Closing the gap, with outcome-based policy

Our chief problem with policymaking, as I see it, arises because it is only incrementally adaptive. That is, it's driven by short-term concerns, and proceeds along lines laid down decades ago. That's one reason why failed policies - such as subsidies to rich farmers and agribusiness corporates - are so difficult to get rid of. Now, if policymaking evolved in the Darwinian way, such policies would be terminated because they are maladaptive. But within countries, and increasingly, between countries as well, there is a policy monoculture. National governments and corporations have similar interests, so there is little policy diversity even at a global level.

Of course, there are differences between, say, Chinese and US capitalism but the vested interests are so deeply entrenched, the global challenges so urgent, the level of aggregation at which problems need to be solved is so high, and the world is so much smaller, that the Darwinian method of allowing optimal solutions to emerge from what is a reasonably wide a range of possibilities will probably not work. There is too little time to wait for incremental adaptation to address, say, climate change or nuclear proliferation. And we have only one planet; the result of a successful policy mutation may not only be too late, but can be swamped too readily by the wrong choices.

This is the end point of the urban monoculture – dominated by government and the big corporations – in which we live. We still have the possibility of adapting, but more and more it is brought into the service of these organizations, and the objectives of those organizations are, at best, different from those of ordinary persons and, at worst, in conflict with them.

Disenchantment with, and disengagement from, politics seems to be the response. And who can blame the voters? Politics seems to be run by the corporations, for the corporations, with some ideology thrown into the mix. One way of reconnecting people with government, I think, is for government to start expressing goals in terms of outcomes that are meaningful to real people. Rather than propose, say, to increase spending on health services or education, government should target, explicitly, life expectancy or literacy. This, of course, is the Social Policy Bond approach.