Bees, war, and root causes

From the current issue of the Economist: 

Detecting covid with bees, meanwhile, involves a method that goes back to ivan Pavlov and his dogs. The insects are offered sugar-water alongside SARS-CoV-2-infected saliva samples, but not with uninfected samples. The thus learn to extend their probosces when they sniff covid. The nose knows: Flies, worms and bees could help detect illness, the 'Economist', 31 July

What does this have to do with Social Policy Bonds? It's often suggested that in order to tackle such social and environmental problems as crime, violence, war or climate we need to identify the 'root causes' before we can devise ways of solving them. I disagree. I think our first step should be to clarify exactly what we want to achieve, and then reward the achievement. Let investors in the bonds decide whether it's worth looking for root causes or whether it's more efficient, and quicker, to find different ways of solving our problems. We could (and, effectively, do) delay, say, reducing conflict, by postulating some ideal world in which there is no poverty and everyone is nice to each other. The implicit assumption is that war is an intractable part of human nature, as the ancient Greeks thought. It's a convenient excuse, especially as the search for root causes - usually the task of people whose lifetime earnings are correlated with the time taken to find them - need never end. As Tolstoy put it:

The deeper we delve in search of these causes [of war] 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.  Leo Tolstoy, 'War and Peace', Norton Critical Editions, New York, 1996 (page 536)

Just as we can train bees to detect covid without knowing about the mechanisms underlying how they do so; so we can target such goals as world peace, reduced crime, or the elimination of poverty without wasting time and energy on endless searches supposedly aimed at identifying their root causes.