Power and patronage

Elang Adhyaksa, in a letter to the editor of the 'Economist' was writing about one particular country but, in truth, this could apply almost everywhere:

In such a fractured country as [*see end of this post], leaders must contend with entrenched power bases, then cultivate patronage networks of their own if they are to govern at all. Elang Adhyaksa, the 'Economist', 31 October

That's how things work. The power bases could be corporations or they could lie within government or the public service. I don't actually think things are drastically worse today in that respect than any other time. I do think, though, that we can do better. Power bases don't always share the same goals as ordinary people. The gap between power bases and the public may be widening. Often, the goals of the elite that constitute the power base (or are the people the power base has to listen to) and ordinary people are in conflict. Overall, trust in government is declining; it's not a hopeful trend.

 There might have been good reasons for why the our current political systems are weighted in favor of interest groups. Reasons to do with an uneducated population with not much free time to spend considering policy issues; the logistical difficulties of informing many people, and finding out what they think. The result is that government's goals depend on the bargaining power of special interests, whose influence is largely a function of how wealthy they are, but also such attributes as the personality of their spokespeople, and the emotions that can be generated from selective video footage. 

I think we need policymaking systems now that prioritise the goals of ordinary citizens. These goals would be based not on emotion, but on the actual wishes and needs of the public. 

Social Policy Bonds could be the way forward. They target outcomes that are  meaningful to ordinary people; outcomes such as better health, reduced crime rates, a cleaner environment and, at a global level, absence of war. There is more agreement about such outcomes than there is about how they shall be achieved, and which political party is best placed to achieve them. As well, these goals are more stable over time, so it is realistic to target them. A bond regime is well placed to target long-term goals, especially those that require research, experimentation, and refinement before they can be implemented. It would reward those who best advance these goals. Instead of self-entrenching power bases whose time, I believe, has passed, we'd have coalitions of bondholders; coalitions whose composition and structure would be subject to change, but that would always have as their goal, the maximising of their wealth. In that one respect, they would be similar to existing power bases. The crucial difference is that, under a Social Policy Bond regime, these new types of organisation would become wealthy only by achieving society's goals as efficiently as possible. Their goals, in short, would be exactly the same as those of ordinary citizens. 

*Which country was Elang Adhyaksa writing about? Indonesia.

How to minimise the risk of catastrophe

One typical manifestation of the 'New Optimism', is Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature. According to the New Optimists, most of the indicators of human health, freedom, and educational achievement are improving. This is undeniably good news, but as Adam Salisbury writes:

[W]e should not be complacent about our past trajectory, and not indulge in the New Optimist’s flawed fixation on observed outcomes. Second, we should develop more holistic measures of human progress: ones that take into account our exposure to catastrophe. New Optimism Ignores Our Potential for Catastrophe, Adam Salisbury, 'Paladium', 13 November

I agree that we underestimate the risk of catastrophe. There are many people working hard to find vaccines, cures and treatments for disease, for example, or to prevent natural disasters or deal with their aftermath. There are peacekeepers, arms control talks, and other efforts to avoid human-made conflicts and disasters. But, in my view, this is not enough. The potential for catastrophe—the probability of a disaster of any sort, multiplied by its impact—is high enough to warrant more resources devoted to reducing its likelihood. Efforts to contain nuclear weapons proliferation, for example, are minimal in relation to their potential for calamity. 

Why is this? I think it's partly because the incentives aren't there for people to get involved. Much human ingenuity, and their attendant resources, go where people have the best chance of making a good living. Advertising dog-food for instance, or the useless (at best) financial services sector.  It's only natural. But there is no correlation between where our best talents go, and the value to society of the activities they undertake when they get there. 

Social Policy Bonds would change that. Instead of the purely coincidental relationship between activity and social utility that we have nowadays, a bond regime would channel resources into society's goals. These goals would be long-term, broad and meaningful to ordinary people, who could then participate in allocating them a priority. One such goal that would, in my view, receive far more funding under a bond regime than at present would be disaster prevention. You can read more about how the Social Policy Bond concept could address the minimisation of the risk of disaster here. The bonds could even bring into our purview those goals long considered to be unrealistic or idealistic; not because they are unattainable, but because they are not rewarded in ways that attract sufficient human and material resources. I am thinking now of that most noble but, in my view quite achievable, goal of world peace.

Defining peace, so that we can achieve it

They keep coming: Ethiopia, Azerbaijan/Armenia, Mali/Nigeria/Benin, etc. 

It's too late to do anything much to stop the current conflicts or to avoid the imminent ones, but we can at least set in place mechanisms to prevent those wars and civil wars that are not yet inevitable. There are links here to my work on applying the Social Policy Bond concept to the elimination of war. An important question though, is what constitutes peace? This is not just an abstract point. A Social Policy Bond regime targeting peace would differ radically from the conventional, and not always successful, approaches. Most markedly it would not directly try to address war's alleged causes; or rather, it would not prejudge what those causes are. Such an approach has (in my view) great merit. War is so complex that it is not always obvious, even after a long conflict has ended, what its supposed ‘root causes’ are, and perhaps the very notion of a ‘root cause’ needs questioning. It implies that factors such as ‘poverty’ or ‘ethnicity’ can be removed from their social context, and somehow dealt with, and that then a desired result will follow. But human societies are complex. Poverty can feed grievance, but grievance can be a result of poverty. No single formula, no single set of parameters will always lead to conflict, and guarantee freedom from conflict. Indeed, even the notion of ‘causation’ in this context is questionable. Perhaps Tolstoy summed it up best:

The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event.

If we are going to issue Social Policy Bonds that target the elimination of violent conflict, how exactly would we define our goals? Peace - the absence of open war, the minimising of numerical casualties - would probably not suffice. Regimes can pile up armaments and blackmail neighbouring countries into making concessions or suffer the consequences. Under such circumstances, the open outbreak of military conflict would be unlikely, but it's hardly the sort of peace that we'd like to target. I have no definitive answers, but I think that apart from the numbers of soldiers and civilians killed in armed conflicts, we could include elements such as the expenditure on armaments, numbers of full-time equivalents in the military, and mass media indicators of impending conflict. This last is interesting: there appears to be strong evidence that the underlying intentions of governments can be accurately gauged by a systematic analysis of opinion-leading articles in the mass media, regardless of the relative openness of the media in question. (See Getting to war: predicting international conflict with mass media indicators, W. Ben Hunt, University of Michigan Press, 1997.) Such analysis allows the prediction of both the likelihood of conflict and what form of conflict - military, diplomatic or economic - will occur. This sort of indicator could be useful as a target where military conflict has not begun, but appears possible, and where other data are scarce. Once we have a set of indicators for peace, we could set about issuing Conflict Reduction Bonds, with national, regional or global objectives. We'd most probably have to refine the indicators over time, but the important point is that we'd be building a strong and highly motivated coalition for peace - in contrast to the current mess, under which the most dedicated individuals and groups seeking peace are the least rewarded, and the most highly rewarded are those who sell weapons of war.