Government by intuition

In our complex, interlinked societies, it's increasingly difficult to identify cause and effect. This matters when making policy, because policy is supposed to have a beneficial effect. Linkages are sometimes easy to identify: that between, say, water quality and infectious disease rates, for instance. Others are much more difficult and, with our scientific knowledge rapidly growing, often impossible: So, facing problems such as crime or war or nuclear proliferation, where there are huge numbers of contributing variables, and our knowledge of relationships is both imperfect and expanding, should government do nothing, waiting for certainty?

What governments actually do is create bureaucracies, or shovel funds into bodies that might once have been successful (when society was simpler) but have become useless or, worse, obstacles in the way of achieving our goals.

A much better approach, in my view, is to target long-term outcomes, and let investors decide, continuously, what are the best approaches to solving our problems. Especially for longer-term goals, the optimal mix of approaches will vary with time in ways that nobody, including governments, can foresee. We need to reward people for coming up with new, efficient, solutions to our problems, many of which are so complex that only diverse, adaptive approaches will work. These are precisely the sorts of solutions that governments cannot identify. That, in essence is the Social Policy Bond approach.

Alternatively, we could opt for an easy life:

Peter Navarro, the head of the White House National Trade Council, told an interviewer, “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm [President Trump's] intuition. ...” Trump vs. the 'Deep State', Evan Osnos, 'New Yorker', dated 21 May

Unfortunately, Mr Navarro's way of doing things predominates.