Enough with the dog-food

Qatar has a population of about 2.6 million. Amongst other facts and figures about weapons sales to the Middle East, the Economist this week tells us that:

Qatar already has Chinese-made ballistic missiles. From muskets to missiles, the Economist, 15 February

Not, thankfully, nuclear. Not yet anyway - nuclear is available only to larger, responsible players on the world stage. Like Pakistan and North Korea. What are the odds, I wonder, against a nuclear attack in the near future? Luisa Rodriguez summarises her findings:

...I get a rough sense of how probable a nuclear war might be by looking at historical evidence, the views of experts, and predictions made by forecasters. I find that, if we aggregate those perspectives, there’s about a 1.1% chance of nuclear war each year, and that the chances of a nuclear war between the US and Russia, in particular, are around 0.38% per year. How likely is a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia?, Luisa Rodriguez, Effective Altruism Forum, 20 January

You'd think that we'd put a bit more effort into avoiding a nuclear attack and its dire consequences than we do. But much of our ingenuity is instead devoted to activities of comparatively little social merit: financial trading, property speculation or (one of my hobby horses) clever advertising campaigns aimed at selling more dog-food.

This is not just a question of efficiency. It's quite possible that the activities of peace-making organisations (like this one) are as cost-effective as they can be, given their limited resources. The question is more one of human priorities and translating what I (presumptuously) see as the likely wishes of most of the world's population for nuclear peace into funding for those bodies working to achieve it. The disconnect here between ordinary people and the politicians supposed to represent us is near total.

The answer could be Nuclear Peace Bonds. Targeting a sustained period of nuclear peace, they could be backed initially by a combination of governments, NGOs, philanthropists, and subsequently members of the public. Floated on the open market they would become redeemable for, say, $1m each only after a thirty-year period during which no nuclear detonation killing more than fifty people takes place. They might initially fetch say just $10000 each, if the market thinks the probability of thirty years’ nuclear peace is low. But these bonds would be tradeable: their value would rise and fall according to how likely people think the peace target will be reached.

Initial investors would buy the bonds and do whatever they can to increase that probability. Even helping existing ways of monitoring nuclear material might see the value of their bonds double. Others, with expertise in different areas, would buy their bonds and do what they can to raise the value of the bonds still further. At every stage, the bonds would be in the hands of those most able to bring about nuclear peace. The bondholders’ goal is exactly congruent with society’s: they make money only by achieving society’s goal. And at every stage of every process required to achieve that goal, incentives will motivate people to be as efficient as possible.

Rather than encourage endless speculation about what projects will make the world more peaceful the bonds would, in effect, contract out the achievement of world peace to the market. They would encourage a wide range of adaptive projects, whose sole criterion for funding would be that they would raise the probability of world peace being achieved. In this way, the governments and others who back the bonds would do what they are best at: articulating society’s goals and raising the revenue for their achievement. At the same time, the market would be doing what it is best at: allocating resources as efficiently as possible.