Status ≈ wealth, unfortunately

One takeaway, after watching a documentary on the life of Justice Clarence Thomas of the US Supreme Court is that money is becoming almost the sole criterion by which many of us measure success or fulfilment.

Robert Locke, writing about Japanese society, argues persuasively that 'what people are pursuing in the workplace is not so much money as the respect of the people around them…. [The Japanese] have understood that a large part of what money-seeking individuals really want is just to spend that money on purchasing social respect, through status display or whatever, so it is far more efficient to allocate respect directly.'

Rather than offer financial rewards we could perhaps reward people who help achieve societal goals with higher social status. An honours system could go some way toward rewarding people who forgo financial fortune for the good of society. Indeed, many countries have honours systems that are - or were - intended to do this. People also gain status merely by being admitted to exclusive societies, by working for a reputable organisation, or are pleased simply to be recognised in their role by cognoscenti. And many social reformers are quite happy to toil away without needing their efforts validated by any external body. They might be happier knowing that they are helping to improve the society in which they live but, for a very large number, their reward lies simply in knowing that they are making a contribution.

But whether for good or ill, the context within which social status is barely correlated with financial status is fading from many rich countries: social status is becoming more and more a function of high levels of wealth and income. The British honours system, for example, which used to compensate dedicated people for the financial sacrifices they made for the public good, is more and more following the trend, making awards to entertainers and sportspeople who, whatever their other troubles, are not financially impoverished. There are still fields of activity, in the academic and religious worlds, for instance, wherein social status and monetary reward do not always go hand-in-hand, but they are shrinking or indeed reward activities that most of us would see as anti-social. Re-instatement of a popular culture that confers high status on those who achieve social and environmental goals would be a difficult task in our highly mobile world. But in the meantime, facing severe and urgent social and environmental challenges, what are we to do?

One of the benefits of a Social Policy Bond regime is that it would create a means by which financial rewards are inextricably linked to social benefit. Under such a regime it would be politically easier to tax the income and profits of activities that have little (or negative) social impact. Great wealth might then be less divisive than under the current regime, where too much of it is generated by questionable or corrupt activities.

Obscurity causes obesity

Recently I did a post describing how complexity can be used to obscure the effects of a policy or the true intentions of policymakers influenced by corporate interests or other powerful groups - such as farmers. 

Food processors appear to be doing something similar. Chris van Tulleken explains the UK's Nutrient Profile Model, NPM 2004/5, which was developed as a tool to regulate food advertisements directed at children:

If you struggle to make sense of the nutrient data table on the [package of food] to guide healthy eating for your child, then the NPM 2004/5 is going to blow your mind. You can’t look up the NPM score of a food easily – you have to calculate it using the following three steps, which I write out only to illustrate their complexity. First, you award a score for the bad stuff: calories, saturated fat, sugars and sodium. These are called ‘A’ points. Second, you add up the points for the good stuff: fruit, vegetables, nuts, fibre and protein. These are called ‘C’ points. (By the way, you may need to pay for access to something like the NielsenIQ Brandbank nutritional database to gather all this information.) After you’ve calculated the A and C points, there are other rules to be factored in, like: ‘If a food or drink scores 11 or more A points then it cannot score points for protein unless it also scores 5 points for fruit, vegetables and nuts.’ Clear so far? Well, then you subtract the C points from the A points to calculate a score out of thirty. Any food that scores more than four is classified as HFSS [High in (saturated) fat, salt and sugar]. But, even if you do all that, it isn’t clear whether children should eat these HFSS foods, or in what amounts. The designation determines only whether a food can be marketed to children at particular times and in particular ways. Chris van Tulleken, Ultra-Processed People, April 2023

By such means is the relationship between ultra-processed food and health obscured; and by such means do we understand how ultra-processed foods make up 60 per cent of the calories consumed by the average UK citizen, and at least 80 percent of the calories consumed by one in five citizens. So policies intended to safeguard the health of our children get corrupted in the black box of our policymaking, regulatory or legislative bodies. The result? As Mr van Tulleken tells us, over the past thirty years, obesity has grown at a staggering rate: '[A]mong children leaving primary school rates of obesity have increased by more than 700 per cent, and rates of severe obesity by 1600 per cent.' This is despite fourteen government strategies containing 689 wide-ranging policies addressing obesity having been published in England in that period. Oh, and children in the UK (and US) are shorter too: 'This stunting goes hand in hand with obesity around the world, suggesting that it is a form of malnutrition rather than a disorder of excess.'

Policymakers and their paymasters couldn't get away with such deceptive behaviour under a Social Policy Bond regime, in which the first step is an explicit setting of verifiable goals. Such goals would be meaningful to ordinary people, which means we could all engage in the policymaking process. So, for example, government would set broad health goals, using an array of indicators, such as longevity, infant mortality, quality-adjusted life years and others, all of which would have to fall into an agreed range for a sustained period before the bonds could be redeemed. (See here; or here for a longer essay on Tradeable Health Outcome Bonds.) Regulations to control adverts targeting children would be enacted only if they could be shown to have favourable health impacts. As with all Social Policy Bonds, investors would have as their sole criterion for the activities they undertake their efficiency in achieving the targeted goal. Currently, big corporations influence policy in their favour, and obscurity and complexity allow them to get away with it. By targeting broad, transparent, agreed outcomes, Social Policy Bonds could reclaim policy to the benefit of the people on whose behalf it nominally made.