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.