Everything is backwards...

 A quote attributed to Michael Ellner: 

Just look at us. Everything is backwards, everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, major media destroys information, religions destroy spirituality and governments destroy freedom. Michael Ellner

It's not true in every case, and it's not inevitable, but there's enough truth in it to be disturbing. And, while there are many idealistic doctors and lawyers, the majority become fully invested in their career and dependent on the goodwill of their governing body. And these bodies have, as their overarching goal, self-perpetuation, whatever their original ideals. All their ideals, activities, memberships and rules are subordinate to that goal.

Which is why I believe we should make policy as if these institutions do not exist. Under a Social Policy Bond regime, policy would be expressed in terms of verifiable, transparent outcomes, and any institutions that come into being as a result would have, as their sole focus, the efficient achievement of these outcomes. Such a regime would be ideal for those social and environmental goals for which:

• current policy is failing,
• a long-term view is essential,
• no obvious solutions exist, and
• a range of diverse, adaptive approaches is likely to be essential.

Sadly, there are many big, urgent challenges that satisfy all those criteria. For example, I've written about applying the Social Policy Bond concept to nuclear peace, climate change, and health. These policy areas would all benefit by, first, clarifying exactly what we want to achieve; most likely a set of subsidiary objectives all of which would have to be met before the targeted outcome would be deemed achieved. Second, by channelling the market's efficiencies and incentives into that achievement. What would happen then? With a guaranteed payout on success, investors would compete to bid for the bonds; collude, tacitly or otherwise, to bring about speedy achievement of the goal. This would entail research, experimentation and refinement of a range of possible approaches toward solving the targeted problem, with only the most promising of these approaches being pursued. A mosaic of diverse and adaptive approaches would be the most likely result. I believe a new sort of organisation would arise: again, it might not be a formal body, but its structure and composition, and all its co-ordinating activities would be entirely subordinate to achieving the targeted social or environmental goal. Thus, there would be an inextricable link between the objective of the organisation and society's targeted goal. 

'The ticks are winning': we need to focus on health outcomes

Jonathan Mingle and Sean Rameswaram discuss the tick problem in the US:  

Are we not fighting back against the ticks?

Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we’re barely even trying. One way of understanding that is to think about two numbers. One number is 90 percent. 90 percent of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks.

90 percent?

Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90 percent of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city and county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80 percent of what they do is mosquito control, and only about 10 or 11 percent of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control. So why is that? It’s a familiar story in the public health world. It’s not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, and deploying new approaches to controlling ticks. The ticks are winning, Danielle Hewitt and Sean Rameswaram, 'Mother Jones', 1 August 2026

...Or a lack of incentives. This kind of mismatch between the a problem and the incentives devoted to solving it bedevils all policymaking in areas where existing institutions have no incentive to explore new approaches. It's rife in the field of health policy, where those in the profession have little incentive or capacity to think beyond their speciality, and so advise policymakers accordingly. 

Given the widespread, and justifiable, 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 are to keep funding existing bodies and their approaches; as well, they encourage over-screening and over-diagnosis. 

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, regardless of the vested interests of the current service providers. A short piece on Health Bonds can be found here, and a much longer version, describing Tradeable Health Outcome Bonds is here. A bond regime 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. 

Health Bonds wouldn't stipulate how our health goals shall be achieved, nor who shall achieve them. This allows a broader approach. For example: if ticks are agreed to be a much bigger threat to health than mosquitos, then a bond regime would channel more resources into dealing with ticks rather than mosquitos. More broadly, our current narrow, short-term compartmentalised policy approach would not look into the positive health impacts of subsidising advanced courses for young drivers 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 whether any improvement they might bring to a population's health is worthwhile, compared to other possible interventions. 

Policymakers in general take the existing institutions, with their limited purview, as a given. An outcome-based approach, such as I envisage in a Social Policy Bond regime, would subordinate the composition, structures and all activities of institutions to the outcomes that policymakers target. For more on the new sorts of organisation that this approach would generate, please see here. 

