Not only pandemics

You might think that we'd be well advised, as a species, to prepare for global disasters. And it's true that many people are working, sometimes heroically, at ways of doing so. There are quite a few organisations, for instance, that seek to reduce conflict or eliminate diseases, such as malaria. The difficulty I have is that their work is unsystematic, uncoordinated, and is rewarded in ways that bear no relationship to their success or efficiency. As well, and perhaps more dangerously, there are policies in play that can only accelerate disaster, such as: subsidies to fossil fuel extraction and consumption, the accumulation of weapons of all kinds; and the failure seriously to pursue one of the main goals of the Cairo Population Summit, where 179 signatory countries agreed to provide access to family planning services to all the women who want them. And last, there are ways in which the survival of millions is threatened by entirely new phenomena, such as COVID-19, whose full implications cannot be foreseen.


We need therefore to re-orient the incentives, and to do so in a coherent manner that rewards the survival of our species against calamities of all kinds. This is where the Social Policy Bond principle can help. The issuers of Disaster Prevention Bonds need have no knowledge of the relative likelihoods of known or unforeseeable catastrophic events. Neither would they have to prejudge, with our current limited scientific knowledge, the most efficient ways of ensuring our survival. Instead, the bond mechanism could target the sustained avoidance of any - unspecified - catastrophe. It would do so in a way that encourages the exploration and investigation of all threats, known and new, impartially. Policymakers would not (and anyway could not) have to decide on how dangerous each threat is. That would be left to bondholders, who would have powerful incentives to do so continuously. Investors in the bonds would be rewarded only if they can adapt to rapidly changing events and to our ever-expanding scientific knowledge.

This is a stark contrast to the current approach; the one that has led to highly intelligent people giving our survival a baleful prognosis. The people who are currently working in favour of humanity do so in ways that, while worthy of great respect, are within a system that is heavily weighted to favour the short-term goals of large organisations, including governments, that have little incentive or capacity to care about our future in the long term. Disaster Prevention Bonds, issued with sufficient backing, could change all that.