Philanthropists want to be in control. Just like governments.

Emma Saunders-Hastings, in her recent book about philanthopy, asks an important question:

Before Parisian firefighters had fully extinguished the blaze that ravaged Notre- Dame in April 2019, lavish pledges rolled in from philanthropists eager to support the cathedral’s reconstruction: €100 million from Bernard Arnault, France’s richest person; ... commitments in the millions and tens of millions of euros from individual and corporate donors in France and abroad. The pledges were greeted with a mixed reception: conventional expressions of gratitude in some quarters but swift criticism from others. Why, some skeptics asked, were private funds so readily available to repair a building
but not to address rising inequality in French society? Emma Saunders-Hastings, Private Virtues, Public Vices: Philanthropy and Democratic Equality, March 2022

Or, indeed, other social and environmental problems such as unemployment, crime, or global concerns, such as war?

Later, Ms Saunders-Hastings grants that 'some donors have a better grasp of the measures that would best promote people’s substantive interests than the elected officials whom they are seeking to influence or bypass'. She concludes: 

Democratic societies need different ways of promoting reciprocity and long-
term attention to the public good— ones that do not require reliance on the
competence and goodwill of hereditary or economic elites. Contemporary philanthropy has not yet solved this problem.  

It seems to me that Ms Saunders-Hastings' first question is relatively easy to answer: philanthopists are unlikely to want to undermine the system that allows them to accumulate and maintain their vast wealth; including by influencing government policy. Also important, I believe, is that philanthropists are biased in favour of projects that are highly visible, where their contributions can be easily identified. In this, it is not very different from governments, which also favour the glamorous and photogenic over more mundane goals that require multiple approaches and much experimentation and refinement before they can be achieved: hence the persistence of some of our most grievous social problems. 

I have tried, with no success, to interest philanthropists in the Social Policy Bond concept. It seems to me that they are reluctant to relinquish control over the destination of their funds. In this respect, also, they are similar to governments. It's an understandable bias - though regrettable. My wish is that all funding bodies, private or public sector, would reward those who solve our most persistent, long-term problems, rather than insist on dictating who shall receive their funding and how they shall allocate it.

A better way of achieving environmental goals

We need to target environmental outcomes, not the alleged best ways of achieving them.

Text shared thousands of times on social media claims green energy is "more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye." But the posts make various inaccurate claims, including that ... solar panels or wind turbine blades cannot be recycled. Elias Huuhtanen, Posts mislead about environmental impact of green energy, AFP Factcheck, 31 March

The source also questions claims about the quantity and environmental cost of minerals used for electronic car batteries. 

My conclusion from such debates about the costs and benefits of different ways of gernerating electricity or powering vehicles is simple: advocating one option over another is just too complicated. Life-cycle analyses can be done, but they come festooned with boundary issues and are unlikely to be robust against changes in technology and our knowledge of environmental impacts, and other variables that change over time and space. And how shall the different costs of, say, child labour be weighed against possible reductions in greenhouse gas emissions? 

Can you imagine any government doing that? And getting it right? And continuing to get it right when new technology or new information about, say, mining or carbon dioxide emissions and their effects becomes available? It's not going to happen.

Which is why we need, urgently, an outcome-driven approach. The old way of doing things, with government doing what it thinks is best, might have worked when government was  well intentioned, and relationships between cause and effect on the environment much simpler to identify. It just doesn't work nowadays, when government is subject to powerful corporate interests and environmental relationships are much more complex. Government is not up to the job of working out whether climate change is best tackled by subsidising rail, electric vehicles, windmills, or catalytic converters. It's not what government is good at, and it's not what people go into government to do. 

What government can do, though, is set up a regime whereby people are rewarded for improving the environment or helping bring about climate stability, however they do so. In other words, it could contract out the achievement of a better environment or a more stable climate to a motivated, diverse, adaptive private sector. Government could stipulate the environmental outcomes it would reward, which is a simpler and less contentious task than trying to work out how best to achieve them. If it did so by issuing Environmental  Policy Bonds, or Climate Stability Bonds, then it's likely that a new sort of organisation would arise: ones that would research, experiment, refine and implement an array of diverse, adaptive approaches to society's environmental goals. They could perform their own life-cycle analyses if they wish; but whatever they do would be done with the aim of achieving our goals as cost-effectively and quickly as possible.

Rewarding nuclear peace

The Economist writes:

Nuclear-armed states may begin to believe that they can gain by copying Vladimir Putin’s tactics. One day, someone somewhere will surely turn their threat into reality... Source

Consider the incentives on offer to those in power today: if they possess nuclear weapons they can initiate a conflict knowing that they can dictate its course by threatening, implicitly or otherwise, to deploy them. If the target of their aggression doesn't possess nuclear weapons or if the target cares more about its civilian population than the aggressor, then at some point in the future, the reality feared by the Economist will come to pass. It might be today, it might be in a few years, but the number of countries with nuclear weapons continues to proliferate and we should not have to rely on those in power to continue to exercise restraint at all times. The taboo against threatening use of nuclear weapons has been broken. It now appears inevitable that, before long, the taboo against their use will also be broken. 

My previous post highlighted the continuing rise in the level of greenhouse gas emissions, despite the many agreements, protocols, treaties and hard-working organisations devoted to reducing their level: 

  

 

Fig.1 Atmospheric carbon dioxide level/Probability of nuclear conflict (?)

 

It seems that the probability of a nuclear strike of some sort is on a similar upward trajectory. What is to be done? 

My suggestion is that we we offer incentives for people to achieve that which we want to achieve: sustained nuclear peace whoever they are and however they do so. If people think that continuing along our present pathway isn't working, they should have incentives to research into and experiment with different approaches, refining those that appear most promising, and terminating those that don't work. This could be done with Nuclear Peace Bonds, an application of the Social Policy Bond concept. As with climate change, the aim is to encourage diverse, adaptive approaches to solving a complex, long-term problem that poses a great risk to large numbers of people and the environment.