Social Policy Bonds and price signalling

 One of the less obvious benefits of a Social Policy Bond regime arises from the price signalling of the market for the bonds. At flotation, the bonds would be auctioned, and difference between the sums raised at flotation and the total redemption value of the bonds would supply the market's best estimate of the cost of achieving the targeted goal at that time. This estimate would vary over time, depending on many factors including bondholders' performance in undertaking or financing goal-achieving projects. The market for Social Policy Bonds, then, as with all markets, plays a vital role not only in allocating resources but also in signalling to the bonds' backers the approximate costs of achieving social goals. The bonds' backers, that is, those who put up the funds for redeeming the bonds, could be in the public or private sectors: either way, this information is of great value. 

A competitive market for Social Policy Bonds would minimise the total cost of achieving a specified objective, as well as signalling it. More subtly, and more technically, it would also indicate the marginal cost of achieving further improvements. Say one million Crime Reduction Bonds issued by a local authority were to sell for $5 each. This would tell the issuing body that the present value of the expected maximum cost, including bondholders’ profits, of reducing the crime level from, say 50 to 40 units, would be $5 million. The local authority might then suppose that it could afford to be more ambitious, and aim for a further fall to 30 units. It could issue a million additional bonds redeemable when this new lower rate were reached. These would (probably) have an initial market value of less than $5, reflecting the (probably) diminishing returns involved in preventing crime. The point is that, by letting the market do the pricing of the bonds, the local authority would be getting an informed view of the marginal cost of its objectives. So if the bonds targeting the new level of 30 units were to sell for $4 each, then the maximum cost of achieving that objective would be $11 million, being equal to: $5 million (paid out when the level fell from 50 to 40 units) plus $6 million (paid out when the level fell from 40 to 30 units). The marginal cost of a 10-unit drop in crime would thus have been revealed to have risen from $5 million to $6 million. Should the local authority aim for a further fall to 20 units? Following such crime rate-targeting bond issues it would have robust information about the cost of doing so.

This is, of course, a simplified example and in fact the bond market would continuously update its pricing information. Say that new research, of the sort that might be stimulated by an initial bond issue targeting crime, suggested new ways of reforming or deterring criminals. Bondholders may, for example, have financed successful research into more effective reform programmes, or set up more appealing alternative lifestyles for especially hardened criminals. How would the market react to such developments? Once their effectiveness had been revealed, the value of all the bonds would rise. Instead of being priced at $5 and $4, the two crime reduction issues of the example might sell for $8 and $7. The total cost to the government of redeeming these bonds would not change: it would remain at $11 million (though redemption would most probably occur earlier). But the market would be generating new information as to the likely cost of future reductions in the crime rate. The market would now be expecting reductions of 10 units of crime to cost $2 million (from 50 to 40 units), and $3 million (from 40 to 30 units). The new research would have reduced the costs from $5 million and $6 million (respectively). So the cost of any further crime reductions would also fall, and by following market price movements policymakers could gauge approximately by how much. 

These figures are hypothetical, but they do indicate the role that markets for Social Policy Bonds could play in helping the government, and taxpayers, decide on their spending priorities. The market for the bonds is elegantly efficient in conveying information about the cost of achieving objectives and, crucially for policymakers, how this cost varies with time and circumstances. I discuss this in Chapter 5 of my book.

