Give up control over the 'how'

Joseph O'Neill looks at US politics and how wealthy left/'liberal' donors' support differs from their conservative counterparts' in the US:

[T]he liberal political apparatus is “largely guided by the moral whims of rich people.” ...Liberal megadonors with private foundations are reluctant to invest in uncharismatic, long-haul grassroots projects. They are typically afraid of appearing “political.” Instead, they favor ameliorating the plight of the visibly needy ... [whereas] right-wing donors have spent their money more productively. They have created and supported entities (the American Legislative Exchange Council, ... the State Policy Network, Americans for Prosperity, the Federalist Society, etc.) dedicated to developing durable structures of power and fanaticism. No More Nice Dems, Joseph O’Neill, 'The New York Review of Books', dated 19 December

I'm not sure about either strategy. Well, I am sure they work for the donors, and there's an argument that the left already has much of the media, schools and universities in their grip anyway, and not only in the US: it doesn't have to create new ones. To quote Thomas Sowell:

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive. Thomas Sowell, 'The Survival of the Left', in The Thomas Sowell Reader, 2011

But the point is that the wealthy donors of neither the left nor right seem to care about outcomes. They fund glamorous, high-profile projects or buildings, foundations, think-tanks. They lobby government. They have in common that, even if they genuinely wish to improve the well-being of certain groups, they won't target the outcomes that those people most care about. Why not? Because, I think, in this respect donors resemble politicians and bureaucrats: they will not willingly relinquish control. They think they know how best to achieve results, or they want everyone to associate them with identifiable buildings, institutions or ideas - whether they do any long term good or not.


Social Policy Bonds are a means by which the wealthy could both articulate society's wishes and channel funds into satisfying those wishes, without actually doing the work themselves. Rich philanthropists could, instead, reward the achievement of our goals, without dictating who shall achieve them nor how they shall be achieved. They would still have the power to articulate these goals but, under a bond regime, they would have to relinquish the control over how these goals are to be achieved. That would be probably be difficult for billionaires to accept. But to address our most serious problems we need diverse, adaptive solutions, with time horizons longer than those of individual lifetimes. 

As a species, we now have massive potential to solve those problems that have bedevilled mankind for millennia: war, for instance, poverty, illiteracy, disease. Social Policy Bonds are a means by which we could motivate people toward solving these problems. Governments, unfortunately, aren't likely to be the first to issue them. They owe too much to existing career paths, methods, and institutions. But billionaires? They could be more amenable to persuasion. They want to see the right thing done. All it would take is a bit of humility on their part so that they don't feel they have to be the ones doing it. 'Letting go' of the need for acknowledgement and short-term results, could be as helpful to society as letting go of emotional hurts can be to the individual.