Social Policy Bonds blog: An Inconvenient Truth

05 September 2006

An Inconvenient Truth

I saw the movie An Inconvenient Truth today. Well worth seeing, I think, as Al Gore presents the evidence from different angles. One telling point for me was his comparison of the number of peer-reviewed articles in scientific articles that believe we are experiencing climate change, 928 articles, or 100 per cent, and the number of popular media articles that doubt this: 53 per cent of the several hundred (I think) surveyed. Gore appears fairly optimistic about the prospects of reducing global emissions to 1970s levels by efficiency gains and application of existing technologies (not nuclear). But he didn’t say what even such large cutbacks would mean for the climate. I suspect the answer is not very much. Climate Stability Bonds were not mentioned.

I don’t go much for party politics, but the man appeared impressive, human and coherent in this movie, and I couldn’t help wishing he were in the White House now. One passing comment was that he had presented his slide show on climate change at least 1000 times.

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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.