Using reason to make policy

The Economist writes:

...Americans need to recognise just how many of their compatriots’ lives are being squandered. Too often politicians have been slow to do so and, as a result, America has come to tolerate an obscene level of early deaths. Only after the shock and shame of yet another mass shooting, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last year, did Congress muster the will to pass modest new gun controls. A proper sense of alarm at other kinds of needless loss may help bring about measures to keep more Americans alive for longer. That way the country could start to curb the carnage. How to reduce American carnage, the Economist, 31 July

It's unfortunate that it takes dramatic events that have immediate visual impact before our current policymakers think about addressing many of our social problems. Ideally, we should aim for policies that minimise adverse impacts on all people's well-being, regardless of who they are, where they happen to live, or whether their plight is dramatic enough to make people watch news bulletins.

One way of doing this would be for government to consult with citizens to discover their priorities for policymakers, specified in terms of broad goals, at times of relative calmness and over a sustained period. Examples of such goals could be: cut violent crime by 50 percent; raise literacy to 99.5%; improve life expectancy by three years. The exact formulation of these goals would be decided by experts and confirmed by government. 

The next step would be to reward people for achieving these goals, whoever they are and however they do so, provided the act within the law - though as part of their goal-achieving activities they can lobby for changes in the law. 

I would go further: my Social Policy Bond concept would aim to inject the market's incentives and efficiencies into the achievement of our specified social and environmental goals. It's a simple idea but one that represents a complete change in the ways government currently runs things. Essentially, it would allow government to concentrate on articulating society's wishes and raising the revenue to achieve them: things that democratic governments are actually quite good at. But the bonds would, in effect, contract out the achievement of these goals to whoever thinks they are best placed to do so. These investors in the bonds would be prepared to pay more for them than they are worth to current holders, so that the bonds would always flow into the hands of those who can best advance progress towards the targeted goal. Because they would be tradeable, investors wouldn't have to hold them for long: they could buy them, advance progress toward the targeted goal, so seeing the value of the bonds rise, then sell them to those best placed to to take the next steps towards the goal's achievement, at which point the bonds would be redeemed. 

In such a way, government would be doing what it's best at, while the market for the bonds would do what - in economic theory and on all the evidence - markets do best: allocate society'e scarce resources optimally.