Why bother with the root causes of anaesthesia - or war?

Saying that we need to find the 'root causes' of our social and environmental problems, in the belief that doing so is necessary to solve them, can be a sincere and necessary position. It can also be a distraction, unnecessary, or a cynical excuse for inaction.

Despite the widespread presence of clinical anesthesiology in medical practice, the mechanism by which diverse inhalational agents result in the state of general anesthesia remains unknown. Mechanisms of general anesthesia: from molecules to mind, George A Mashour, Stuart A Forman, Jason A Campagna, Best Pract Res Clin Anaesthesiol 2005 Sep;19(3):349-64.

And even when identifying root causes turns out to be a necessary condition for solving our problems, it needn't be carried out by government. Social Policy Bonds work by rewarding the achievement of a targeted goal; how this is done, and by whom, are not specified - they don't need to be. Even the people who help achieve the goal need not necessarily know why exactly their methods work.

Take violent political conflict. It's still going on, killing, maiming and making homeless millions of people every year. We could spend years analysing past outbreaks of war, but still never get close to identifying root causes in ways that could be usefully be deployed to forestall future outbreaks. Society is just too complex, diverse and fast-changing. Policymakers should begin by specifying society's desired outcomes, and then put in place ways of rewarding those who achieve them, rather try to identify any root causes. Society and the environment are not like simple chemistry or physics. The entities and their relationships are not static. 

A bond regime wouldn't try to identify the root causes of war, which are a moving target anyway. Instead it would start by specifying exactly the outcomes we want to achieve, and then injecting market incentives into achieving those outcomes. The Social Policy Bond principle, applied to conflict, are the means by which I propose we begin to end all war for all time. There are many organisations, staffed by hard-working, dedicated people, already aimed at ending conflict. But their resources and influence are pitiful compared to the scale of the problem. We should acknowledge that our current ways of trying to bring about world peace are insufficient at the global level, and that we need to encourage new approaches. In economic theory, and on all the evidence, competitive markets, of the sort in which Social Policy Bonds would be bought and sold, are the most efficient way of allocating society's scarce resources. Conflict Reduction Bonds would channel the market's incentives and efficiencies into finding cost-effective solutions. They would would increase people's motivation and attract more resources into solving the problem of conflict, and the principle could be deployed to solve our other social and environmental problems. This is not idealism, of the sort that can be put into a box and hence ignored: it's giving incentives to motivated people to find solutions and rewarding only those who succeed in doing so.