Social Policy Bonds blog: Prague

20 June 2005

Prague

In Prague, where memories of what happens when Government gets very far out of line are still prominent and sobering. A front page story in todayś International Herald Tribune quotes a Jiang Yhaohua, a Communist Party secretary for the township of Zegou, in Zhejiang in China

No matter how smart we are, we officials have limited information. The easiest way to avoid mistakes is by having more democratic decisions.

Impressive humility, and letś hope it portends a way forward for acting on complex problems such as crime, climate change, and violent political conflict, where officials, politicians and experts, however dedicated and well-meaning, are failing. A Social Policy Bond regime would democratise the finding of solutions to these problems by letting people decide both on the priorities they would give to problems, and the best ways of solving them.

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Social Policy Bonds in the media

13 June 2018: my short article Make Social Impact Bonds Tradeable, appears on the website of Alliance, a magazine for philanthropy and social investment.

25 May 2018: a short article on Social Policy Bonds and their possible application in India, appears on Market Express (India). It is by Dr Ashok V Desai and titled Incentivizing welfare.

9 October 2015: An article by Greg Bearup on the genesis of the Social Policy Bond idea, and application of a version of it in Australia appears in the Weekend Australian Magazine. (The article can also be downloaded as a pdf from here.)

October 2013: Professor Robert Shiller of Yale University, is named as one of the three winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics. His Nobel Prize lecture (pdf) delivered on 8 December, mentions Social Policy Bonds. Professor Shiller has for many years encouraged my work on Social Policy Bonds, beginning in late 1996 when he sent me this letter.

3 May 2012: An audio talk by Nobel Prize winner Professor Robert Shiller at the London School of Economics, in which Social Policy Bonds are briefly mentioned, is available here.

18 April 2012: Robert Shiller, Professor of Economics at Yale University, mentions Social Policy Bonds in his new book Finance and the Good Society. He also mentions the concept in a Huffington Post article. It's the eighth of his Ten Ways Finance Can Be a Force for Good in Society, and is also mentioned in a short profile piece about Professor Shiller.