Social Policy Bonds blog: David Lange

09 November 2006

David Lange

An excerpt from David Lange’s engaging autobiography:

“It was often remarked that I had no education in economics. This is somewhat ironic. In the early 1980s, nobody was better qualified than a lawyer to understand the New Zealand economy. It was a legal construct. Only the law could allow farmers to earn an income by killing sheep and burying them…. There was a ramshackle wall of legal protection around the economy…. [Prime Minister] Muldoon’s regulatory excesses were increasingly absurd. You did not need to be an economist to understand that; the question was what to replace them with.” My life (page141), David Lange

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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.