The system is corrupt

Two excerpts from recent readings:

In the Rostov region, in southern Russia, the owner of several stalls that sell local produce says she dreams of having her own fuel tanker. “They can all go to hell with their ideas and grand ambitions,” she says. “They” include Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, Emmanuel Macron and local governors. “We used to live just fine. Now all you do is scramble from one problem to the next.” Russians are growing anxious and angry, 'Economist', 8 July 2026

The SNP [Scottish National Party] has been winning by default for years now. Everyone knows the party is exhausted and out of ideas, but people keep voting for it for want of anything better. And, like Labour when it ruled Scotland, it never tries anything new. Why bother? The day before [Peter] Murrell’s sentencing, the party’s eight remaining Westminster MPs backed a presentation bill aimed at devolving independence referendum powers to Holyrood. These bills are highly unlikely to be passed. A futile gesture. Business as usual. Stealing from the SNP, Dani Garavelli, 'London Review of Books', 9 July 2026

The real political divide, I think, is not so much between left and right, or government and opposition, but between politicians and ordinary people. There are probably convincing psychoanalytical explanations for why those who pursue and attain power lose sight of whatever ideals they might have had, but more important is what we can do to close the gap between those with power and the people they are supposed to represent. Part of the reason for this gap is that we live in systems under which politicians can avoid being accountable for outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. Instead they make vague, unverifiable promises, and their debates centre around funding arrangements, institutional structures, and legalisms. 

My thinking is that we need to re-orientate policy discussions and express policy goals in terms of long-term meaningful outcomes such as reduced crime rates, improvements in literacy, health and the environment. Ideally, too, we'd devise a way of channeling the market's incentives and efficiencies into the achievement of these outcomes, and my suggestion is that we transition to a Social Policy Bond regime. This could be done gradually, Take health, for example. In the UK, central government provides funding for regional health authorities (for spending on doctors, hospitals and prescriptions) according mainly to
population level, age and need. Government also supplies funds directly to medical research organizations and academic institutions. A transition to a Social Policy Bond-based, rather than institution- or activity- based, funding programme would see the direct funding government gradually decline, while expenditure allocated by bondholders to the outcomes that all these institutions are collectively trying to achieve — longer life spans and a better quality of life, say — would gradually rise. Bondholders would face continuous incentives to make sure their funds are allocated only to those institutions with the most promising approaches to improving people's health. Those institutions could be already existing or new, public- or private-sector. There is more on how this sort of gradual transition can be achieved in Chapter 4 of my book, and more about applying the Social Policy Bond principle to health in the links on this page.

Someone understands the Social Policy Bond principle!

Kylie Mohr writes: 

As prediction markets boom and a new wildfire season begins, fire survivors and ethicists say that the betting encourages and rewards callous thinking — and dangerous behavior, too. One major concern stemming from wildfire prediction markets is arson. ...Theoretically, making a bet could give someone the perverse incentive to start a fire, or help one grow. Unlike other disasters, such as hurricanes, flooding or extreme heat, a fire can be manipulated in minutes by just one person. “Systems that tie financial gain to wildfire outcomes risk encouraging misuse, including arson, and are not compatible with our mission,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service said. Will betting on wildfires lead to arson?, Kylie Mohr, 29 June 2026

This is how Social Policy Bonds were conceived: define an uncertain future event and allow people to bet on whether it will occur or not. If enough people bet enough money, they will have an incentive to co-operate to make that event happen. Simple. Social Policy Bonds would target desirable social and environmental goals. Though some bondholders would be mere speculators, others would be motivated by the prospect of potential increases in the value of their bonds, to help achieve the targeted goal. The aim is to channel people's self-interest - their wish to win a bet - into improving society's well-being. Targeted goals have to be chosen carefully. A bond regime would show the most marked improvement over conventional policy when: goals are long term; when current policy is failing; and when diverse, adaptive approaches will be necessary. I've written about applying them to goals that fulfil all these criteria: including eliminating conflict, reducing crime, unemployment or climate change. Each goal must ideally be objectively verifiable. Though the non-tradeable variant of my idea is currently being implemented in about 25 countries, the original conception has yet to be tried. One possibility could be target for reduction the area of land lost to wildfire in, say, the United States, in one year....

