving our social and environmental problems. Social Policy Bonds could be the solution: they would target broad long-term outcomes, and stimulate approaches that can adapt readily to changing circumstances and to diverse circumstances of different regions or populations. Unfortunately, any initiative to introduce a bond regime or something like it would be hobbled by the interests of existing institutions, whose entire raison d'etre would be threatened by a policymaking system that subordinates institutional structures and funding to desirable social goals. Current policies and are dictated by the private- and public-sector bodies we already have; it should be the other way round. See here for how a Social Policy Bond regime could bring about such a reversal. 

Betting on outcomes

The current controversy over prediction markets reminds me of how the idea of Social Policy Bonds originated. If you hope for a particular outcome and put a sufficiently large bet on it, then at some point it would be in your interests to make that outcome happen. Applying that to desirable social and environmental goals, and of course restricting any goal-achieving activities to those that are legal, is the underlying principle of the bond concept. Perhaps one way forward for, say, environmental groups is collectively to bet on something verifiable, and something that a counterparty thinks unlikely, such as a less-than-consensus projection of the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in five years. They could then strive to achieve that goal, using their own funds and the possibility of that payoff as collateral for projects that will cut greenhouse gas emissions. In principle it could work. In practice, since most of our important social and environmental goals are long term in nature, it could be helpful only if there were a secondary market for the bet. If there were, then as with Social Policy Bonds, people could trade in and out, without having to wait till the goal is achieved before they can realise a gain: they'd make a profit if the market sees quick attainment of the goal as more likely. 

Without a secondary market, prediction markets would be as limited, and for the same reason as Social Impact Bonds, which aren't tradeable. I've written about the need for tradeability here and here. Essentially, it greatly expands the time-frames of the goals we can target, and allows for research, experimentation and channeling resources into only the most promising projects. For our most challenging goals, we need these activities, and they can take years.