'Sustainability' is a meaningless goal

 The New Scientist, in a feature about fishing, quotes an expert:

The word 'sustainability' doesn't mean anything. You can actually overfish sustainably - you can reduce the stock to a tiny fraction of is original abundance and fish the rest sustainably. It's like cutting an immense forest, but leaving a few trees standing, which you harvest sustainably. Daniel Pauly, quoted in Plenty more fish in the sea? by Graham Lawton, 'New Scientist', 13 February

One advantage of the Social Policy Bond concept is that it obliges policymakers to come up with clear, unambiguous, verifiable goals. 'Sustainability' just isn't good enough. You might almost think its elasticity and prevalence are designed to ensure that business can continue continue as usual, not only in fisheries but in forestry, climate change, or indeed any aspect of the environment. Unfortunately, setting verifiable goals is difficult for governments. There are genuine as well as spurious reasons at to why this should be. One is that there are too many unforeseeable variables that could affect movement towards targeted goals and that have little to do with government performance. We can hardly expect, therefore, government to do otherwise than promulgate vague, meaningless goals that have little to do with social well-being. 

I advocate, instead, that government relinquish some of its goal setting role, and instead seek to articulate and refine society's goals. Such goals, I believe, would extend beyond the time horizons of particular government administrations. They would be broad and verifiable but, most importantly, they would be meaningful to ordinary people, in a way that such goals as 'sustainability' - or proportion of youngsters going to university, or waiting times in hospitals etc - are not. 

Discussing Social Policy Bonds I often emphasise the gains that could be made by injecting the market's incentives and efficiencies into the achievement of social and environmental outcomes. But perhaps even more important would be the bonds' role in obliging society as a whole to define clearly what those outcomes actually are. In such a policymaking environment goals as devoid of meaning as sustainability would not clear the first hurdle.

Nuclear peace: no time to lose

The Economist recognises the threat posed by nuclear proliferation:

If the nuclear order starts to unravel, it will be almost impossible to stop. ...Stopping proliferation also requires spotting it. ...The International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog ... is overburdened and under-funded, and needs to keep up with technological change. The world ... cannot afford to downplay the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Today’s nuclear diplomacy may seem a slog, but it is as nothing compared with the lethal instabilities that arise whenever regional nuclear-armed rivals confront each other. There is no time to lose. Who will go nuclear next?, The 'Economist', 30 January (emphasis added)

My contention is that too much human ingenuity and attendant funding are channelled into activities of little, no, or negative social utility, such as advertising dog-food, hedge funds or high-frequency trading. People react rationally to the incentives on offer, and such activities, unfortunately attract some of the brightest minds on the planet.

The under-funding of the IAEA is not the only reason for the Economist's (and my) alarm at the nuclear threat. The Agency is like any other organisation. Though its employees are no doubt hard working and well meaning they are not rewarded in ways that are linked to their success or otherwise in carrying out the Agency's ostensible goal. Like every organisation, it has its own incentives, and one of its most important is likely to be self-perpetuation. 

I think that the nuclear threat is too significant to be left to one under-funded organisation. I suggest instead that : 

• We clearly define what we want to achieve: most obviously the continuation of nuclear peace, but we could also encompass other goals, such as reductions in the number of nuclear warheads, and the number of nuclear powers.
• We reward the sustained, simultaneous, achievement of all these objectives.
• We supply adequate funding that encourage such achievement - and are prepared to increase those rewards if necessary.
• We then contract out the achievement of this array of objectives  by means of Nuclear Bonds, made available to everyone - public- or private-sector - on the open market. 

What would happen? Most likely a new sort of organisation would arise: one whose goals are exactly congruent with society's goals. Its structure and composition could vary over time, but at every point would be those that would best achieve and sustain nuclear peace. As project-initiators and implementers, they will do what they can to achieve nuclear peace, see the value of the bondholdings rise, realise their gains from holding the bonds (or receiving payments from bondholders), and sell their bonds to others who can better carry out the next steps towards achieving and sustaining the specified goal.

For more about applying the Social Policy Bond concept to nuclear peace see here.