Small wars and nuclear peace

The Economist writes about great power equilibrium: 

But for a balance of power to bring a new order it must do more than satisfy the two main actors. It must also bring stability to others or be flexible enough to encompass change. It must offer something of what Britain brought to 19th-century Europe through policies which sought to preserve the status quo by ensuring no country could dominate. Wars still happened, but their goal, as Henry Kissinger put it, was equilibrium, not total conquest. Unfortunately, as Dr [Francis] Fukuyama points out, using small wars to recalibrate the balance of power in a world studded with nuclear weapons will court catastrophe. How such a system could function is a mystery. America's wrecking-ball revolution, the 'Economist', 2 July 2026

Right; and small wars aren't going to stop happening any time soon. Does anybody seriously believe that there are there are systems in place that will effectively stop them becoming nuclear if one or other of the protagonists have the means to use them? We've been lucky, so far. The number of warheads has fallen from about 70000 since the Cold War, but there are now nine countries in possession of 12187 warheads, and those numbers are likely to increase. 

Consider the incentives on offer to those in power today: if they possess nuclear weapons they can initiate a conflict knowing that they can dictate its course by threatening, implicitly or otherwise, to deploy them. If the target of their aggression doesn't possess nuclear weapons or if the target cares more about its civilian population than the aggressor, then at some point our luck is likely to run out. It might be today, it might be in a few years, but the number of countries with nuclear weapons continues to proliferate and we should not have to rely on those in power to continue to exercise restraint at all times. The taboo against threatening use of nuclear weapons has been broken. It now appears inevitable that, before long, the taboo against their use will also be broken. Our political systems reward those most adept at acquiring power. Threatening the use of nuclear weapons is one way in which a regime can hold on to that power.

What can ordinary people - those of us who are content not to have the power to kill millions of human beings - do, faced with the realistic possibility that the nuclear taboo will be violated some time soon? My suggestion is that we issue Nuclear Peace Bonds. These bonds would be redeemable for a fixed sum only when a targeted array of indicators of peace had been achieved and sustained for a period of at least thirty years. They would reward those who do most to reduce the likelihood of nuclear conflict. Backed by a combination of governments, non-governmental organisations, philanthropists and ordinary people, they would encourage a variety number of diverse, adaptive peace-generating approaches. Some would inevitably fail; the way the market for the bonds would work means that these efforts would be terminated and resources diverted into more promising initiatives.

The effect of Nuclear Peace Bonds would be to give incentives to accelerate and guide our progress toward a less violent world more efficiently than has happened so far: a protracted, haphazard and bloody path that has given us a less violent world until now, but also one that has left us fearful of nuclear catastrophe. We can do better than that. By acknowledging that not all approaches are going to work, and supplying incentives for those that do, we can guide and accelerate evolutionary processes to bring about, as quickly and efficiently as possible, what is surely our one of our most urgent goals: sustained nuclear peace.

Defensive medicine

When adherence to process becomes more important than outcomes, it's time to complain. One example is the practice of defensive medicine: 

Between 60 and 90 percent of U.S. physicians report practicing defensive medicine, defined as the practice of ordering of tests, procedures, and other medical care solely to reduce the threat of malpractice liability.  This additional care has been estimated to cost the U.S. as much as $50 billion annually, and this likely underestimates the scope of the problem. Why do so many doctors practice defensive medicine? maybe because it works, Anupam B Jena et al, 16 May 2016 

'It works' in the title of that study does not mean that defensive medicine generates better health outcomes; rather: 

[It was found that] physicians with higher spending in a given year—in other words, the physicians who ordered more tests or procedures for the “typical” patients—were substantially less likely to be sued for a malpractice incident occurring the following year. Source, cited in the above paper, but not currently visible on the web)

Doctors are reacting rationally to the incentives on offer: they are liable for under-diagnosis, but not for over-diagnosis. The incentives aren't solely financial: in the UK 'the primary driver behind this trend [toward over-testing] often lies in a "better safe than sorry" mindset, coupled with a growing emphasis on preventive medicine.' (Source)

The problems caused by over-diagnosis are not limited to its waste of resources arising from unnecessary treatment and its adverse effects, and treatments that bring no benefit: there are also the psychological harms such as anxiety, stress, depression, and the burden of being unnecessarily labelled as having a disease. 

