Social Policy Bonds blog: Follow the money

09 March 2008

Follow the money

A useful site for keeping track of US political donations is http://www.opensecrets.org/, maintained by the Centre for Responsive Politics. Eric Janszen argues that the bubble that looks about to burst in the financial markets has been inflated by a 'credit-financed, asset-price-inflation machine organized around one tenet: that the value of one's assets...now goes in only one direction, up....' The US finance, insurance and real estate industries are the lead players. are the culprits. Government oversight has been weak and, as Mr Janszen puts it, these sectors, according to opensecrets.org:

gave $146 million in political donations for the 2008 election cycle alone, and since 1990 more than $1.9 billion - nearly double what lawyers and lobbyists have donated, and more than triple the donations from organized labor. Harper's February (subscription), summary here

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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.