Make democracy work: target outcomes directly

George Monbiot writes about the weaknesses of democracy. He ends on a vague note but does ask: 'What if democracy doesn’t work? What if it never has and never will?' To which I would reply with another question: 'how do we know if it's working?'

I think there are two elements to an answer. One: democracy is working when people have buy-in to the way society runs. Two: it's working when things are generally getting better for ordinary people. The two go hand-in-hand. Buy-in is important, because unanimity over virtually anything in any large society is impossible and if we have been consulted we are more likely to go along with what wider society decides, even if it's not what we would choose. 

We do occasionally consult ordinary people over certain decisions. But - and this is where the other essential element comes in - these decisions are rarely expressed in terms of outcomes. Instead we are asked questions such as: which political party do you want to form the government? Whom do you want to be President?
Prospective politicians say what they hope to achieve; we vote for them on the basis of what they say and on factors such as their looks, delivery, public image, or their experience in or out of office. These attributes might tell us something about candidates' intentions but they tell us very little about the impact they will actually have on the things that matter to us.

Which is why I think policy should focus on broad, meaningful outcomes. Things like better health, a cleaner environment or, at a global level, world peace. We know something about how to achieve the first two of those examples: essentially, throw more money at them. But neither we nor any politician has a clue about how to achieve them with maximum efficiency. And world peace? We are completely clueless on that one.

Social Policy Bonds could be the answer. Instead of wasting time with political parties, public images, or simplistic and inescapably inadequate (at best) ideologies, we could instead move toward a policymaking system that targets outcomes directly. A bond regime would do that, and would inject the market's incentives and efficiencies into the every process needed to achieve our social and environmental goals. Because the bonds would be tradable, we could target goals that will require many approaches and that are inevitably going to take many years to achieve - such as, yes, world peace. Bondholders (or the people they contract) would have incentives to explore numerous approaches, to boost the successful ones and - something that seldom happens in the public sector nowadays - terminate the failures.


Our current policymaking systems fail because they don't engage the wider public. Buy-in is a lost cause. Political processes are arcane, legalistic, complex and time-consuming. The only people who follow it closely are those who have a strong financial interest in doing so; mainly big corporations, lobbyists and think-tanks. Social Policy Bonds could both widen public participation and achieve society's goals more efficiently. Then we'd know that democracy is working.