Targeting long-term goals

James Hansen talks about climate change:

You’re talking about a system that responds on the timescale of decades to centuries — that’s a different time constant than the political constant.” James Hansen talking to David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth: Annotated Edition (reference 12)

It's not only climate change for which our current politics is inadequate. Any crisis building now, but whose effects will be felt only by future generations or, even more scarily, future administrations, is going to to be neglected within our current system. Our politicians face few incentives to consider future generations, and plenty of incentives to ignore them completely. We see this in the amassing of grotesquely inflated debt levels, badly thought-out immigration policies, under-investment in critical infrastructure, and environmental behaviours including, but by no means limited to, those that affect the climate. The narrow, short-term interests of powerful interests, public- and private-sector, win out every time. As for future generations: our politicians are expert at kicking the can down the road.

Social Policy Bonds could remedy this neglect of long-term consequences. They would create a coalition of interests in favour of achieving social and environmental goals that are currently too remote to receive much attention - though plenty by dystopian fiction writers. The way the bonds work would be to reward the achievement of our long-term goals at every stage of the process.

Social Policy Bonds (unlike Social Impact Bonds) are radeable, which means that bondholders don't have to hold them until redemption to see their value rise and realise a profit.. This allows the bonds to target effectively such remote goals as climate stability, universal literacy and world peace. The bonds would begin their work as soon as they were issued: those who buy the bonds would be motivated to begin the explore measures that would immediately raise the chances that the targeted goal will be achieved quickly. For most long-term goals, a large array of diverse measures will need to be proposed, implemented on a small scale, then either terminated or implemented more widely. No government can effectively oversee such a range of projects, nor can any single, conventional organisation. In particular, terminating failed approaches in favour of more efficient ideas does not come easily to government. But under a Social Policy Bond regime there would be every incentive to focus only on those approaches that will achieve our targeted goal most efficiently. And, crucially, the optimum mix of approaches will change over time - especially over the long time period that remote goals will require for their achievement. The bonds would give rise to a new type of organisation; ones whose composition and structure would change, perhaps radically, over the lifetime of the bonds, in response to changing circumstances and improving knowledge. Again, such adaptiveness is not a characteristic of government action, but it is an essential element of any attempts to solve our long-term problems.

Social Policy Bonds would represent a radical change from today's politics. But, as long-term problems threaten to overwhelm humanity (click on the source excerpted at the top of this post, for one example) it's clear that business as usual is not working. Targeting long-term goals and injecting market incentives into their achievement would seem to be our best hope. Social Policy Bonds, uniquely amongst policy instruments, would do both.

I've written about why I believe tradeability is important here, and why I am ambivalent about Social Impact Bonds here.