Who really cares?

The problem with the worldwide protests is simple to state, difficult to solve: giving power to the people who say they'll help groups X and Y doesn't actually help people in groups X and Y. This is one of the few constants of history.

And that is even with the assumption that the leaders or spokespeople for these groups actually mean what they say, and care about the people they purport to represent. I have my doubts about the leaders of the current protests but, even if we assume their good intentions, the probability that they, or the people who shove them aside once their bid for power succeeds, can or will do anything to help their constituency is low. This is not a party political view: just a statement of fact. From the current US President's base to the idealists who fomented revolution in France or Russia...the gap between hopes and reality is wide and deep. There is very little correlation between the stated goals of people wanting power and the post-election or post-revolutionary facts.

Social Policy Bonds, at first sight, might seem a wacky solution to the problems we are all facing. I mean not only such global problems as climate change and threats of nuclear catastrophe, but also problems such as the systemic, self-reinforcing inequalities, between and within countries that should be unacceptable in their own right, as well as posing a threat to democratic political and economic systems that are the least worst in human history, when it comes to maximising the chances of a decent life for the largest number of people.

Social Policy Bonds? A new financial instrument? As if there aren't already enough ways in which the financial sector has invented new ways of obscuring the ways in which it syphons off resources - including some of the world's best mathematical brains - from the rest of society, for its own selfish purposes.

But Social Policy Bonds would be different. Yes, they would use the market's incentives and efficiencies, but they would be doing so to achieve society's goals. Their use of markets is secondary to their first essential element: that of clarifying and targeting our social and environmental goals.A Social Policy Bond regime doesn't need to take an opinion on the more controversial and divisive aspects of policy: how our goals shall be achieved or who shall achieve them. That would be left to investors in the bonds who would be rewarded exactly according to how successful they are in achieving our goals. Under a Social Policy Bond regime, politicians wouldn't be able to obscure the workings of government by making arcane, protracted,self-serving decisions about regulation, or institutional structures and funding—procedures that, you might think, are specifically designed to deter anyone other than powerful interests and their paid agents from following. On the contrary, Social Policy Bonds would target outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. On the national level these would include improved health, reduced crime rates, universal literacy. On the global level, the bonds could target nuclear peace, the prevention and mitigation of all kinds of disaster including adverse climatic events or, again universal literacy. The point is that these would be society's goals. Goals that are comprehensible and meaningful; goals that all can help in formulating and prioritising.

It is this aspect of Social Policy Bonds—the articulation and prioritising of our social and environmental goals—that needs to be emphasised if they are going to become acceptable, just as much as their use of markets which, rightly in many cases, have been discredited by their manipulation and subversion to the benefit of the already powerful. After thirty-plus years of advocating Social Policy Bonds, I remain hopeful. Well, put it this way: I certainly can't be hopeful about any of the other policymaking systems currently on offer.
anising society currently on offer.