We need to rejig the incentives so they align with people's health. I suggest we explicitly target broad, meaningful indicators of national health and reward improvements in these indicators however they are achieved. Funding should be dictated by its expected benefits to people, rather than to liability lawyers. Resources should be directed to where they will achieve the maximum improvement in health per pound spent. Such improvement could be measured using such indicators as Quality Adjusted Life Years, longevity and an array of other measures. 

My suggestion, therefore, is that we apply the Social Policy Bond concept to health, and issue Tradeable Health Outcome Bonds (THOCs), which would provide incentives to research, develop and refine all approaches to improving our health, including measures that are currently thought to be beyond the remit of health authorities, but that could nevertheless generate large positive health improvements. Such measure might include measures as varied as better public transport for low-income households, subsidised apprenticeships, or lobbying for more controls on alcohol outlets. There are many other possibilities - but, currently,  few incentives to explore their potential health impacts. A bond regime would not assume that existing healthcare organisations are best placed to deliver all such impacts: it would encourage investors in the bonds to direct resources into any those approaches that promise to bring about the best improvements in health. My essay on THOCs is long, at 9500 words. A shorter version is here. 

Indirect greenhouse gases: why the 'root causes' approach isn't working

From the current New Scientist:

Of all the global warming that has happened since the pre-industrial era, about 15 per cent has been caused by emissions other than greenhouse gases, mainly carbon monoxide and VOCs [volatile organic chemicals]. ‘Forgotten’ pollutants cause warming, Alec Luhn, 'New Scientist', dated 20 June 2026

Some countries target emissions of these 'indirect greenhouse gases' indirectly, but most efforts aimed at reducing the rate of climate change are focused on carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that more directly affect the composition of the atmosphere. The same article tells us that black carbon (soot) is also excluded from these efforts and from national emissions data.  

The flaw in this approach - and it's a flaw that bedevils much environmental and social policy - is that in targeting a problem we try to identify its root causes and then aim to eliminate or attenuate them. But, as this example shows, when we are dealing with problems that have multiple causes and significant time lags, it's almost impossible to exhaustively identify these root causes. In this example, Mr Luhn points out that these indirect greenhouse gases plus black carbon are estimated to have contributed about  0.3°C of warming, which is quite significant. But there may be even more causes of climate change of which we are not aware. Indeed, a recent article in Nature highlights the hitherto unrecognised climate forcing contribution of micro- and nano-plastic particles. 

Which is why I advocate targeting the outcomes that we wish to see, rather than the supposed means of achieving them. Our knowledge of environmental and social relationships though, is always growing, and it makes more sense (to me) to recognise that we can't identify all the root causes and, rather than assume that we do and legislate accordingly, we should be encouraging people to keep researching into those root causes or to acknowledge that there might be more efficient ways of solving our problems than trying to find them. In the climate change example, we should be very clear about what we want to see: most probably, we'd want to see a range of physical, biological, ecological, social and financial measures of climate impacts to fall within an approved range for a sustained period. Why then, shouldn't we reward people for achieving that goal, rather than the alleged means of achieving it? In this example, again, it might be more efficient to look at solutions other than, or complementary to, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Such approaches are being followed, but there is no coherent way of rewarding the most promising of them; nothing along the lines of the efforts to control emissions of those gases that fossilised science once told us contribute most to climate change. 

A Social Policy Bond regime, applied to climate change, would take that long-term view, and once we have clarified exactly what outcomes we wish to see, reward those who take steps to achieve them. A bond regime would reward the most cost-effective approaches and terminate those that are least promising. The same paradigm applies to other social and environmental approaches, especially those that are so complex that current policies are failing. 

For more about what I think about root causes, see here and here. For more about Social Policy Bonds in general see here; as applied to climate change see here.  

$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.