Nobody seems to have high expectations for this year, beyond any personal hopes and dreams. War, fear of new pandemics, environmental tipping points, nuclear proliferation: the possibilities are frightening. Yet the ingenuity of our species knows no bounds. Each day brings news of discoveries in every field of the sciences, medicine, technology including IT... All driven by our curiosity, intellect, skills and hours of dedication and hard work.
And - oh yes - by ample funding. Perhaps it's funding and the way it's allocated that explain the contrast between our boundless successes and the very real possibility that we are heading for at least one of a baleful array of potential calamities. We are collectively very happy to support research into activities that have identifiable winners, such as pharmaceutical companies, weapons manufacturers and also, to be fair, universities and research institutes. We are less happy to adopt the Social Policy Bond approach by targeting outcomes, such as world peace, however desirable they are, where humanity - the biggest beneficiary - cannot monetise its wishes. Such goals as world peace, if we believe them attainable at all are, we think, best worked towards by bodies that might have founded with idealistic goals and hard-working, well-meaning employees, but have (often) been ossified by routine and cynicism, such that their over-arching goal is now self perpetuation. Those bodies that have escaped that fate are pitifully under-resourced and make only localised impacts.
We pay teachers, don't we? They receive salaries, as do doctors, nurses, and people who care for others. But we are squeamish about paying people for things that we think should be pursued solely for idealistic reasons. Example: paying people not to kill each other is a long way short of ideal, but I believe that, if it's the only or the best way of avoiding deadly conflict, then we should encourage it. It is one possible approach that investors in World Peace Bonds could follow; an approach that we eschew, not because it's been tried and failed, but because (I surmise) it's too crude, or too defeatist (as in 'are we really so degenerate that we have to bribe adults not to have murderous tantrums?'), or perhaps because it's never been tried before. Tried, tested and failed will always beat new, might-not-work and disruptive. In large institutions of any sort, things must never be done for the first time.
World Peace Bonds would allow for the possibility that such unsubtle measures as bribing or otherwise undermining those who foment conflict are the most efficient way of bringing about peace. They would encourage research and experimentation of all potentially viable measures, and refinement and implementation of only the most promising ones. The goal is always to achieve peace as efficiently and speedily as possible and the way the bonds work would ensure that all activities, always, would be aimed at that goal. To this end, approaches would be necessarily diverse (what works in one part of the world won't work in another) and adaptive (what works in some conditions won't work in others). Such flexibility is beyond the imagination of any current organisation, be it private- or public-sector.
There are other advantages to this application of the Social Policy Bond principle: the bonds would take a long-term view, paying out only when the goal (world peace, in our example) had been achieved and sustained for a period of, say, three decades. They would divert funds away from socially neutral or negative activities as investors, with an eye only on their financial returns, would see the light. This does not mean that only self-interested investors would be rewarded: the gains from holding the bonds while working to achieve society's goals would cascade downwards, so that the number of, and rewards to all those working for bondholders would benefit, just as civil servants, teachers or workers generally, benefit from the success of their employers.
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