Resistance is futile. Incentives are fruitful.

Writing in 2019, Roy Scranton reviews books by Bill McKibben and David Wallace-Wells:

And at this point — after the 2003 protests against the Iraq War, the “largest anti-war rally in history,” which saw millions of people in hundreds of cities across the world protesting the American invasion of Iraq and which utterly failed to stop the war — after the “People’s Climate March” in 2014, the “largest climate change march in history,” which utterly failed to have any noticeable effect on global climate policy — after decades of failed protests against institutional racism, gun violence, sexism, nuclear weapons, abortion, war, environmental degradation, and a raft of other issues — only the deluded and naïve could maintain that nonviolent protest politics is much more than ritualized wishful thinking. In the end, McKibben’s argument falls into the same vague preaching as does Wallace-Wells’s. Human beings are special, McKibben insists, because we have free will: “We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing.” Asking hard questions about who that “we” is, how “we” make decisions, how power works, and the limits of human freedom are beyond the reach of both writers, because such questions lie outside the narrative they’re both trapped in. No Happy Ending: On Bill McKibben’s “Falter” and David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth”, 'Los Angeles Review of Books', 3 June 2079

One thing we can take away from this is that sufficiently large financial incentives can outweigh the informed wishes and protests of millions of ordinary people. Dr Scranton is writing about climate change, but the same applies to any of a multitude of other threats to our well-being and even our existence. The incentives take the form not only of profits to large corporations but of salaries to hard-working employees of conventional organisations ostensibly devoted to improving the environment and society's welfare. My thoughts about such organisations are here, but we have only to look at the state of the planet's human, animal and plant life to realise how little they are actually achieving. I do not see any of this changing, which is why I advocate Social Policy Bonds, which will encourage the formation of a new type of organisation, whose every activity will be aimed at achieving society's goals most efficiently. 

The predicament that we're in results from incentives that are mis-aligned, in that they favour existing wealthy corporations and existing bodies, be they public- or private sector, all of whose interests differ from and, indeed, are often in conflict with the long-term interests of everyone including, I believe, the individual members of these bodies themselves. The 'we' to which Dr Scranton refers does, I believe, refer to all rational beings, despite their working in a system that is at odds with their real needs and wishes. Given that large-scale protests are ineffectual, the most effective way of re-orienting society such that we give a higher priority to solving our with social and environmental problems would be to re-jig the incentives. Social Policy Bonds would do that. They would start out by defining exactly those goals we want to achieve in terms of verifiable outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people, who could therefore participate in their selection and relative priority. These goals would not presuppose who will achieve them and how they will be achieved. So, we could target so-called 'intractable' goals, such as the ending of war. Or, once we have defined exactly which climate goals we want to see, we could target a combination of indicators of the climate and its impact on plant, animal and human life, and issue bonds that would supply incentives for people to solve the climate change problem. (See here or search this blog for my work on climate change.) 

There are various possible problems arising from the implementation of a Social Policy Bond regime, which I've tried to address here. No question: the bonds are not a panacea and will need trials, experimentation and refinement. I advocate them because (1) Our current trajectory means we are collectively facing urgent, huge crises: social, environmental, nuclear..., and (2) I think Social Policy Bonds, with their combination of clear, meaningful outcomes and market efficiencies are the best option.

The corruption of every body

The current Economist writes about the militias and gangs in Brazil:

Founded by former policemen, Rio’s militias gained prominence in the 1990s by hunting down drug traffickers, winning the support of terrified residents and forging links with local politicians. Yet today they extract a security tax in areas they control and charge residents for access to gas, internet, transport services and electricity. More recently, they have started trafficking the drugs themselves. Brazil’s criminal groups are walking the militias’ path in reverse. Gangs are increasingly funding politicians, paying off local prosecutors and bureaucrats, and laundering their assets through the legal economy. Brazil's gangsters have been getting into politics, the 'Economist', 14 November 2024

At any scale above the smallest, we rely on organisations, be they public- or private-sector, to solve our social and environmental problems. However, organisations, once they've been going for a while, tend to develop priorities other than, and often in conflict with, their stated goals. Their over-arching goal becomes self perpetuation. It happens to all types: not only government bodies and Rio's militias, but also to religious organisations, trade unions, political parties etc.

Which is why I advocate a new type of organisation: ones whose structure and composition are entirely subordinated to their stated objective. Under a Social Policy Bond regime, investors in the bonds would form a protean coalition, whose every activity would be devoted to achieving verifiable outcomes. Those outcomes, at the national level, could include, reduced crime, and better physical and mental health. At the global level, we aim to improve the environment, reduce climate change (or its adverse impacts) or, more ambitiously, we could aim to bring about world peace. 

There are plenty of organisations ostensibly devoted to these goals, but my contention is that they too frequently lose sight of their original intentions, despite their being staffed by, in many cases, hard-working and well-meaning employees. A case in point could be the United Nations Climate Change conferences. The current one, with 67 000 attendees, is the 29th. Much of their attention over the years has been focused on greenhouse gas emissions, chiefly carbon dioxide. This graph showing the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide over time, tells us how successful they have been:

'Climate activism became a big public cause about halfway along this graph. Notice any effect?' From Riding the Climate Toboggan, John Michael Greer, 6 September

The tragedy of the Common Agricultural Policy

All countries have bad policies. What matters is whether we have systems in place that will reform or abolish them. Few policies are as unambiguously bad as the rich countries' agricultural policies.

1. They are capitalised into land values, thereby intensifying agriculture, and so worsening the environment and animal welfare, as well as making the entry of young people into farming impossible.
2. They benefit wealthy landowners at the expense of consumers, taxpayers and food-rich developing countries.
3. They generate overproduction of unhealthy products, which are then disposed of to the detriment of people's health.

These policies have been widely challenged for decades; there's been some tinkering but, we still see, focusing on point (2): 

Revealed: billionaires are ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ linked to €3bn of EU farming subsidies

Thousands of small farms have closed according to analysis of official but opaque data from EU member states. ...The European Union gave generous farming subsidies to the companies of more than a dozen billionaires between 2018 and 2021... including companies owned by the former Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš and the British businessman Sir James Dyson. Billionaires were “ultimate beneficiaries” linked to €3.3bn (£2.76bn) of EU farming handouts over the four-year period even as thousands of small farms were closed down, according to the analysis of official but opaque data from EU member states. ...“It’s madness,” said Benoît Biteau, a French organic farmer and MEP for the Greens in the last European parliament. “The vast majority of farmers are struggling to make a living.” Ajit Niranjan, the Guardian, 3 November 2024

The stated objectives behind these corrupt policies sound grand: to secure the food supply (with huge quantities of imported oil) and, laughably, to protect the family farm.  

Perhaps the most important advantage of a Social Policy Bond regime would be that politicians would have to bind the financing of their policies inextricably to their stated goals. Under the current systems, they can get away with burying the actual goals (transferring money from the poor to rich individuals and, increasingly, corporations), under grandiose rhetoric and reams of legislation and regulation. Under a Social Policy Bond regime, policy outcomes and financing for their achievement would be exactly congruent. Unfortunately, the lobbies that resist reform can afford to do so precisely because of the subsidies they receive. So much so that, as Mr Niranjan points out: 

The EU gives one-third of its entire budget to farmers through its common agricultural policy (Cap), which hands out money based on the area of land a farmer owns rather than whether they need the support.

Agriculture is one sector with which the governments have enmeshed themselves for decades. Government involvement, though, need not be corrupt nor corrupting. A bond regime could ensure that governments would intervene to bring about only the outcomes that are supported by a consensus of the people they are supposed to represent.