Policy for the post-truth era

US President Barack Obama talks about the new media system which:

...means everything is true and nothing is true. ...An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll. .... Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that’s what 99 per cent of scientists tell us. And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That’s how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you’d argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don’t have that. It happened here, David Remnick, 'New Yorker' dated 28 November

Science isn't a consensual process though, so even if the majority of scientists agree 
on one thing, whether it's anthropogenic climate change, or acid rain, or whatever, that should carry no more weight than the collective wisdom of experts in other fields, such as economists or opinion pollsters. There is a genuine problem here: how should we make policy when the relationship between cause and effect in our ever more complex societies is impossible to identify? It's not simply a question of following the opinions of existing bodies often backed by vested interests - nor of reflexively ignoring them: they might after all be right as well as self interested. Nor should we simply identify a problem then mindlessly dole out funds to the organizations whose stated objective is to solve it, but whose over-arching objective - in common, I think, with all organizations - is self-perpetuation.

We should instead recognize that resolving complex social and environmental problems, cannot wait for our receiving perfect information about causal relationships, and nor should we delay making decisions until such information becomes available - it might never happen. Take climate change: it's likely that, by the time we know the effects of man's greenhouse gas emissions on the climate, it will be too late to do anything to avoid or reverse their catastrophic effects on the environment. The current way of addressing the problem seems inadequate: extravagant gestures that might lead to some reductions in emissions that we think contribute to climate change, which might lead to some tiny, almost imperceptible (but unverifiable) effect on the climate some decades hence.

I think we can do better than this. We could use the Social Policy Bond idea, first to identify exactly what we want to achieve; and second to channel the market's incentives and efficiencies into achieving it. With climate change, we need to clarify whether we are more concerned about climate change, or about the impacts of climate change on human, animal and plant life. In other words, we define the outcome that we wish to achieve, then let the market decide how best to go about achieving it. Most social and environmental goals will embody an array of conditions that have to be satisfied for the goal to have been deemed met and the Social Policy Bonds redeemed. Our climate change goal should embody measures of physical, biological, social and financial variables that shall have to fall within a targeted range for a sustained period before the redemption of Climate Stability Bonds.

And as with climate change so with other major challenges.The important point is that the Social Policy Bond principle works even when the facts about what causes climate change, say, or crime, or war, are disputed. As such, Social Policy Bonds are the perfect policy instrument for today's post-truth politics.

Update 5 December: a version of this post for newcomers to the Social Policy Bond idea is available here

Ideologues and vested interests impede good policymaking

A letter-writer reacts to the suggestion by the Economist that poor American consumers gain more from cheap imports than they would if imports were restricted and America produced the same goods:

Being able to buy a Chinese-made 50-inch TV when you work by flipping hamburgers for the minimum wage may be more efficient than working in a factory on wages where you can only afford the 30-inch American-made model. But Donald Trump’s voters weighed up factors that many economists and your newspaper often downplay: the marginal utility of consumer goods in a rich society, the distribution of wealth and a sense of self-worth. The medium through which they channelled their anxiety may be flawed, but their message is clear. Trump's triumph, Prof Diomidis Spinellis, the 'Economist' dated 19 November

Exactly so; countries as a whole benefit from free trade in that the benefits to the economy more than offset the losses, even if the losers - those whose jobs become obsolete - are fully compensated. The problem is that most of the gains are going to the wealthy, and the losers aren't being compensated.

One of the great advantages of the Social Policy Bond approach is clarity about ends and means. Free trade isn't an end in itself: it's a means to an end: the improved well-being of society. A bond regime targeting poverty or income levels would ensure adequate compensation to the losers from free trade (which could take the form of subsidies to struggling companies or laid-off individuals, or enhanced re-training opportunities). Or it could restrict trade, perhaps temporarily, if that were to better meet society's long-term income goal. Such measures would be heresy to the free trade ideologues, but in a bond regime it is outcomes that matter, not ideology.

We see similarly non-outcome driven approaches in other policy areas, where ideology or vested interests get in the way of rational, welfare-enhancing policies. Healthcare in the US is one example, where the interests of insurance companies and blind resistance to anything that could be called 'socialist' do so much to blight the security of even middle-class Americans.

Bootlickers, yes men, liars

There are many ways we can interpret the US Presidential election result. I prefer to see it as the victory of ordinary people over the people who are supposed to look after their well-being. In domestic politics, just as in the international aid industry, a whole class of intermediaries, supposedly devoted to improving the condition of the ordinary man and woman, has grown and expanded so much that its interests have now diverged from the
very people they are supposed to represent. Mr Trump speaks for these people. Whether he will improve their lot remains to be seen, but it would difficult to do a worse job than the current motley coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, academics and media persons.

Two statements I take as axiomatic:

• Every institution, whether church, government body, trade union, university, charity or whatever, however well meaning it began, however well meaning and hard working the people it employs will, sooner rather than later, have as its over-arching goal that of self-perpetuation.
• Everybody - everybody - in a position of power, will always overplay their hand.

The US establishment - the political parties, the bureaucrats, the media, the countless lobbyists, academics and government bodies - are no better and no worse than innumerable other spinners of dreams, bootlickers, yes men, liars, whose corruption and degeneracy have let ordinary people down. Hence Brexit - and hence President Trump.

Consensus and politics

Maria Bustillos introduces the concept of dismediation:

Dismediation is looking to make you never really trust or believe a news story, ever again. Not on Fox, and not on NPR. It’s not that we can’t agree on what the facts are. It’s that we cannot agree on what counts as fact. The machinery of discourse is bricked. That’s why we can’t think together, talk together, or vote together. ...

The peculiar mendacity of [George W Bush's] catastrophic presidency left us with worse problems than a bunch of lies to put straight and reflect on. There’s a broken trust to restore — to the extent that it’s possible to replace toxic cynicism with healthy skepticism — in media and in government. When truth falls apart, Maria Bustillos, 3 November

And, as this prolonged US Presidential election campaign reaches its end, she asks "How do we restore consensus in an age so divorced from fact?"

Here's my suggestion: we vote on social and environmental goals, rather than the supposed means of achieving them: namely, politicians or political parties. Personality is not a sound basis for choosing who shall make policy. Neither, we know now, are campaign sound-bites or media commentary. Currently though, we have little else to go on. We choose policymakers rather than policies; and we choose them on the basis of their image at worst, or their stated policy priorities or ideological leanings at best. Rarely are we given the chance to target desirable outcomes.

In theory, our current approach is practical: social, economic and environmental policymaking is complex and time-consuming. Ms Bustillos quotes Edward Bernays writing in 1928:

[E]very citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything… Propaganda

But if we don't have the skills or energy to evaluate policy ourselves, and if we can't rely on the media any more, what can we do to bring about some consensus and repair what looks increasingly like a dysfunctional policymaking system?

I suggest outcome-based policy. Instead of voting for people or parties, we'd all participate in choosing and prioritising social goals. Social Policy Bonds lend themselves to a gradual transition to this sort of policymaking: by focusing on outcomes to be targeted they would be more transparent than the current policymaking process. A bond regime would generate more consensus - and, just as important - buy-in, about our chosen goals. A transition to a Social Policy Bond regime would be quite easy to arrange, with funding to existing activity-based bodies (mostly government agencies) being reduced gradually, at the same time as funds for Social Policy Bond redemption rise.

Choosing policymakers is fraught with problems, not the least of which is the raucous and destructive dialogue des sourds flooding out of our news media. It's time to target outcomes, issue Social Policy Bonds, and let motivated public- and private-sector bondholders work towards achieving society's goals.