Actuarially...

It concerns me that our biggest, urgent social and environmental problems are never going to be solved under our current political arrangements. The problems include global environmental depredations, the risks arising from ever-greater access to weapons of mass destruction and extreme poverty.

Their features make them ideal for targeting with Social Policy Bonds:

• they require many diverse approaches, depending on geography. So reducing the likelihood of war, say, in the Middle East requires a wholly different approach to reducing the chances of war originating in the Korea peninsula, or the horn of Africa.
  
• they are long term problems that require sustained attention - not necessarily from the same people; and
  
• they will take years or decades to solve, so they require adaptive approaches, which respond to changing circumstances.

It is the last two points that require that the bonds must be tradeable, so that bondholders have incentives to do what they can to achieve our targeted goal in cooperation with other bondholders, and then realize the consequent rise in value of their bond-holdings by selling to investors who can better continue progress towards the goal. 

But all these features of our global problems show just how inadequate are our current attempts at solving them. Our politicians' purview is temporally or geographically extremely narrow. Our supra-national organisations do some good work, but cannot attract the people they need, nor the resources necessary to match the scale of our problems. As well, their structures and composition cannot respond to changing circumstances. We need a new sort of organisation whose structure, composition, and every activity are subordinated to its goal of solving a targeted social problem.

Social Policy Bonds have been in the public arena since 1988 (pdf). Others have taken the idea, made the bonds non-tradeable, and issued Social Impact Bonds, about which I am ambivalent. Actuarially, I'm unlikely to see my original concept deployed, despite the initial flurries of interest it has provoked over the last 34 years. I'll carry on, however, because I see no sign of any better way of addressing the multiple calamaties towards which we are heading.

Yet another post about nuclear war

The Financial Times discusses the ruler of North Korea:

In his New Year's address, he declared he would "exponentially increase" nuclear weapons production in 2023 and stressed his willingness to use his nuclear arsenal for offensive as well as defensive purposes. North Korea's nuclear threat (subscription), Financial Times, 9 January

He is certainly acquiring the capability:

[A recent test brought the North Korean] regime a step closer to acquiring a solid-propellant intercontinental ballistic missile that, unlike liquid fuel missiles, can be fuelled in secret before they [sic] are deployed, giving adversaries far less time to conduct a preventive strike.one of many recent examples of Pyongyang approaching or crossing key technical thresholds that are making its nuclear arsenal increasingly versatile and difficult to destroy or defend against. 

 How should we address such a possibility? The experts have no idea:

[S]ome analysts worry that a strategy to meet strength with strength risks making conflict even more likely. 

So whether the world does or does not suffer a nuclear exchange depends on the state of mind of the ruler of a hermit kingdom who is not renowned for a willingness to accept the status quo, nor a predisposition to negotiate in good faith. There are, of course, other potential nuclear flashpoints in our world. How are we going about dealing with these threats not only to millions of people, but to an already parlous physical environment? Well, we have international bodies such as the United Nations and numerous other organisations, staffed by hard-working, well-meaning employees with very limited resources doing their best to try to bring about peace, either regionally or globally.

Sadly, in comparison to those who benefit when tensions are high and rising, the people working for these organisations have little to work with. There are fewer incentives to achieve and sustain world peace than there are to foment war. People, especially on the left, don't like the idea that we should pay people for doing idealistic things and really dislike the idea of paying them more for doing an excellent job. But even if we share their disdain for paying people cash for success in performing a public service, we can see that giving such people and their organisations more resources with which to work can be helpful in bringing about their goals - which, in the case of nuclear conflict, are the goals of almost the entire world population. 

Yes, incentives matter. But there is no known way of reducing the likelihood of nuclear conflict: we need an array of diverse, adaptive approaches, many of which we cannot foresee in advance. So my proposal is to issue Nuclear Peace Bonds, which would reward the people who bring about nuclear peace for a sustained period, whoever they are and however they do so. I've written copiously about this idea both on this blog and on my main site: see here. Nobody's taken it up, probably because it's radical, possibly because it doesn't emanate from one of our esteemed institutions or highly acclaimed academics or celebrities. Yes, some wealthy people might become even wealthier if they succeed in bringing about thirty years of nuclear peace. Is that so bad, though, when compared to the alternative? The unfortunate fact is that our current policy choices are leading humanity and our physical environment to disaster.